The boldness of asking deep questions

The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.

- Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe

Yogi Berra Explains Jazz

Excerpts from an interview published in 2004 at AllAboutJazz.com.

Interviewer: Can you explain jazz?

Yogi: I can't, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part people play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, it's right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it's wrong.

Interviewer: I don't understand.

Yogi: Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's whats so simple about it.

Interviewer: Do you understand it?

Yogi: No. That's why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn't know anything about it.

Interviewer: Are there any great jazz players alive today?

Yogi: No. All the great jazz players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would kill for it.

Interviewer: What is syncopation?

Yogi: That's when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don't hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they're the same as something different from those other kinds.

Interviewer: Now I really don't understand.

Yogi: I haven't taught you enough for you to not understand jazz that well.

Ambivalence is a bigger nuisance than schizophrenia

Ambivalence is a bigger nuisance than schizophrenia. When you're schizoid each of your two personalities is blissfully ignorant of the other, but when you're ambivalent each half of you is painfully aware of the conflicting half, and if you aren't careful your whole life can turn into a taffy pull.

- Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

Magic

Children see magic because they look for it.

- Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

The Musician's Way

I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe. That's what music is to me—it's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That's what I would like to do. I think that's one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician's is through his music.

- John Coltrane, quoted in Ascension: John Coltrane and his Quest

This force beyond anything that we can comprehend

Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

- Albert Einstein

Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.

- Gretchen Rubin, from this post on her Happiness Project blog

Memory believes before knowing remembers

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

- William Faulkner, Light in August

The Optical Delusion

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

- Albert Einstein

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

- Wallace Stevens

Choosing Simplicity in Small Ways

It's not a real option for me as a father of young children, a breadwinner, a husband, an oldest son to my parents, a person who cares deeply about his work to go off to one Walden Pond or another and sit under a tree for a few years, much as the impulse beckons at times. But within the organized chaos and complexity of family life and work, with all their demands and responsibilities, frustrations and unsurpassed gifts, there is ample opportunity for choosing simplicity in small ways.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are

The Still Mind That Simply Is

Wisdom occurs in the mind that rests in not knowing, the still mind that simply is....In letting go of who we imagine ourselves to be, letting go of our thinking, our attempt to control the world, we come upon our natural being which has been waiting patiently all these years for us to come home.

- Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening

Let Your Children Become the Teachers

Children are fascinated by the ordinary
and can spend timeless moments
watching sunlight play with dust.
Their restlessness they learn from you.
It is you who are thinking of there
when you are here.
It is you who are thinking of then
instead of now.
Stop.
Let your children become the teachers,
and you become the student.

- William Martin, The Parent's Tao Te Ching

The Mind

The mind is no more the contents of the mind than the sky is the clouds that pass through it.

- Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening