Musings on "Another 12 Rules for life"

“Rule 3 is do not hide unwanted things in the fog"

What is the fog?

Imagine that you were afraid. You have reason to be afraid of yourself. You’re afraid of other people, you’re afraid of the world. You’re nostalgic for the innocence of the past for the time before you learned the terrible things that shattered the trust characterizing childhood, the knowledge you have gained of yourself other people in the world have embittered more than enlightened. You’ve been betrayed hurt.

I’m disappointed you’ve become distrustful, even of hope itself. Your hope is being repeatedly shattered. And that is the very definition of hopelessness. The last thing you want to know is more. Better to leave what is instructed in mystery, better as well to avoid thinking too much or at all about what could be.

When ignorance is bliss after all to fully to be wise. Imagine, more precisely, that you are so afraid, that you will not allow yourself even to know what you want knowing. What symbol tenuously mean hoping and your hopes have been dashed.

You have your reasons for maintaining your ignorance. You’re afraid, perhaps that there is nothing worse wanting. You’re afraid that if you specify what you want precisely, you will similar tenuously discover and all too clearly what constitutes failure. You’re afraid that failure is the most likely outcome and, finally, you’re afraid that if you define failure and then fail, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was you that failed and it was your fault.

So you do not allow yourself to know what you want to manage, by refusing to think it through. You are happy, satisfied and engage, sometimes an unhappy frustrated and nihilistic other times, but you will not inquire deeply into why. Because then you would know and then you would encounter yet again shattered, confirmed disappointment.

You’re also afraid but for different reasons to allow others to know what you want. First, if they were to find out just what you wanted, then they might tell you and then you would know. Even if you were fighting against the gathering that very knowledge second if they knew.

They could then deny you what you truly wanted, even needed and hurt you much more efficiently than they might, if your deepest desires and, therefore, your vulnerabilities remain secret. The farms that hides is the refusal to notice to attend to emotions and motivational states as they arise and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself. And to the people who are close to you. A bad mood signifies something, a state of anxiety or sadness signifies something, not likely something that will please you to discover.

The most probable outcome of successfully articulating an emotion, that has accrued without expression over time, is tears and ignition of vulnerability and pain, which are also feelings that people do not like to allow ticket, only when they are feeling distrustful and angry.

Who wants to get down into the depths of pain, and grief, and guilt, until the tears emerge?

And solitary refusal to take notice of our emotional state is not the only impediment to dealing with them. If your wife or husband or whomever else you were tangled up with unhappily at the moment says something that comes too close to the painful truth, for example, there are sharp and insulting remarks that will often shut them up. It is therefore very likely to be offered. This part is when the person being insulted cares enough about you and your suffering today asked a few obstacles and honors the bitter truth. It is also partly and more obviously defensive if you can send someone away from something you, yourself, don’t want to discover, making your life easier in the present.

Sadly it is also very disappointing if that defense succeeds and is typically accompanied by a sense of abandonment, loneliness and self betrayal. You must, on the list to live among other people and them with you, have desires, wants, and needs. However, it is understated and unclear, and you are still motivated to pursue them at least, because it is impossible to live without desire, want and need. Your strategy, under such conditions is to show your disappointment when someone close to you makes you unhappy.

Allow yourself the luxury pleasure of resentment when something does not go your way. Ensure the person that was transgressed against you is frozen out by your disapproval, forcing them to discover, with as much difficulty as possible, exactly what they have done to disappoint you and finally let them grow up around blindly in the far you’ve generated around yourself, until we stumble into an injure themselves on the sharp hidden edges of your on revealed preferences and dreams. And maybe these responses are tests too, deeply associated with the lack of courage to trust.

If you really Loved Me you would bring the terrible landscape that I ever rate around myself. Discover the real me. And perhaps there is even something to such claims implicit though, there may be a certain testing of commitment, might have its utility. Everything does not have to be given away for free but even a little unnecessary mystery goes a long way. And you must still live with yourself. In the short term perhaps you are protected from the revelation of your insufficiency by your refusal to make yourself clear.

