The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.
Interpretation
Life is unpredictable, and this uncertainty brings both mercy and opportunity.
Wendell Berry's quote suggests that the unpredictable nature of life is a source of mercy, as we cannot foresee the events that lie ahead. This unpredictability can lead to unforeseen opportunities and outcomes, which can be both a blessing and a source of hope, reminding us to embrace life's uncertainties with an open heart and mind.
In practice
This quote could be used in a motivational speech to encourage embracing change.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Now it is nothing but torture.
I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy
Be very careful. Giving because we think we will get something back will not work. You must be 100 percent willing to give and never experience any return, or it will not work.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.
It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disasters to discuss the matter.
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