Never enough

A voracious appetite for understanding, for communication, for seeing, for changing things, for living. Getting up after a hard knock and going again. Regardless of set backs. With empathy for those who failed. With silence when needed and a laud cry when required.

The above could be a snapshot of several individuals I have met. Intellectuals. Politicians. Activists. Artists in art or life. Those with "names" and those known only to a few around them. All passionate. All courageous. All inspiring.

Recently I found an expression of this attitude in The Guardian's profile of Zygmunt Bauman (written a few years ago by Madeleine Bunting). Here it goes:

“The real pessimism is quietism - not doing anything because nothing can be changed, argues Bauman: "Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better. [My role] is to alert people to the dangers, to do something. 'Don't ever console yourself that you have done everything you could, because it's not true,' says the philosopher Levinas, who believed that you recognized a moral person as someone who does not think he or she is moral enough. That is also how we recognize a just society - a just society castigates itself that there is not enough justice in our society."