Every ideal is the judge after all, the judge who says you’re not manifesting your true potential. No ideals. No judge. But the price paid for that is purpose listeners. This is a high price, no purpose then no positive emotions, as most of what drives us forward with hope intact is the experience of approaching something we deeply need and want. And worse when we are without purpose.

Chronic overwhelming anxiety as focused purpose constrains, what is otherwise likely to be the intolerable chaos of unexploited possibility and too much choice. If you make what you want clear and commit yourself to its pursuit, you may fail. But if you do not make what you want clear, then you will certainly fail. You cannot hit a target date you refuse to see. You cannot hit a target, if you do not take. I am deeply dangerously in both cases. You will not accrue the advantage of being, but missing you will not benefit from the learning that inevitably takes place when things do not go your way.

Sometimes learning is impossible without the failure, it leads you to see that aiming your ambition in a different direction would be better. Not because it is easier, not because you have given up, not because you’re avoiding. As you have learned through the vicissitudes of your experience, what you seek is not to be found where you were looking for, it’s simply not attainable in the manner by which you chose to pursue it.

What might you do? What should you do as an alternative to hiding things in the fog? Admit to your feelings. This is a very tricky matter and it does not simply mean give into them.

First, no kidding much less communicating feelings of anger or pain due to loan from Nassar anxiety about something that might be trivial or jealousy, that is likely unwarranted, is embarrassing the admission of such feelings as a revelation of ignorance insufficiency and vulnerability.

Second, it is unsettling to allow for the possibility that your feelings, however overwhelming and convincing, might be misplaced, and in your ignorance pointing you in the wrong direction.

Portable that you’ve misinterpreted the situation entirely for reasons of which you remain fundamentally unconscious. It is for such reasons the trustee is vital, but trust of the mature and tragic sort of naive person, trust because he or she believes that people are essentially or even universally trustworthy. But any person who has truly lived, has been or has betrayed, someone with experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive.

That knowledge brings with it, has arguably justified pessimism about human nature, personal and otherwise, but it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity. One based on courage, i will trust you.

I will extend my hand to you, despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible through trust to bring out the best in you and perhaps in me.

So why will I accept substantial risk to open the door to cooperation and negotiation?

And even if you do betray me in a not to unforgivable manner, assuming a certain degree, shall we say of genuine apology and contrition on your part, I will continue to extend my hand.

The way I will do that is by telling you what I am feeling. Necessary humility must accompany such raw revelations. I should not say at least not ideally you have been ignoring me lately, I should say instead: I feel isolated, and lonely, and hurt, and cannot help but feel that you have not being as attentive to me over the last few months as I would’ve liked. Or it might have been best for us as a couple, but I’m I’m not sure if I am just imagining all this because I’m upset about it, or if I am genuinely seeing what’s going on.

The latter statement gets the point across but avoids the accusatory stance, that so often serves as the first defense against the Syrians get to the bottom of this conversation, it is very possible that you are wrong about just what is causing you to feel the way you do. If you are, you need to know what, because there’s no point in propagating errors that are causing you pain and interfering with your future.

Best to find out what is truly best to disperse the fog and find out, if the sharp objects you feared were lurking there are real or fantastical. And there’s always the danger that some of them are real. But it is better to see them, then to keep them occluded by the fog. Because you can at least sometimes avoid the danger that you are willing to see.

Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible. From a subsection entitled memory and vision. The pride of the peacock is the glory of god. The last of the goat is the bounty of god. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of god. The nakedness of woman is the work of god. Excessive floral laughs, excessive Jori weeks, the roaring of lions, howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive stored are portions of eternity, too great for there are you man. William Blake from proverbs of hell, the marriage of heaven and hell.

When I was a child, I knew the contours and details of all the houses in my immediate neighborhood. I knew the back alleys, the places behind the fences, the location of each crack in the pavement, and the short codes that could be taken from one place to another.

My geographical locale was not large but it explored thoroughly and my knowledge of it was very detailed. Now that I’m an adult, the same is not true. I lived in Fairview. the town I grew up in for most of my childhood adolescence, for only 9 years, but I’m still able to picture in high resolution the street I lived on. I have lived in Toronto, on the same street, for more than twice that long, but I still have only a vague sense of the houses that surround me. I do not think that is a good thing. I feel far less at home because of it. When I walk down the street and glance at a local house, I think how as an icon because really what practical difference does it make to me what particularities characterize Charles and then my attention is turned to something else I do not see that helps with that specific shingles colored flowers and architectural details, despite the interest that might have been elicited in me, had I paid careful attention.

