Writings and Reflections from a Life in Words

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David L Heaney

  • Literary
  • Politics & Culture
  • Theology & Religion

Sculpting: Reflections on Work and Retirement

Even a brief glimpse of my forty plus years of professional full-time employment evokes a wide range of feelings when I consider how blind I was to how little I knew about the things I sought but did not comprehend.

LIFE IS BIG. LIFE IS SMALL

We will always miss the exquisite detail of the changes that create us. We will always miss the vastness of the bigger story of which we are only a small part. All we have are brief pauses...interruptions, as it were, along becoming’s path to form woefully inadequate impressions about this life.

ANXIETY, COMMON CAUSE, AND BAD ENDINGS

We are more interested in outcomes than processes, ends not means. The consequence of this has been to create a faux consensus-building process designed to generate the outcomes desired by the powerful.

Ich Bin der Welt

All experience, by its very nature is subjective. Even if a lot of people’s experience suggests the same conclusion, that doesn’t make it objective. Experience is not mathematics.

The Sensations of Age

Maybe one of the reasons aging can be so interesting is that as sensations dim and others sharpen we are constantly redistributing the value we assign to the sensations we are bombarded with. As the volume of sensation we are capable of processing slows, perhaps we are better able to appreciate and even savor at least some of them.

For Oona

Oona was family. Oona was a friend and companion. Oona was a protector. So, after a short but rich and consequential life she was put down on Thursday. But her loss has reminded me in the most powerful ways imaginable that the principle of loyalty to one’s dog is inviolable.

DECISIONS…DECISIONS

Life’s most consequential choices, drive change at lightning speed. Indecision yields to decision only after we grow weary of endless ruminating, anxiety, ambivalence, and aimless drifting.

Someone Has to Take the Blame

Communities give us cover when the need to expedite resolution takes precedence over a need to understand. When the members of communities understand that together they run the risk of becoming an undifferentiated collective personality offering moral license to embrace conflicting ideals, perhaps the importance of remembering one’s own voice takes on a special sort of urgency.

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Our ideas are like children; we give birth to them, nurture them, and learn to love as well as protect them. We introduce them to others with a great deal of pride. Yet, they are not children, merely ideas we have come to love as a personal act of creation.

Russian Searches on Google

On March 5, The Economist published an article titled "Russians are trying to flee Putin’s chaos". The author examines Google search trends since the invasion of Ukraine.