About these notes

 I suppose my friend Christopher is right: This collection of online notes is a kind of practice, a habit of daily meditation.

I’d call it “meditation,” except that so many people talk of meditation today as a way of “emptying” the mind, getting away from the endless stream of thoughts. I try to get in the middle of stream and catch at least one a day.

I guess that’s one thing I like about Joubert. He thought that thinking was a natural process. A mind produces ideas, just as a field produces flowers. Rather than suppressing these notions, he examined them. He found some to be useful, interesting, even beautiful.

 

The mind. It loves to produce flowers.

 

• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, pp. 108.