Remember, reflect, refine, renew!

"Every sentence that I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question." --Niels Bohr

xperience is reflective appropriation of experience. Connoisseurship and delectation result from leisured but disciplined study of our world of daily life. "New experiences" have their place (everything was new once, and if what we have is irremediably not good then we have no choice other than to try to find something better...). But with every "something different" we have to start all over again at the surface in order to orient ourselves so we can begin to discover nuances.... Not variety, but the ever more refined delights revealed in thoughtful daily engagement over many years with things which "have what it takes" to sustain such commitment, is the spice of life. Consider the art conservator, who, by the caring actions through which he or she preserves (and sometimes restores...) each work, at the same time tests its authenticity and integrity (See 1 Thes. 5:21, quoted below...).

hen friends collegially undertake this reflective process of building ever more layers of meaning upon the layers of meaning previously laid down in the reflective meaning-building process itself, they enrichingly transform their form of shared social life. By including their social relations within the horizon of their reflection, the persons re-construct the form of life they happen to be living as a fortuitous result of "being from where they came from" (their "ethnicity"), in all its aspects, in the light of the results of critical reflection on it. The persons thus claim their form of life for the thematized goal of being optimally good for the persons who live it (themselves...); they exchange "their" ethnicity, for their city. The persons enrich their form of life with all the meanings and activities through which they work to realize this goal, many of which "sediment" to become a new kind of self-aware habitualities which supercede their daily life's previous unreflected customs ("novus ordo seclorum"). And the persons become increasingly self-accountable for their form of life's success (or failure...) in achieving that goal -- which goal is "simply" the quality of each person's life as freely judged by the person him- or herself.

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thes. 5:21)

Leisure is the basis of culture.