BRIEF
Daily brief - Tue May 12 2026
What would the writer say about the same behaviour you have repeated three times this month?
Theme: patterns · card 1/4 · 2026-05-12
It is said that there was one Mindyrides, a citizen of Sybaris, who one day seeing a man digging and vigorously brandishing a mattock, complained that the sight made him weary, and forbade the man to work where he could see him. The same man complained that he had suffered from the rose-leaves upon which he lay being folded double.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
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Which trait condemned in this passage do you also carry? Where does it show up?
Theme: shadow · card 2/4 · 2026-05-12
Don’t reason about it, as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya, ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended and forgotten. Christian Science so‐called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the most radical branch of mind‐cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is simply a _lie_, and any one who mentions it is a liar.
— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
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Which kind of practice would you take up this month if you took this passage as instruction?
Theme: growth · card 3/4 · 2026-05-12
I have been pleased, in places where I have been, to see men in devotion vow ignorance as well as chastity, poverty, and penitence: ‘tis also a gelding of our unruly appetites, to blunt this cupidity that spurs us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of this voluptuous complacency that tickles us with the opinion of knowledge: and ‘tis plenarily to accomplish the vow of poverty, to add unto it that of the mind. We need little doctrine to live at our ease; and Socrates teaches us that this is in us, and the way how to find it, and the manner how to use it: All our sufficiency which exceeds the natural is well-nigh superfluous and vain: ‘tis much if it does not rather burden and cumber us than do us good:
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne (Complete)
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Which hour of yesterday would the writer of this passage be unable to forgive you for?
Theme: time · card 4/4 · 2026-05-12
In the fall the loon (_Colymbus glacialis_) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
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