Rachel Y > Recent Status Updates

HOW honesty, openness and willingness to try. Earlier, I wrote change begins with awareness and acceptance. The third step in changing human behavior is assertive action. For us that means doing things differently. Get honest, keep an open mind, and to become willing to try to do things differently, and we will change.

We need to balance giving and receiving; we need to find the dividing line between letting go and doing our part. We need to find a balance between solving problems and learning to live with unsolved problems. Much of our anguish comes from having to live with the grief of unsolved problems, and having things not go the way we hoped and expected.

Take responsibility for our expectations. Get them out into the light. Examine them. Talk about them. If they involve other people, talk to the people involved. Find out if they have similar expectations. See if they are realistic. For example, expecting healthy behavior from unhealthy people is futile; expecting different results from the same behaviors, is insane. Then, let go. See how things turn out.

Before we know it, we see the oars too. Next thing we know, we're so happy rowing the boat with the goofy people we don't care if we ever get to the other side.

You need to learn how to start saying no to things you DO want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life. Elizabeth Gilbert

There you were, planning to live on forever- as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment

"bright sadness" Richard Rohr

We learned something. We are mortal. You might say you know this, but you don't. The news falls neatly between one moment and another. You would not think there was a gap for such a thing... It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, you will lose everything that catches your eye.

The original Latin word for decide, decidere, means "to cut off" as in slicing away alternatives; it's a close cousin of words like "homicide" and "suicide."

We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger's strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time.

The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you'll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.

So the retiree ticking exotic destinations off a bucket list and a hedonist stuffing her weekends full of fun are arguably just as overwhelmed as the exhausted social worker or corporate lawyer..... It remains the case that their fulfillment still seems to depend on their managing to do more than they can do.

Re: premodern people's unchanging or cyclical view of history: When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of *this* life. And when people start believing in progress- and the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future- they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future.

They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn't to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.
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None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction.

Meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up, but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life, wrote Nietzsche, because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

"WEAR IT AS LONG AS YOU CAN"

Society itself is essentially a "codified hero system" - a structure of customs, traditions and laws that we have designed to help us feel part of something bigger, and longer lasting, than a mere human life.

In Becker's view, all religions, all political movements and national identities, all business ventures, all charitable activity and all artistic pursuits are nothing but "immortality projects," desperate efforts to break free if deaths gravitational pull.

We are perfectly capable of feeling acute self-pity about more minor predicaments at home or at work on a daily basis. Yet the biggest predicament of all goes by, for the most part, not consciously worried about. At bottom, wrote Freud - sweepingly, as usual, but in this case persuasively - no one believes in his own death.

There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.

"Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose." Natalie Goldberg

Calling a desire bad names doesn't get rid of it. - Watts

"We are poor indeed if we are only sane." D. W. Winnicott

For Winnicott, the role of psychotherapy, play, or creativity [or for Buddhism, meditation] in unintegration.

Unable to see me as a real, and therefore limited, person, they were expecting me to be "all good," and at the same time they were completely furious with me.
"Tell them you don't think they are aware of how much they want to destroy you," he would say." Show them this pattern in their lives, how they ruin that which they most need."

Often masking a virulent rage or self-hatred, emptiness, for Kernberg, was a sign of a lack of cohesiveness in the self, of an inability to tolerate conflicting feelings for the same person.

At some point, [the child] will have the realization that the gratifying and frustrating mother are one and the same person and will thus have the ability to relate to "real" people, not just to what he called "part-objects." Feelings of emptiness, thought Kernberg, occurred when this ability to relate to" whole objects" was lacking.

The cucumber is bitter? Put it down, Marcus advises. There are brambles in the path? Step to one side. That is enough, without also asking: How did these things come into the world at all?