Welcome to the Time Capsule — a weekly newsletter that serves as both my public journal and personal scrapbook. I write about the things on my mind and close to my heart in hopes that those who read it find value and enjoyment in it, and perhaps some solace too.
💭 Quote(s) of the Week
God gives us the cross, and the strength to bear it.
Leo Tolstoy
✏️ Compression
No one can save us in life. We can only be given the tools to perform our own rescue.
Compression — a flatting down, a pressing together. This motion exemplifies human transformation. In many ways, we must be willing to compress ourselves to make space for the new, to make space for others — to make space for the things outside ourselves.
I find the most difficult and powerful thing to do is to adhere to your own convictions. An Estonian conductor once said, “In life, if you are your own man, you will go in your own direction.” Going in one’s own direction is a noble endeavour, but one wrought with illusion and mud. You meet a man in the street, he tells you to change this. You meet a man in the office, he tells you to change that. Each goes their own way and doesn’t think about the implications of their advice. But I carry it with me, contemplate it, press it against my own philosophy to see which breaks first. I choose my own. But to live by the sword is to die by the sword. There are no makeovers, no mulligans. You make your bed, and you lie in it too.
I violate one of my principles again. I forgive myself, as I have the full context. But in the eyes of another, it is hypocrisy. I keep it to myself — one of the secrets we sweep under the rug and take to the grave.
Hindsight is 20/20. It takes courage to listen to that inner voice — Socrate’s daemon, the Holy Spirit in Christianity. We can make plans but, if we allow Him, the Lord determines our steps. In doing so, we surrender our minds, our bodies, our souls, our careers, and our paths, in order to get them back twofold. It is okay to plan for the future, but compress yourself and make room for the Lord to do His work.
📸 Photo(s) of the Week
📖 Book of the Week — The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett
I was recommended this book by a colleague as we discussed a study on cultural differences between France and Scotland, and how said differences acted as determinants in vaccine hesitancy/acceptability during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Geography of Thought documents Richard Nisbett's groundbreaking international research in cultural psychology and shows that people actually think about—and even see—the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China. As a result, East Asian thought is “holistic”—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.
From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration has never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that will span it.
💡 Food for Thought
Wisdom is
separating water
from water.
🔭 Sunday Best
If God Leads You to Do Something, He'll Shape the Space Around It — a podcast with Sadie Robertson Huff & musician Chris Tomlin.
Paavo Järvi - Living The Classical Life — Prolific conductor and recording artist Paavo Järvi joins Living the Classical Life for an exclusive discussion about his musical beginnings, the role and influence of his father, conductor Neeme Järvi, the story of his early meeting with composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a glowing remembrance of the late piano legend Radu Lupu.
Showing Skin: Tattoo Visibility Status, Egalitarianism, and Personality are Predictors of Sexual Openness Among Women — published in Sexuality & Culture by Skoda et al. (2020)
A sample of 814 women, both tattooed and non-tattooed, were recruited through a Western Canadian university research pool and various social media outlets to complete an online questionnaire assessing these attributes. Women with tattoos reported greater willingness to engage in uncommitted sexual relations, as well as a higher endorsement of egalitarianism and sensation-seeking, relative to non-tattooed women.
A tout à l'heure!
AT