Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

"But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood.

The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes.

How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign.

We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy."

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
Alain de Botton

The Giving Tree

"Silverstein detested stories with happy endings. As he once put it, “The child asks, ‘Why don’t I have this happiness thing you’re telling me about?’”

"The Giving Tree” at Fifty: Sadder Than I Remembered
Ruth Margalit

Being raised above being

On Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet of Lithuanian origin, Nobel Prize for Literature (1980):

"At a time when voices of doubt, deadness, and despair are the loudest; when writers are outstripping each other in negation of man, his culture, and nature; when the predominant action is destruction . . . , the world built by the author of 'Daylight' creates a space in which one can breathe freely, where one can find rescue.

It renders the world of surfaces transparent and condenses being.It does not promise any final solutions to the unleashed elements of nature and history here on earth, but it enlarges the space in which one can await the Coming with hope.

Milosz does not believe in the omnipotence of man, and he has been deprived of the optimistic faith in the self-sufficiency of a world known only through empirical experience. He leads the reader to a place where one can see—to paraphrase the poet's own formula regarding time—Being raised above being, through Being."

On Self-Respect

A friend gave me a xerox copy of this article, in 1988. It has probably played a huge role in helping me get my priorities right.
...........................................................................

"The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one.

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

...Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life - is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts."

From 'On Self-Respect', by Joan Didion

Complete article, here.  Every line is worth re-reading.

Listen

From 'How Silence Works: Emailed Conversations With Four Trappist Monks', Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston:

"On yet another level, silence means listening. We follow the Rule of St. Benedict and the first word of that Rule is "Listen." That's the great ethical element of silence: to check my words and listen to another point of view. I'll never have any real peace should my sense of well-being depend on soundless peace. When I can learn the patience of receiving, in an unthreatened way, what I'd rather not hear, then I can have a real measure of peace in any situation."

Forget your personal tragedy

Ernest Hemingway, to F.Scott Fitzgerald:

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you."

Forget your Personal Tragedy: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/forget-your-personal-tragedy.html#.T5lK81Ygmxw.twitter

To stop time

My Life’s Sentences
Jhumpa Lahiri

"In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do."

(You still do. You type them down. You store them on this blog. Which is all that remains.)

Full article, here. 

Happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens

"Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

 The Joy of Quiet, Pico Iyer. Article here.

Doubt is not paralysis. Certainty is.

From  Preface to "Doubt: A Parable", by John Patrick Shanley:

“What is Doubt? Each of us is like a planet. There’s the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who’s your best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so.

Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.

It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake; like you’ve gone the wrong way and you’re lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.

…….Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite—it is a passionate exercise. You may come out of my play uncertain. You may want to be sure. Look down on that feeling. We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.

Doubt is not paralysis. Certainty is. Doubt keeps the doors and windows open. Belief is one room with no way out. Do not let others impose a polarity of response on you. You need not live a reactive life. Don’t look to have life explained to you, presented to you. Live the life that emanates from your interior greatness. Be an overwhelming bounty of impressions, ideas, conflicting theories, and let the propellant behind all this be generosity. A giving.

Never look to the opposite side to change. It is always your turn to change. Society begins and ends with each of us. If you want to reverse some frustrating polarization of thought you encounter in others, I invite you to passionately doubt everything you believe."

The risk of being loved

In today's excerpt - the risk inherent in positive emotions: observations from the psychiatrist George Vaillant, who has long been the chief curator of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running - and probably the most exhaustive - longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years:

"...Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman's graduate students on the power of positive emotions - awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). 'The happiness books say, 'Try happiness. You'll like it a lot more than misery' - which is perfectly true,' he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they'd cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they're future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs - protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections - but in the short term actually put us at risk. That's because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak."

Joshua Wolf Shenk, "What Makes Us Happy?" The Atlantic, June 2009, pp. 47-48.

Mujo and the Appreciati​on of Beauty

From "Unrealistic Dreamer: Haruki Murakami’s acceptance speech on receiving the Cataluña International Prize": http://www.senrinomichi.com/?p=2541

Note: The excerpt below is not the central theme of the speech, far from it - more on that later.

