To Live on a Day-to-Day Basis is Insufficient

By: Oliver Sacks

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient 
for human beings; we need to transcend, 
transport, escape; we need meaning, 
understanding, and explanation; 
we need to see over-all patterns 
in our lives. 

We need hope, the sense of a future. 

And we need freedom (or, at least, 
the illusion of freedom) to get beyond 
ourselves, whether with telescopes 
and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning 
technology, or in states of mind 
that allow us to travel to other worlds, 
to rise above our immediate 
surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions 
that makes it easier to bond with each other, 
or transports that make our consciousness 
of time and mortality easier to bear. 

We seek a holiday from our inner 
and outer restrictions, a more intense 
sense of the here and now, the beauty 
and value of the world we live in.

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You can find this passage in Oliver Sack’s great book — Hallucinations.

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