By this point in my life I have seen so many houses, in so many places, that I know what a house is likely to do when I walk by which is very little. Thus I ignore the engaging idiosyncrasies and beauties of the details, its unique character for better or worse in feet, just enough to stay oriented as I walk past and continued to think and be elsewhere as I do so. There is a real loss in nafta, I am simply not there in my adult neighborhood same way I was as a child in my home town. I’m separated from the reality of the world. And a very deep sense of belonging is missing in some important way because of the doubt. Perception has been replaced for me with functional pragmatic memory. This may be more efficient in some ways, but the cost is an impoverished experience of the richness of the world. I remember when I started working as a junior professor in Boston, when my kids were about 2 and 3 years old, I was very preoccupied with my work trying to keep out, trying to advance my career, trying to make enough money to support my family on a single income. I would come home and take a walk with Tammy and our children Makayla and Julia.

I found it very difficult to remain patient with them, I had too much work to do always, and believed the idea about discipline myself through years of effort to focus continually on the fact. If we went for a walk I wanted to know exactly where we were going, just how long it would take to get there, and precisely when we were going to get out.

This is no attitude to adopt when trying to have a pleasant and reasonable time with charters, nor does he want to immerse yourself in the experience, note if you want to watch and participate in the pleasure they take, in their timeless discovery. Not unless you want to risk missing something of crucial import. It was very difficult for me to relax and focus on the present and watch my little kids pursue their meandering route through the neighborhood with no particular destination, purpose or schedule in mind, gauging themselves deeply in an encounter with a local dogs, earthworm, or in some game they invented on the way.

Now and then, however, I could snap briefly into that same frame of reference, that is one of the wonderful gifts provided by young children and sees a pristine world they inhabited still I’m traveled quite practiced and effective memory capable of producing pure joy in the newness of everything. But I was still possessed enough by my future concerns, to be involuntarily pulled back into intense preoccupation with getting the next thing done. I knew perfectly well I was missing out on beauty, and meaning, and engagement, regardless of whatever advantages in efficiency my impatience was. I was narrow, sharp and focused, did not waste time, but the price I paid for that, was the blindness demanded by efficiency accomplishment and order. I was no longer seeing the world, was only seeing the little I needed to navigate it with maximum speed and lowest cost.

None of that was surprising. I had the responsibilities of an adult, I had a demanding job, I had to take care of my family, and that meant sacrificing the present, and attending to the future. But having little children around and noticing their intense preoccupation with the present, and their fascination with what was directly around them, made me very conscious of the loss that accompanied maturity.

Great poets are expressly aware of this and they do what they can to remind the rest of us. There was a time when meadow Grove, and stream the earth, and every common site to meet team, apparel in celestial light. The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now, it has to be your turn, we’re so whatever I made by night or day, the things which I have seen and I now can see no more. The fullness of your bliss I feel. I feel it all. Evil day if I were stolen well earth herself is adorning this sweet may morning and the children are calling on every side so I was always far and wide fresh flowers while the sun shines warm and the Babe leaped up on his mother’s arm. I hear.

I hear we sure yeah, I hear that there is a tree of many, one single field which I’ve looked upon. Both of them speak something, it is gone. The currency of my seat does the same tale repeat. Windsor is flooded, the visionary clean. Where is it now? The glory and the dream. William Wordsworth’s. Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood. Some in fact never lose the glorious vision of childhood, this is particularly true of artists and indeed seems a vital part of what makes them artists.

William Blake, the English painter printmaker and poet, appears to have been one such person. He had nabbed a uniquely visionary world. Blake perceived something closer to what the philosopher Immanuel Kant termed the thing in itself. Then do most mortals left, as we are with a pale reflection of our surroundings that are increasingly restricted mature perceptions delivered to us Blake was also exquisitely sensitive to the metaphorical dramatic significance of each apparently isolated event, the manner in which each event is rice with endless poetically echoing connotations.

