This week I finished:

Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave (The Stoic Virtues Series), by Ryan Holiday: This book spoke to me about what I’m doing with living by a different culture than nearly everyone around me. I hadn’t considered myself courageous. I’m just living by my values. For that matter, I’m living by the values everyone who values

• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
• Leave it better than you found it
• Live and let live
• Love your neighbor as yourself

I also hadn’t considered those compromising on those values to get along with mainstream culture cowardly, but the book makes it clear that’s what’s happening.

This book recalls another time, when people took more responsibility, spoke more clearly, and lived more deliberately. Holiday uses Florence Nightingale as one of its main examples, but still feels more masculine than our culture today. I enjoyed it and wouldn’t mind reading more like it, living more like it.

We Mourn Robert Clary, “Hogan’s Heroes” Actor and Holocaust Survivor, USC Shoah Foundation: Watching Judgment at Nuremberg last week, I noticed Werner Klemperer played one of the judges on trial. As a kid I liked Hogan’s Heroes, where he played Colonel Klink. Looking him up, I saw Robert Clary, who also appeared in Hogan’s Heroes.

Clary spoke at my high school about his experience surviving the Holocaust. I remembered him speaking but not his story, so I watched this video of his telling the story. I don’t know to put to words what hearing an account of surviving the Holocaust evokes. I think about the trials I’ve faced. They seemed so challenging at the time. I didn’t deserve such fate. Then I hear his story, shuttled from one concentration camp to another, seeing death all around, suffering cold and pain. How can I dwell in my troubles, so manageable in comparison? Yet they still are challenging. I can learn resilience and forgiveness.

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