In his poem “Born Yesterday”, Phillip Larkin looks at a new born baby and wishes, not that she is beautiful or smart or talented, but that she is ordinary.
There is great value in our just being. There is something essential about remaining attentive to those around us, whatever the distractions, no matter who may have done what to whom. The completing thing lies in being grateful for where we are. In accepting our shortcomings. In being patient and loving. It is only in the impurity, that the true perfection is revealed.
Image Credit
Baby by mulan/flicker made available via a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
Beautiful. It’s quite a different tone/message, but it reminds me of Nietzsche wishing his friends suffering. (“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”)
Thanks Justin. Nietzsche is poetic, dramatic and does not shy from hyperbole, but there is some truth in the basic idea.