And this pressure of ready-made pastimes and amusements affects another source of the joy still apparent in pretechnical societies - the element of spontaneity, of a direct, fresh response to living and being. This spontaneity is not easy to define. In fact, none of the phenomena of happiness lends itself too well to our typically modern dissecting and analyzing intelligence. There is a factor in it of rejoicing in the sheer existence of some object - a bird, a flower, a song a sword. But there is an element, too, of enhancing the object by communicating to it the power of life of the observer's own personality. The Africans have a name for a man's power to enhance, in beauty, force and emotion, the given facts of being. They call it nommo. And men with this gift - poets, singers, seers, saints - are said to have baraka, the power of enhancement, of giving and having life and having it more abundantly. For societies in which this is a high and valued endowment, it is virtually impossible to conceive of such modern phrases as "to kill time" or "the problem of leisure."
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But, in the larger sense of human existence needing, for joy and sanity, a sense of purpose and direction, an awe and wonder, which, as Einstain reminded us, is the very source of inquiry and hende of science - in this sense, our technical society, so wrapped up in means and manipulation, too often fails to give us direction and dedication, without which we can be rich and healthy and strong, yet bored and joyless as well.
--Barbara Ward (1963)
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But, in the larger sense of human existence needing, for joy and sanity, a sense of purpose and direction, an awe and wonder, which, as Einstain reminded us, is the very source of inquiry and hende of science - in this sense, our technical society, so wrapped up in means and manipulation, too often fails to give us direction and dedication, without which we can be rich and healthy and strong, yet bored and joyless as well.
--Barbara Ward (1963)
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