I had four great years this year, in three disciplines: Character, education and aestethics/fiction.
Click the links to learn what you’ve missed. You can study me now or later, with the only difference being the Splendor you will have lost out on by insisting that I can’t teach you anything. No skin off my nose, either way – and my nose could spare some.
The whole of my year is summarized in that photo caption, and the summary is summarized in four short words:
Goodness breeds more good.
That sounds treacly and platitudinous, but in fact it’s a recapitulation of the demography of DISC:
Only Ds marriages reliably produce Ds or Sd offspring. In the absence of Ds civilization, all other marital strategies are self-extinguishing, over time. Ci, currently the social ideal, is suicidally infecund.
Another way of saying the same thing:
Goodness breeds more good because hope and love attract and retain, where fear and fascination imprison by incessant rejection.
And another:
Rancorous transactions do not recur, absent compulsion, so every new goodness is in part an accretion of accumulated past goodness.
There’s more, and I mean a lot of it, but you’ll either learn it or you won’t. I grow regardless.
Hope is family. Family is hope. I leave you with this poem, from Dusty, as a summary of everything I know that is worth knowing:
Poetry is leadership.
Leadership is love.
Love is family.
Family is hope.
And hope is poetry.
Happy New Year! Make the most of it.
