May 2012
60 posts
Politeness became so rare that some people mistake it for flirtation
“What you say about the present state of mankind is true: indeed it is even worse than you say. For they neglect not only the Law of Christ, but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans. For now they do not blush at adultery, treachery perjury, theft and other crimes, which I will not say Christian doctors, but the Pagans and Barbarians have themselves denounced. They err who say: ‘The world is turning pagan again.’ Would that it were! The truth is, we are falling into a much worse state. Post-Christian man is not the same as pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as a virgin from a widow….there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse sent away.”
—C.S. Lewis (via invicemsunt)
I have a problem
Someone “announces” the items they bring into my office. For example, when placing the remittances I need to review and sign into my inbox, this person says “Here are the remittances!” To clarify, remittances are processed every week and are not particularly extraordinary.
Everything – and I am not exaggerating, it is everything – brought to my office is announced with a description. Sometimes a deadline is also mentioned. But always the description.
I actually said once, “You don’t need to announce things you bring to my office. It’s OK. I’ll figure it out.” But the practice persists.
It is not that new items in the office are offensive, per se. Tiring perhaps. Many people bring many items. Often they can do it without me even noticing they’ve come and gone.
It is not that I find the person particularly grating, such that anything said is annoying. A simple “How’s it going?” would not rankle. It is this particular, persistent, pathological practice which is distracting me from the myriad of other things I should be doing.
Why does this bother me? To ask again for it to stop would hurt feelings and I don’t want to do that. Any suggestions or thoughts?
“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
—Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird (via literat)
“You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”
—Mere Christianity (1952)
“We have no ‘Right to happiness’”
—C.S. Lewis (via meta-cog-nition)
“The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”
—Isaiah 40:8 (via glorifyhisname)
“It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.”
—C. S. Lewis (via cs-lewis)
“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
—Timothy Leary (via librarian-esque)
“Forcing religious believers to keep their convictions to themselves, while atheists and agnostics are under no such restriction is, in fact, an expression of religious intolerance.”
—Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (via bishopfeed)
“The bread that you store up belongs to the hungry; the coat that lies in your chest belongs to the naked; the gold that you have hidden in the ground belongs to the poor.”
—Saint Basil, give me the strength to live this out. (via kindnessalwaysmatters)
“The incarnate Christ would be the divine Word in human flesh even if no human soul acknowledged him, even if (to allow a Kierkegaardian echo) his incognito was never pierced. Only as such can Christ offer us an authoritative liberation.”
—Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (via invisibleforeigner)
“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”
—John Steinbeck (via andbrighthope)
