So I was Wrong

Which happens often.  The trick is to not fear being wrong, for without risk, there's no growth, no tension that causes you to examine.  So, talking, reading, thinking, writing, doing and being newly is the mandate.  Not obsessively, of course, but in a way that challenges you, that keeps you moving.

Last night the Unpronounceable Name stopped by for dinner and talk (and, in general, companionship), which featured, in parts, a sort of very challenging meta conversation on leading the good life, as well as the visceralness of belief in a Catholic context.  As Aristotle would have noted (had he been invited), talk and inquiry and conversation was itself a kind of productive happiness (a happiness in doing, not, as our culture often quite wrongly has it, in a kind of post-achievement glow and external rewards.)  It's been awhile since I used the words "virtue" and "grace" seriously in a conversation, and longer since I thought about what those words mean - actually it's been so long it was as if part of my brain were a dusty machine that squealed and groaned its way into lumbering motion.  I don't think anything broke though. 

I've had good conversations in Miami before - certainly those whom I've count as friends here have all had some kind of "good talk" with me at some point or another.  (Although I must say good conversation is rarer here than in DC, or just about any of the other places that I lived.)  On the whole though, this was a Providence conversation, that much more amusing because it actually featured old Providence friends, some of whom the Unpronounceable Name knows (of) via her professional circles.  It's a small world, but an interesting one; Miami continues to surprise.