Today is Wednesday. It is called “hump day” the mid-point of the work week. Though retired, by force of habit Wednesday yet feels like a halfway to Friday to me.

I look around the room at Starbucks, I see the mix of patrons, genders, generations from infants perhaps only weeks old, to seniors like myself. Every adult present here, has reached thus far in their journey, the result of everything they have learned to love, and everything have learned to hate. This is the essence of the passage quoted below. Each of us represents the coincidence, the intersection of unnumbered past generations, and of geographies, as well as everything that our ancestors deigned worth living for, and worth resisting…

For just one moment pause to think about it. That short list of things, of experiences, the lifestyle that you affirm is the expression of your will, your own personal assertion of what it means “to be” you; or as Nietzsche starkly puts it “the voice is their/your Will to Power”.

Does that suggest a dark, negative, potentially violent possibility? Good! Then you are getting it! 

On the other hand those ancestral inheritances, entail good potentials. Superpositioned, layered below the surface of consciousness, — these nudge us toward potential combinations, of genuinely new values, and of futures that we couldn’t have imagined. Nothing is wasted, no throw-away encounters. Every encounter makes a difference.

Whenever I speak with someone, a stranger, it is worth keeping in mind that unanticipated and delightful possibilities may well be in store… What I must do is but to risk, to say “hello!”

Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples:
thus he discovered the good and bad of many peoples.
No greater power did Zarathustra find on earth
than good and bad.
No people could live without first valuing…

A table of excellencies hangs over every people.
Behold. it is the table of their triumphs;
Behold. it is the voice
of their Will to Power.

…Whatever makes them
rule and conquer and shine,
to the dismay and envy of their neighbor,
they regard as the high and foremost thing,
the test and the meaning of all else.

…”To have fidelity,
and for the sake of fidelity
to risk honor and blood,
even in evil and dangerous courses”
— teaching itself so,
another people mastered itself,
and thus mastering itself,
became pregnant and heavy
with great hopes.

Truly, men have given to themselves all their good and bad.
Truly, they took it not, they found it not,
it came not to them
as a voice from heaven.

Values did man only assign to things
in order to maintain himself
– he created only the significance of things,
a human significance!

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, The Thousand and One Goals No. 15

Post Script: Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation
                       the nut of existence would be hollow. – Zarathustra

There’s no need to leave this page without a song. I learned that today, April 16th is the birthday of Dusty Springfield, born in 1939. She was a British soul-singer, with a wicked, seductive voice. The lyrics, metaphors, stacked higher and higher.