I’ve always known I was a traveler…. I just didn’t realize I was a TIME traveler. Did you know today is “Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day?” Except I’m not pretending anymore. I ventured down a rabbit hole this week on this topic. Now it makes sense why….
It started this week with a quote I saw in an email and then shared on social media:
“Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil… Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end…
Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history.
[Some] understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.”
That was an excerpt from Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse, 1986.
A quick search on the author took me to an interview, which led to a lecture… and as YouTube does, the rabbit hole opens up.
Pause, at the end of the lecture video, there is a link, longnow.com, a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking. (Just another rabbit hole of content on the topic of time).
Unpause, here’s where it gets interesting. Synchronistic. After watching some other videos, I end the rabbit hole to finish watching a video I had started last week. I was about half-way through and just randomly decided to finish it before I jumped off of the Tube for the day. At the very end of the podcast the host says “Let’s play the infinite game.”
That was not a YouTube algorithm that served that up. This video and the that quote did not come from the same place. So the Universe is guiding civilization to thinking about the infinite game of life on this planet.
Leave a Comment