The section on Love of God in The Art of Loving was perhaps the most moving piece in the direction of God I’ve ever read. Having first read The Road Less Traveled as a teenager, and multiple times since then, I’ve always felt that the chapter on grace was out of place. I wonder if I would feel otherwise if I read it yesterday, or now. Fromm engages the concept of God as something undefinable but through the paradox of defining what God is not. Through the discussion of many subjects the idea is drawn, “… to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.”
In other news. Today was the start of another two week sprint at work. At one point, hours into the planning process, I realized just how much time was spent working. A while ago, sorting through a relapse of disappointment in the ability of educational systems to teach, I was looking at two year or shorter programs. Not really that I thought I could take them, because I’m convinced that the time constraints of these programs won’t ever fit into my life, nor my lifestyle, but I was pondering that. I was interested in some kind of forestry management program, and trying to figure out how you achieved such education without spending two years of your life in school. On one hand, two years isn’t a horribly long amount of time for something you could do for the rest of your life. I looked at the Commercial Driver Training program at South Seattle Community College and wondered what exactly one did for 11 weeks, or 360 hours. As I currently hold a Class B CDL, I was dumb-founded.
Some time after I dropped out of high school I was considering what to do with my life now that I had chosen to take responsibility for it. Eastern Maine Technical College (EMTC), now known as Eastern Maine Community College (EMCC), has a new computer networking program coming up and I was planning on taking that. Since it was new, it wasn’t until late in the planning process that I got a hold of a program syllabus. I was pretty disappointed to find that the fourth quarter of the second year would bring us around to discussing the TCP/IP model. At the time, I was reading about that in TCP/IP illustrated. This was good stuff, but seemed far from the pinnacle of two years of education. In retrospect, as I’ve now taught dozens of peoples about networking, they were doing it wrong and this was definitely a sign of failure.
What could I do with 360 hours? The point is a lot. I can’t sit still, not for long.
Spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming.