OPM 141, JULY 5TH MEDITATION (commemoration)

The decision to distill fragments from the material that was originally written ten years ago coincides with the 'discovery' of material that was not included in Being and Learning. So,  in a way, I've taken up in earnest what I declared the other day to be a missed opportunity with respect to the editing and publication of the writing produced in the year long experiment.   The decision to distill fragments also coincided with the shift in my approach to the commemoration, which, for now, is not including a video of me reading the daily meditation.   The other shift in my approach was the move to take up the traditional Stoic/Hegelian 'dusk writing' aka to write at the end of the day, when, as Hegel famously wrote, the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings.   Of course, Hegel did not have a Stoic meditation in mind when he wrote this.  Rather, he was offering a powerful metaphor to describe the historicity of philosophy.   That is, for Hegel, philosophy is both rooted in a specific historical cultural situation, and also the best expression of that situation.  The philosopher is the owl who spreads its wings at dusk, which is to say, the one who looks back on 'the day'  and offers a critique of his epoch or era.  The young Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is the most extravagant and audacious example of this, offering, as it does, an account of the entire history of the west as the dialectical unfolding of a philosophical reasoning that culminates with the his own system!     I'm only taking the cue from Hegel's metaphor that thinking and philosophical writing is best done at the end of the day, which is precisely the approach that Marcus took when writing his Stoic meditations, withdrawing into the detached placed of apatheia.
As I write this prelude to the fragment I'll be distilling from today's writing, I can't help but note the shift that has happened since I returned from my week on Mt. Desert Island, where, among other experiences, the most profound and lasting effect of hiking and biking on the trails and paddling on the ponds has been the reconnection with project that I took up post 2004-05 experiment: a hybrid of a New England transcendentalism and a Stoic (via Arendt) meditative thinking.  Human singularity realized in communion with Nature!   The space that has opened up for me this summer in the respite from the various collaborative projects, and from teaching, as returned me to what seems to me the most empowering and lasting approach to philosophy.   And because of this I am already envisioning a fine tuning of my courses in philosophy of education.
Now for the fragment distilled from OPM 141, material written this day (July 5th) ten years ago, but not included in Being and Learning:

All is given, yet every thing, which has its place, rises and recedes like the tide.  And like the tide, a person has each day a moment when they are high and low, moments of clarity and moments of obscurity.   Unlike the tide, however,  these moments happen when they do and are never predictable.   What does this tell us about the order of things?  It indicates that while there is a sublime governing order,  obvious in the cycles of growth and decay, birth and death, each of us is set apart and are determined by this order in so far as we are singular and free to think, make and act.    We perceive the impermanence of things, and thereby understand our own mortality.  We perceive the birth of things, and thereby understand our capacity to make, to cultivate, to envision and imagine.  We perceive the death of things, and thereby understand our capacity to conserve and to harvest, and to remember, to mourn.  

This fragment is distilled from the quotation from Lao Tzu that concludes OPM 141: "the mysterious quality of the Tao 'produces (all things) and nourishes them...produces them and dow not claim them as it own..does all yet does not boast of it...presides over all, and yet does not control them."