Skip to main content

All Roads


All roads lead to Rome. An idiomatic expression that has less relevance for today's Classics-agnostic culture, but when the center of the western world was Rome, every road did actually lead there from the provinces.

The modern world does not have an equivalent since the world has many poles and not just one. And those poles are often bifurcated between the political and economic centers (think New York vs. Washington in the US, Milan vs. Rome in Italy, Beijing vs. Shanghai in China, etc.), unlike the Rome of imperial times.

To each of us, though, all roads leads to where we are meant to go. That could be right around the corner or all the way across the globe. The key is to take the first step and take to the open road that stretches in front of us. And who knows - in today's multifaceted, multi-pole world, we still might end up together in Rome?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spring Cleaning (better late than never)

Memorial Day weekend came and went like the thunderstorms that rumbled on Sunday evening here in the DC area. I thought that a three-day weekend would be just the cure for a crazy-busy schedule the past month (work projects blowing up all over the mainstream news, wedding planning, homeownership nicks & nacks, getting my personal affairs in order, travels, and stealing a moment for reflection), but it turned out that the only salvation was that the next weekend was now only 4 days away. Oh yeah, and a great friend was going to be in town in the upcoming week but that is the topic of another post. Still, I tried to make the best of the extra out-of-work time - which got funneled right back into homeowner activities (and what else does a homeowner do except spend free time keeping up with whatever is going on around and inside the home?). To be more specific, I took to cleaning up the "jungle", Wendy's vividly wonderful description of our backyard's overgrowth. I...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...