Thread by @medicalaxioms

Attaching emotion to physical objects that are inherently temporary leads to inevitable sadness. #MuseoNacionalDeBrasil

You have two superior options:
1. Celebrate each day a temporary physical item is not destroyed. “Good morning, coffee cup! It is so great to see you not broken again today!!”
2. Put your effort and emotion into unbreakable eternal projects. Beads on the string of causation.

Here’s a short list of things that won’t be eventually ruined predictably in a fire, flood, or disaster:
- teaching someone
- forgiveness
- love
- helping someone through a hard time

These project lead to other effects and so on. Eternally. Each is indestructible. Causation.

The Mona Lisa, Michelangos David. The Great Pyramids of Giza. They are all wearing out and wearing down. They might last a few hundred years or a few million, but the day will come when they are gone forever.

Like writing a beautiful poem in the sand at the beach with a stick.

If you teach someone something and help them understand, they might do the same. And again & again. That lesson or advice might last 10 years or 10 billion. Even though it seems so squishy and temporary, adding a bead to the string of causation can become a very durable project.

Definitely more durable than a paper book or a glass jar or a canvas painting. When I my kids were little and they broke a glass, they would get upset. I’d say, “Where are all the glasses from 100 years ago?”
“I don’t know.”
“They all broke. Predictably. Don’t worry about it.”

The reason I am threading away on this tangent is that this is what I am doing here on the twitter with @medicalaxioms. I’m not carving these tweets on stone tablets for eternity. The eternity starts with you, reader, and continues with the people you influence.

These pixels and electrons are thoroughly temporary but my goal is to create something that lasts longer than any Egyptian papyrus or cuneiform clay tablet.

That is a change within you that may cause a change within another person.

It’s a lofty goal. I don’t need 100% success. I’m looking for any success. Even just one.

It’s a bit of a ridiculous proposition. There is nothing to show or measure. Nothing to put on the CV. That’s just how it is when you grasp the truth of things.

Filling libraries with books and museums with dead birds and artifacts is a temporary refusal to admit this stuff will inevitably wear out, get broken, burn up and turn to dust.

Personally I love museums. I think, “I can’t believe this junk made it all the way to today!”

If all the junk made it to today, there would be no need for museums. I’d be drinking out of Roman glassware every morning.

Museums keep the (ever shrinking) number of old things in one place for us to stare at.

Anyway When I go to the Louvre I think, “It’s amazing they stole all this stuff from around the world and I’m seeing it before it inevitably turns to ashes and dust.”

It makes going to a museum more special. It makes it less sad when a museum burns down. It’s just nature.