I Can’t Stop Thinking Big

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“In a world where I feel so small I can’t stop thinking big” (Rush) “What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God.” James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916)

Fear

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In the introduction to his March 4, 1933 Inaugural Address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." While we share “common difficulties . . . our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for.” 


I daily encounter people who are driven by fear. They are “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” Marcus Aurelius says people are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. Roosevelt is right: It is unjustified to behave this way and we have more than enough, so what’s the problem? The source of fear must lie in another realm, where we can easily be our own worst enemy. Our task is to show people what is good and what is evil. We have nothing to fear, as “we have still much to be thankful for.”

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