Tag Archives: feeling deeply

His Irksome Aunt

16 Mar

Christina Nehring:

The presence of the inessential weakens the power of the essential.  Love is not about micromanaging your partner’s quotidian concerns:  her noisy co-workers and his irksome aunt; her brassiere sizes and his starched shirts.  “Leave this touching and clawing,” exclaims Emerson.  Forget this petty detail!  Let your love be to you “a spirit.  A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance…not news, not pottage.  I can get politics and chat and neighbourly conveniences from cheaper companions.”

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.

I am a Four

21 Jul

Seth Miguel rocked my world.

He introduced me to the nine personality types of the enneagram.  Which are you?   Here’s the best description of me I’ve ever seen.  I’m a four:

* Basic Fear: That they have no identity or personal significance
* Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance (to create an identity)

Key Motivations: Want to express themselves and their individuality, to create and surround themselves with beauty, to maintain certain moods and feelings, to withdraw to protect their self-image, and take care of their emotional needs before attending to anything else.

This is only the beginning!  Watch me get eviscerated and explained by clicking the red link below to read more! (more…)

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.

The Acoustics of Love

4 Mar

Koo and I, sitting on my couch a few nights ago watching poker, began talking about love.

It started when I asked him whether he felt the women that he had dated had “strong personal boundaries”.  The term, which I’ve taken from Dr. Paul’s usage, implies that the woman is capable of standing up for herself, determining what she wants, generally living on her own terms, and not sacrificing her desires and values and standards to those of the people around her.

You’d think we would favor women with strong personal boundaries.  And, frankly, we do.  But the most interesting part of the conversation came when Koo described women he dated who had strong personal boundaries but whose boundary was so strong that it prevented her from fully experiencing him.   She was missing what Koo called “a certain acoustic”, meaning that she lacked the happy, open space inside of her that could be filled with Koo’s life and enthusiasm.  Or, in his glorious phrasing, where he could “reverberate”.

It’s really rare to find a woman (or any person, for that matter) who has a strong personal boundary — and yet whose boundary is permeable enough that we get the pleasure of seeing our own life and influence reverberate around inside of her.

How strong is your personal boundary?  And to what extent does the life of your partner reverberate inside of you?

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.

Giving Thanks

28 Nov

Every year, as my family is around the T-shaped Thanksgiving table on my favorite day of the year, I give the toast.  Here’s the toast from this year.

Today, I want to give thanks to all the things in this world that are invisible.

To all the personal sacrifices that people have made for us that we never saw or knew of.

To all the car accidents that almost happened, but didn’t.

To all the active and veteran individuals who fought wars for us though they’ve never even met us.

To all the relationships that we’ve left behind, but are still with us every single day.

To all the funerals for family and friends that we didn’t have to attend this year.

And finally, to the most invisible of all, the love that this family has for each other which we’ll never be able to express in words, and thus will forever go unsaid. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

Today was a wonderful day.

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