Today’s post comes from Bart, the bear who found a smart phone in the woods.
H’lo, Bart here.
I’ve been reading a lot of self-improvement stuff.
I know that surprises people – us bears are supposed to be happy with who we are and not too interested in losing weight, being smarter, and all that. Maybe it’s having the phone that changed my mind about it.
There’s lots of apps to make you a better you, whoever you are.
And now that I have what I need to take a selfie, there’s a lot of improvement ideas that just come to mind every time I look at one.
Having better hair would be the first thing I’d work on, but the hair care websites I see don’t say much about matting and dealing with pear-sized ticks. There is some useful advice, though. So next time I break into a camper there’s a list of shampoos I’m looking for.
He Found a Smart Phone in the Woods
And by the way – I’m unclothed in all my selfies, just like a celebrity. It’s not that big a deal – so hack away, hackers. You won’t have to try too hard to get a shot of me naked.
So far, I think my best chance for self-improvement is in the brain department. I like this article about the mental virtues. It’s talks about a way to size up your character, taken from a book, called “Intellectual Virtues.”
The virtues are:
Love of Learning
Courage
Firmness
Humility
Autonomy
Generosity
Practical Wisdom
I have no idea what this book is about.
The title says it’s “An Essay in Regulative Epistemology“. At first I thought this had to do with your timetable for emptying yourself in the woods, which, if you’ve ever heard the popular question about bears, is definitely the place where we do it, so always answer ‘yes’. I like questions where I know the answer from my real-life experience, and that’s definitely one of them.
But I think this “epistemology” stuff is really about all the different ways of knowing things, and it’s full of tricky questions like:
What is knowledge and what are its limits?
Can we know anything?
How do we know what we know?
Can we know something without knowing that we know it?
I don’t have any of these answers, and so I thought maybe getting this book would give me something distracting to do while I lie low during the bear hunting season and maybe all the way through hibernation too. But then I saw that on Amazon, it costs $99.36. So I figured one way to apply that section called “Practical Wisdom” without even reading it was to skip buying the book all together.
Anyway, Amazon doesn’t have a very good track record of shipping stuff to “Hollow Beneath A Log, The North Woods, Minnesota, MN”, which is the best address I can come up with. Maybe once they start delivering stuff with drones it will work better, I don’t know.
I’d still like to improve my mind, though. And have cleaner, silkier hair.
Trail Baboon 