A gift for L. for our six month anniversary, reflected back to me in photograph today to see afresh. Printed on my Golding Jobber No. 8 last week, using a new font of wooden type from Letterpress Things.
The words are from Krishnamurti, by way of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:
“I don’t mind what happens.” Perhaps these words need a little unpacking; I don’t think Krishnamurti means to say that we shouldn’t feel sorrow, compassion, or anger when bad things happen to ourselves or others, nor that we should give up on our efforts to prevent bad things from happening in the future. Rather, a life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it – and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected.
Those words have proved helpful to both of us, by times, in recent weeks.
Comments
For me this sense of “minding” suggests attending to something, so this Krishnamurti quote seems to exaggerate what I think he really meant. IOW to me it carries a an unintended connotation of “never mind” and “tune out.” I suspect in some other context he might have recommended focusing on what’s happening.