January 2
If you want to cheer yourself, consider the merits of the people you live with: the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of a third. Nothing delights so much as the images of the virtues in the people around us — keep as many of them as you can present before you.
Meditations VI.48
Listening mode
If you want to cheer yourself, consider the merits of the people you live with: the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of a third. Nothing delights so much as the images of the virtues in the people around us — keep as many of them as you can present before you.
In shared work, someone's precision can first hold you up and later take a weight off you. You want to put up the shelves for an exhibition; he is still asking about spacing and about how the individual pieces will be arranged. Another person has long had an idea for the space but can't explain it well.
While the two of them sketch and ask questions, something gradually takes shape that neither of them alone had proposed in that form. The fussy precision gives the vague idea a shape. Your pushing to get started would still have been understandable half an hour ago. Now, what you would have put together so quickly would seem rather haphazard.
When it comes to setting up, you can put your own energy to use again. You don't have to defend it against the others' ways of working. It is precisely their difference that has made sure you now have something definite to do, whose effect you are curious to see.
