No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” —Edmund Burke, 1756.

We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body - King Lear.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they don’t want to learn from someone who has a character blemish or a worldview that doesn’t align with theirs. Seneca captured the right approach when he said in On the Tranquility of the Mind, “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.” Or, as Cato the Elder put it, “Be careful not to rashly refuse to learn from others.” Don’t throw away the apple because of a bruise on the skin.

I think that the play is less about jealousy than about accepting the other, about opening the doors of consciousness to more of reality. Or having to become less. Rejecting is easy: all it takes is confusion and ignorance. But facing the complexity of others, their history, their raw humanity — that takes courage, and is rare.

*Redreaming the World: For Chinua Achebe

“It is possible that a sense of beauty, of justice, of the inter-connectedness of all things, may yet save the human species from self-annihilation. We are all still learning how to be free. Freedom is the beginning of the greatest possibilities of the human genius. It is not the goal.