Tag Archives: fearlessness

License to Ill

17 Mar

Every once in a while, someone you care about has the courage to call out a crutch of yours that you don’t really see.  If you’re lucky, they do it with panache rather than malice.

In its most sophisticated form,  rare because it takes both insight and courage, the person gives you the gift of contrasting what you did/said with what you could have done/said. They hand you a better you, right on a platter.

I’ve been dishing out these moments left and right lately, and last night got dished to.

Do not shrink from these moments.  Smile sheepishly.  Nod.  Grow.

And be grateful that you have someone like that around.

The Fast and the Slow

16 Mar

So many conversations with Koo about what I will very broadly call “romance” end up talking about time.  We’re in agreement on most things, though we tend to diverge in the short run due to his patience and my intensity, which makes our advice to each other fairly amusing.  For instance, in one personal email, Koo referred to time as “an ineluctable motherfucker”.

While there’s much to be said, perhaps it all boils down to this:

Some things have to feel like they’re happening too fast in order to be felt at all.  Other things must be earned slowly or they’re not real.

Pick Your Poison

11 Mar

Two great 19th century thinkers:

“It seems that it is madder never to abandon one’s self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor”

– Margaret Fuller

And:

Go farther
Go further
Go harder
Is that not
Why we came? and if not,
Then why bother?

– Jay-Z, Mr. Carter

This Erotic Yearning

28 Aug

This passage is maybe the most concise expression of my philosophy of living.  My introduction to it was Wilber’s The Atman Project, though the passage below is from a Thomas Pangle speech about Leo Strauss at AEI.   It was one of those moments where you hear or read something and say, yes, that is me!

Human nature, as understood by the Socratics, is characterized by a profound, passionate longing for self-transcending union with the eternal or divine. This “erotic” yearning is inevitably if obscurely at work everywhere in political action; but this deepest need of the human soul cannot find its clarification and hence its true object through political accomplishment.  Man is so built that his spirit finds its fullest satisfaction only in the life of the essentially private, restless mind, given over to “articulating the riddle of being”.

The somber consequence is that only a very, very few individuals can be fortunate enough to surmount the enormous spiritual as well as material obstacles to this “best life” of the mind.  In other words, humanity’s deepest, philosophic longing is encased in, penetrated, and molded by a complex concatenation of more immediate physical and spiritual needs, personal as well as social. It is chiefly in response to these sub-philosophic natural requirements that civil society (with its cornerstone the family) and its specific excellences and demands and (partial) fulfillment comes into being.

Pangle’s phrasing is immaculate.  His restatement explains the co-existence of two desires inside me:  building & fortifying the financial lives of others, andthe more private life of writing/reading/meditating.

Refuse to Accept the Given

5 Aug

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This is wonderful:

We want to determine the world, not merely be determined by it; we want to stand above the things we may want to consume. You can call this the urge for transcendence, so long as you don’t call it mystical. We are born as we die, a part of nature, but we feel most alive when we go beyond it. And we go beyond it often – every time we explore the world instead of simply taking it in.

To be human is to refuse to accept the given as given.

–  Susan Neiman, “Moral Clarity”.

There’s a great interview with her here.

Like a Smoldering Volcano

13 Apr

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Outside WTC PATH.  5:12pm.  A nod to the last shot of L’Avventura.

There’s a certain amount of respect you give a person by showing effort, by putting your heart in your throat and talking from there.  When it comes to love, I find openness so seductive, and half-measures to be cowardice.   I relish lovers who have the courage to truly unleash themselves.

Give me the woman who discloses too much about what her heart hides (good or bad), rather than the one who piecemeals and says nothing at all.

How I Really Feel

22 Mar

Every person’s life is  animated by one of two desires.  We either live to avoid discomfort, or we live to have as much intercourse with the world as possible.

By intercourse, I don’t mean merely sexual intercourse.  I mean a “give and take” with life:  taking in all the myriad things the world offers, and as a result having something meaningful and unique to give back with confidence.  This kind of intercourse almost always involves stepping out of your hiding places.  It’s often emotionally raw and you feel awkward doing it at first.  The reward for doing this, though, is that you feel new pleasures and understandings inthings that you didn’t even know you lacked before.  These pleasures and understandings are impossible without walking through that discomfort.

