There are brutes that threaten, stab and rob, and assassins, but the disenchanters, who rape invisibly your respect for yourself and your belief in a fair world, harm you with deeper and incurable wounds.

The disenchanters lurk everywhere, even in quiet, wealthy land; some are passers-by: bullies, small-time backyard tyrants, bureaucrats. Others are rulers, teachers or parents.

In one way or another, such people – most likely poisoned themselves - drain your illusions, trust, dreams, and beauty. They debase you. Pay the price to fight back or if you cannot, run away but do not break in. If it happened, find a way to wash yourself. Consider revenge to get even in your soul, because your soul needs balance. Make it become true in your personal life story that disenchantment is punished. On the spot, or later. This is a fight for your quality of life.

When good hope and self-respect are broken, you are contaminated. When your trust is wrecked that the world is understandable, lawful and foreseeable, you are jailed for life.
 
If you were brought to see the world as arbitrary, indifferent, perverse and cruel, there is no need for prisons, police and yoke, no need for Hell; you are banished to live in the empire of evil, until you die. No need of chains, you are crippled. You will carry, branded on your eyes, the distorting lens that makes certain the presence of wicked ugliness, wherever you go.

Whole nations get to live in such parallel worlds, bullied by their tyrants. Half a century may be needed for a people to wake up from its nightmare of helplessness.

Have no mercy for the killer of trust.

Consider picking what you find as much as hunting what you need.

Your choice will double and your pains be halved.

I must be coming from an ancestry of gatherers; I have a born habit to keep looking around and finding things and an urge to understand what I found. The understanding part is the most important, as all people stumble on things constantly ... but ignore them because they do not care or see any value.

On my daily walk with my two dogs, I find coins lost, nuts fallen - in places where many other people passed, wild strawberries, small fruit in the bushes, butterflies and lizards, I glimpse the one swallow not supposed to make spring, the change of tide in the Zeitgeist. When I read or talk with people, an amazing number of things I meet falls in place with my current interest. Wherever I learn something new, I soon meet many other related to it. Heavens! How little we know!

The strange thing is that in my wanderings I do not see details, I do not analyse: I rather grasp the shape of the whole and observe differences and likeness standing out. The instinct of the gatherer is a curiosity for differences and impressions. I am alert for potential promise, beauty and usefulness in everything; or threat.

There is a difference in the strategy of the gatherer compared to the seeker. The seeker would go to the flea market - or the huge flea market that is the world around us - with a set vision of what he wants to find; he may discover that thing he was after or he may create or build that which he seeks. The gatherer is a modest innovator; he will not inspect the flea market to find this or that precise thing he needs. He is out, open, to see what interesting things are there to find.

Let me observe that compared to the seeker, the gatherer will find a lot*.

The readiness to observe, listen, read and pick from the many things found is a pull-strategy, very different from the push of the seeker. Besides understanding what you found, the gatherer approach requires flexibility and tolerance to the unexpected. While you do what you want to do, you need, additionally, lightness: to let your eye free to roam and your thoughts to happen by themselves.

I have no merit in finding that the gatherer attitude gives advantage; I was born with it, I guess, my only credit may be to put it in words as a recipe for people who waste opportunity and energy because they do not do more to complete changing the world with the seamless use of what is already at hand . Too much planning kills the plan; too much dreaming blinds the eye.

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*This not at all to claim that gathering and finding is superior to discovering or making. Superior is to combine the two attitudes.

In almost everything, the two ends facing are extremes and usually extremes are exaggerated and thus wrong.

Being for or being against is being an object, not a person.

Avoid being on this side or on that.

Keep reserve so that you can later be the arbiter between sides. Show sympathy or support but do not hurry to say "You are right." This is particularly true when you find yourself in presence of a dispute or a conflict.

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In every matter the fools will instinctively take the other extreme to oppose this one and are certain to be no better. You can even ruse the blockhead into error by holding up an extreme, so that he will ram into the other.

When you see people out in the streets breaking and burning against some evil, you can bet that they are not on the right side either.

Let your extreme be the middle way. It is the path of wisdom.  Let your excess be honest, steady, optimistic moderation and measure; Even in the face of much darker daily reality.

Let moderation be your habit, old fashioned and foreseeable. That will not hurt you but serve you well to keep close to truth and to have a better life.

Surprise is what we live when we meet the unknown.

You are surprised because you are hit by “something else”; something new, unexpected, unfamiliar, unprepared and even unconceived.

Significant surprise is a life event. Neglect this subject and your fate may be of the led and of the losers.

The surprised lose initiative, stumble and take hasty decisions they will regret. They submit to choices crafted by other people while surprisers gain advantage. The surprised will take as given things they should think over.
 
Being surprised is a situation of temporary inferiority: judgment is impaired, errors often made, opportunities lost and bad relationships started unwillingly.

We need an education for surprise and we had none. We need a Method to deal with the unknown, but there is none.

Modern schooling is about what was known before, what can be measured and foreseen, not about negatives like uncertainty and the unknown. Instruction works to eliminate surprise from our life; it aims to foresee everything and to prevent disorder. Most human endeavour is to keep the world under control. We are not formally educated for the unplanned side of life. With people brought up like this, surprises appear as noise, given by the inevitable complexity of the Universe if not by Fate. What else to do with the unexpected than to suffer it?

I claim that we can do better: we can prepare against surprise, for surprise and we can even prepare the surprise ourselves.

James Carse pointed at the solution some time ago: "To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated."

If you want to read more about this, it is here.

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[1] Carse, J.P., “Finite and Infinite Games”, The Free Press, New York, 1986