"....Notwithstanding this (the tsunami), there are 13 million people living “ordinary” lives in the Tokyo area alone. They take crowded commuter trains to go to their offices, and they work in skyscrapers. Even after this earthquake, I’ve never heard that the population of Tokyo is in decline.

Why? You might ask me. How can so many people live their daily lives in such a terrible place? Don’t they go out of their mind with fear?

In Japanese, we have the word “mujo”. It means that nothing lasts forever. Everything born into this world changes and will ultimately disappear. There is nothing eternal or immutable on which we can rely. This view of the world was derived from Buddhism, but the idea of “mujo” was burned into the spirit of Japanese people, and took root in the common ethnic consciousness.

The idea “everything has just gone” expresses resignation. We believe that it serves no purpose to go against nature, but Japanese people have found positive expressions of beauty in this resignation.

We love the cherry blossom of spring, the fireflies of summer and the red leaves of autumn. We think it natural that we watch them avidly, collectively and as a tradition. It can be difficult to make a hotel reservation near the famous sites of cherry blossom, fireflies and red leaves in their respective seasons, as such places are invariably milling with visitors.

Why?

Cherry blossoms, fireflies and red leaves lose their beauty within a very short time. We travel very far to watch the glorious moment. And we are somewhat relieved to confirm that they are not merely beautiful, but already beginning to fall, to lose their small lights and their vivid beauty. We find peace of mind in the fact that the peak of beauty has passed and disappeared.

I don’t know if natural disasters have affected such a mentality, but I’m sure that in some sense we have collectively overcome successive natural disasters and accepted things that we couldn’t avoid, by virtue of this mentality. "

The Pain of Exclusion

In today's excerpt - our need to matter and our need to belong are as fundamental as our need to eat and breathe. Therefore ostracism - rejection, silence, exclusion - is one of the most powerful punishments that one person can inflict on another. Brain scans have shown that this rejection is actually experienced as physical pain, and that this pain is experienced whether those that reject us are close friends or family or total strangers, and whether the act is overt exclusion or merely looking away. Most typically, ostracism causes us to act to be included again - to belong again - although not necessarily with the same group:

"Studies reveal that even subtle, artificial or ostensibly unimportant exclusion can lead to strong emotional reactions. A strong reaction makes sense when your spouse's family or close circle of friends rejects or shuns you, because these people are important to you. It is more surprising that important instances of being barred are not necessary for intense feelings of rejection to emerge. We can feel awful even after people we have never met simply look the other way.

Walking a Songline

"Imagine a beginning, when man and woman first named the world. A "Songline" or "Dreaming Track" in the Australian outback can still be walked, perhaps by the Arrernte or Pintupi or other Aboriginal peoples, and for them, it is nothing less than creation, the world sung into existence by naming all plants and animals and the landscape itself.

Reaching back at least 40,000 years, a singer can find his or her way along the ancient path of one of the "Ancestors" retracing a Lizard Dreaming, or a Kangaroo Dreaming, or a Rain-Maker Dreaming, refreshing existence and "singing up the land".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/mar/07/david-vann-aborigines-songs-legends-past-future

Raupuch

"...Every language is a storehouse of indigenous culture and knowledge. It reflects a peoples' worldview. English and Hindi have words for someone who loses their spouse or their parents, but they do not have a word for a person who loses a sibling. Great Andamanese does - raupuch. This tells us a lot about this society and the emphasis it places on family kinship."

Anvita Abbi, Linguistics Professor, JNU

from the article - "Mind your Languages: Dwindling populations, social pulls, sound the death knell of India's rare tongues"
by Debashri Dasgupta, Outlook Magazine, 19 Nov 2007

The Badjos

The Badjos are a tribe of constantly wandering people who live on small boats called leppas in the Indian Ocean. They are very difficult to find as they keep moving to new places rapidly, sometimes every day. Their origins are a mystery to ethnologues. A French ethnologue, after 2 years of studying them, manages to learn from their shaman that long ago they were displaced from an island by a tsunami, after which they have been floating ever since.

Translated from an article in Le Figaro

Do the Badjos have a word for "insecurity"?