words.

The past few weeks/life lately has provided excellent fodder for internal musings - many of which I've drafted and redrafted mentally - but all of which feel loaded and confused and thus hard to write down.

So, in the meantime - a quote that stuck out to me in The Economist, and three words that have reemerged in my thoughts lately:

But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. {found here}


Some words:
wrenching
juxtaposition
abounding

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad.  Everything is Illuminated 

who knew adventuring could be so circumnavigatory?

“Farewell! O Gandalf! May you ever appear where you are most needed and least expected!”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit