What a beautiful thing to read first thing on a Monday morning! Thank you.

Do you mind if I quote you?

Huzzah! :-)

I am, by the way, loving Shadow Unit. Thank you.

*smirk*

I'm not sure how welcome I should feel, with that icon.

Edited at 2008-04-28 01:57 pm (UTC)

Aaah. When I pound my head on my desk, it usually indicates frustration. :-)

Then again, I play with numbers for a living. Numbers usually lead to frustration.

Fair 'nuff. I just don't do that for a living (yet).

That is very wise.

I seem to have trouble with the range of things I define as needful.

Or in the case of milking cows, it's a combination of both.

Needful because without the milk you can't make cheese. Joyful because just image how good it feels to the cows to get that thing empty!!

(This message brought to you by Cummer's Perversion of Wisdom Service. Just remember our motto, Hey, we made Socrates look stoopid. )

It's actually pretty accurate, at least when the story's had time to fill up your head and get big and exert pressure.

Lately I'm doing more trying to scrape a little more mud from the dry well.... Which is a Sign, yanno?

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" (William Morris).
I find 'beautiful' there is a bit restrictive, because there is not necessarily a complete overlap between 'gives joy/pleasure' and beauty. Though I might make a case for the inner beauty of e.g. tatty old paperbacks.

Only if the tatty covers made the paperbacks less beautiful.

=)

::loff::

What a lovely way of putting it.

I'm sure Marcus Aurelius would approve.

Do you ever have trouble prioritizing this? Should you do things that bring joy to others more often than you? What if 'needful' doesn't bring joy that often?

It's probably coming from feeling like I can't possibly accomplish everything that I want to. I've been feeling this more and more as I approach the end of college, so I don't know what that's all about yet.

I do really appreciate that you took the time to offer the advice. It's not unwelcome, and is something to think about.

This is true. Which is why Madison Avenue does all it can to blur the meanings of "want" and "need."

I like.

And my avgolemono falls under both!

I'm glad you phrased that the way you did. It manages to include things that are fun for fun's sake, as well as real responsibility - while simultaneously excluding fun that harms others, or things that do no harm but absolutely no good or joy to anyone.

I really needed to read this today, and didn't know it until I had read it. Thank you.

In a book on the Arts and Crafts movement, I ran across a quote from a period piece, I think a newspaper, in which a family decided to have a "William Morris day" and went through all their stuff. Dad would hold up a thing.

"Does anyone know this to be useful?"

"Does anyone find this to be beautiful?"

If it fails those tests, it went in the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Goodwill pile.

I have tried to use this test on many things since then, ad it seems to sum up a lot. Especially with the codicil philosophy of "Make the useful everyday things beautiful".

Beautifully said.