Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt: Why get angry at things, if anger doesn’t change it?

Or as I’ve put it before, the universe doesn’t care about your feelings.  Black holes aren’t evil.  Neither are those really freaky parasitic wasps, and neither are viruses.  They do what they do, and there is no moral judgement in that.  So getting angry will get you nowhere quickly.  It’s perfectly natural to react with anger to a circumstance that thwarts you or harms you in some way, but if you stay in that angry place for too long, the anger will overwhelm you and do far more harm than the circumstance will.

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And I was suddenly moved to take photos of Spitfire’s adorable orange toes today.

A short update today, because there was book inhaling accomplished, followed by embroidery.  The book arrived today–exceedingly quickly–from Australia;  a short little book by Michael Ardov entitled Memories of Shostakovich, written by a man who was a friend of his children and interviewed them about their experiences.  It was mostly wonderfully laugh-out-loud  fun, although it took a decidedly serious turn around the events of 1948.  The embroidery, of course, was Rocket Cat, which is now progressing quite quickly.  I also spent some time rearranging things on my office/craft grotto walls, and then promptly received the art print I ordered from a friend, which may mean yet more rearranging, once I figure out how I will frame it (it’s an unusual size).

Currently listening to a Russian filmmaker. Andrei Konchalovsky  on the CBC who apparently has a movie out about a 1962 massacre of unarmed factory workers in the USSR.  He came to the US in 1980, and is, interestingly enough, the man who remade The Lion in Winter. His father wrote the lyrics for the Soviet/Russian national anthem.  He had some really interesting insights about living with constant fear as a member of the intelligentsia–which he distinguished from terror, as one can actually learn to live with fear.  It did bring to mind one of the articles I read about Shostakovich yesterday which mentioned how completely traumatized people were at the time of the premiere of the 5th Symphony, probably explaining why people were weeping during the 3rd movement.