Every farmer understands. Every tear from every eye becomes a Babe in eternity, this is caught by females bright and return to its own delight. The bleak, the bark bellow wind rumor are wasted beat on heaven’s shore. The baby did weeps the rod beneath right revenge in realms of desk. The bakers rags fluttering in the air, does to rags the heavens’ terror. Soldier armed with sword and gun policy strikes the summer’s song, the poor man’s forcing is worth more than all the gold on average sure. One might run you from the labor’s hands, show buy and sell the misers lands or is protected from on high does that whole nation to sell and buy. He who marks the entrance face shall be locked in. He and she shall teach the child to doubt the rotting great show never get out. He who respects the entrance race triumphs. Over hell and guest.

The vision of a true artist such as Blake is truly too much because what is beyond our memory restricted perceptions is too much, it is the unfathomable totality of the world past, present and future, bound up together on every level connected, to every other level nothing existing in isolation, everything implying something vital, but beyond our comprehension and all of the speaking of the overwhelming mystery of being.

The visionary concentrates on something we all see hypothetically, a vase of flowers perhaps in all its complexity and beauty, each bloom springing forth out of nothingness before its dissolution in return haystack in the spring and its appearance in the summer, autumn and winter, observing in portraying the absolute mastery of its existence, with its different shades of light and color, as well as the underlying commonality form, which we can easily confuse with the full of the incomprehensible actuality of what is there.

How do you know what every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world’s delight close by your senses far it? William Blake from a memorable fancy the marriage of heaven and hell. To proceed van Gogh’s painting irises. From which the illustration that begins this chapter is derived, is for example, the gaze through a window back into the eternity that our perceptions once revealed so then we can remember how all right inspiring and miraculous the world really is under the Mundine familiarity to which we have reduced it.

Share in the artist’s perception reunites us with the source of inspiration that you can rekindle our delight in the world. Even if the drudgery and repetition of daily life has reduced what we see to the narrowest and most pragmatic visions. But for those first affections, those shadowy recollections which be what they may, are yet the fountain light of all of our day, are a master light that all RCN holders cherish and have the power to make our noisy years seen moments in the beginning of the eternal silence truth, wait to perish never which neither listlessness norm Madden Dever, no man nor boy not only that is it enmity with joy can obviously a bullish or destroy. William Wordsworth’s ode intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood.

All of this is very frightening. It is frightening to perceive the shells of ourselves that we have become, it is frightening to glimpse even for a moment the transcendent reality that exists, beyond we think we border are great paintings with luxurious elaborate frames to glorify them.

But we do it at least as much to win 50 words, held the glory of the painting itself ends out the screen that bonding that bordering leads, the world we’re familiar with comfortably intact and unchanged, we do not want that beauty reaching out past the limitations imposed on it and disturbing everything that is familiar. We do the same with museums, those as far as for genius we isolate everything that was great, everything that could in principle be distributed throughout the world.

Why cannot every small town have a shrine devoted to one great piece of art instead of having every piece collected in the manner impossible for anyone to ever take in at once? Is not one masterpiece enough for a rule or even for a building? 10 great works of art, hundreds in a single room is absurd, given that he has a world in and of itself, such mass collection is degrading of the unique singular particularity and worst of what is priceless and irreplaceable.

It is fear that entices us to imprison art and no wonder. How do you reckon the 0 acres much have you reckoned the earth march? Have you practiced so long to read? Have you felt so proud to get the meaning of homes? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all colds. You possess the good of the earth and sun, there are millions of sons laughed you will no longer take things a second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead nor feed on the spectators of books, you shall not look through my eyes, or take things from me. You should listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

What Whitman’s song of myself. The overwhelming to open ourselves up to the beauty in the world that we as adults have painted over with simplicity. In not doing so, however, in not taking a proper walk with the child for example. We lose track.

It can be overwhelming to open ourselves up to the beauty in the world that we as adults have painted over with simplicity. In not doing so, however, in not taking a proper walk with a young child.

The untrammeled world is constantly capable of producing, and reduce our lives.