I suspect that everybody’s life, at times, traffics in both realms:  avoiding discomfort and having as much intercourse as possible.  Clearly, everyone is capable of both.  But make no mistake:  when you look at the lives of others, and when you look at the results of your own life, it’s not difficult to tell which of these desires animates your daily existence.

It’s really that simple.  The two are, over any length of time, absolutely, unconditionally, mutually exclusive.

Which desire animates you?  Which one, when you look back at your life so far, has produced your favorite moments — the give & take or the drive to remain comfortable?  Which, ultimately, has produced deeper comfort in your life?

When your sleepy eyes open tomorrow morning and no one else can hear, ask yourself how you really feel.

We Bonded Over Broken Bones

27 Jan

The concept of this song by Owen is simple enough:  a guy and a girl, strangers, sharing a hospital room for broken bones, start to fall in love.   What the song means, though, and how it’s really helped me to understand my relationships, is after the “keep reading” link below.

Enjoy the song first — it’s short, and light, beautiful, and acoustic.  The lyrics are right below the video.

We bonded over broken bones.
Who’s broke skin, who’s fractured in two places, and whose hurt the most.

We bonded over broken bones.
How many Vicodin we took before bed, how many we sold
to the band sleeping on our floor;
Week one of a two week tour.
God knows, they’ll need it more than us.

You and me; an x-ray machine.
I swear that day you saw straight through me.

We’re two bags of bones, broken and talking
of people we both know in common.
Amongst other things that I shouldn’t mention.

You and me: a hospital love scene.
If only these broken bodies were ours forever.

For the relationship of this song to, well, my relationships, click the “keep reading”.

(more…)

What We Fear & What We Feel

19 Jan

The most appealing opinions in the world, for most people, are those that relieve us from having to go learn something else.   If you feel that philosophy is worthless and impractical, you certainly don’t need to struggle through Plato, do you?  If you feel like the world of fashion is just superficial and shallow, you don’t need to learn the basics of style, do you?  If you think that therapy is just a scheme to divorce you from your money, you certainly don’t need to try it, do you?  If you think that life is best when you just “soldier on”, rather than engage the  practice of sitting and feeling the emotions that make you most uncomfortable, then why bother?  If you can read a book about the economics of the “information age”, you can skip the need to understand traditional finance in your small business, right?

And so our opinions and values begin to reflect not so much what we feel, but what we want to avoid feeling.  As a consequence, the world becomes much simpler to us:  Republicans are evil, the old economics are passe, quantum physics is a spiritual idea rather than a mathematics (and Newton gets the finger), and you can just go ahead and skip reading all of literature, philosophy, religion, and source texts.   No need for therapy or meditation, of course, because [fill in opinion that makes it moot here].

Yes, this way of living makes things easier in the short term — but it also divorces us from reality, and from feeling like ourselves.  We may get to skip feeling silly while we learn something new and question our current feelings, but we end up feeling like we’re not really the person we’re trying to be.

Too often our lives take the shape of the places we’re afraid to go.

This Changed Everything

12 Jan

So the following from Alice Miller is what started the ground-shaking revolution a few weeks ago:

Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements.  They do well in everything they undertake; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be — but behind all this lurks depression, and a sense that their life has no meaning.  These dark feelings will come to the fore as soon as the drug of grandiosity fails, as soon as they are not on top, not definitely the superstar, or whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some standard.  What are the reasons for these disturbances in these competent, accomplished people? Typically, this child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond unconsciously to this need of his parents to take on the role that had been unconsciously assigned to him by them.

This accomodation to parental needs often leads to the “as-if” personality.  The person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self.

As an adult, this “grandiose” person is admired everywhere and needs this admiration; indeed, he cannot live without it.  He must excel brilliantly in everything he undertakes, which he is surely capable of doing (otherwise he just does not attempt it).  He, too, admires himself, for his qualities and success and achievements.  Beware if one of these fails him, for then the catastrophe of a severe depression is imminent.

Click on the  “Keep Reading” link, and after the jump she further dresses me down and talks about my choice of marriage partner, my contempt for others, my struggle for authenticity, and how all this craziness gets resolved.

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