... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.

I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me. Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.

Individuals understood in relational terms cannot be conceived as fully separate from their communities. Others in one's community may already be a part of the self. This conception of the person as overlapping in identity with others has normative implications for what constitutes the good of the individual and how that good relates to the good of others. One's relationship with others can form a part of one's good as an individual, such that one can have a compelling interest in the welfare of these others and in one's relationship with them.

Accommodation is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible pressure if it always depended on strict agreement.

Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

The Daoist appeal to simplicity can be very appealing to the many of us who feel that contemporary life is overwhelming. "Less is more" can be a call to identify what it is we really need and appreciate doing for its own sake, as opposed to what we have been socialized into wanting, often to our detriment, or becoming consumed by activity that we would never do for its own sake but only for the sake of something else.