Not a bad book but got quite tired of the style. First of all, there's the choice of words of a sophomore. Second, there's the eternal lists. All the examples are lists of at least four things.
It's not a bad book, there's some ideas in there that are applicable and not intuitive enough to necessarily come up with yourself, but it could have been a lot better if it had been condensed into a third of its volume.
Interesting observation: you are not responsible for everything that happens, but you are responsible for how you react. These two often get mixed in people's mind and it's good to mentally separate them.
Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of equilibrium, some limitation that has been exceeded. And like our physical pain, our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or even undesirable. In some cases, experiencing emotional or psychological pain can be healthy or necessary. Just like stubbing our toe teaches us to walk into fewer tables, the emotional pain of rejection or failure teaches us how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
A more intersting question, a question that most people never consider, is, "What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?" Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
Imagine that somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you that you have to run 26.2 miles in under five hours, or else he'll kill you and your entire family.
That would suck.
Now imagine that you bought nice shoes and running gear, trained religiously for months, and completed your first marathon with all of your closest family and friends chering you on at the finish line.
Exact same 26.2 miles. Exact same person running them. Exact same pain coursing through your exact same legs.
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
Fault is past tense, responsibility is present tense.
Friday, 19 July 2019
Wednesday, 17 July 2019
Louisa Young - “You left early”
Wonderful autobiography about loving an alcoholic. Remember clearly how amazing the first chapter was… that’s how they should be written. Sadder near the end. Should not have read it at this point.
So: detox is a set of pills to take in order to safely come off alcohol after an extended period of heavy drinking. rehab is an extended set of therapies dealing with the physical, mental and emotional results of long-term heavy drinking, and the obstacles to giving up. Recovery is where you want to end up: a long-term state of carefully nurtured sobriety.
And alcoholism? The simplest and most useful account I ever heard is this: It’s not what you drink or how much you drink, it’s why you drink and what it does to you. You might drink every day and not be an alcoholic; you might have been sober for twenty years and still be an alcoholic.
A good guideline to an illness’s moral status is the use of a noun to describe its sufferers - a leper, an alcoholic, an anorexic - rather than using the illness as a quantifier, which allows the inclusion of other qualifiers and thus preserves the patient’s humanity: a child with flu, a woman with gastro-enteritis, a man with cancer. The use of a noun also re-iterates the illnesses’ chronic nature. These are conditions which must be managed but cannot be cured.
Here is something I learned at an AA meeting. Twenty years earlier, the speaker, a healthy, cheerful woman, had been jobless, thrown out by her husband, banned from seeing her children, depressed, insomniac, skint, hopeless, sick, shameful, in constant pain. Suicidal. She thought it through and made her decision. She spent her last money on two bottles of gin. Back at the flat she was about to kicked out of, she drank one bottle, and put the plastic bag it had come in over her head, and tied it, and prepared to die. But through the clear plastic she could see the other bottle, sitting on the side. The alcoholic in her couldn’t just leave it there. She had to drink it. She tore the plastic bag off her head, drank the remaining gin until she passed out, was found by her flatmate and rescued. So, her compulsion to drink had saved her life.
As the Frenchman said, Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.
Chopin’s description of how English ladies play his music - “looking at their hands, with great feeling, and many wrong notes.”
So: detox is a set of pills to take in order to safely come off alcohol after an extended period of heavy drinking. rehab is an extended set of therapies dealing with the physical, mental and emotional results of long-term heavy drinking, and the obstacles to giving up. Recovery is where you want to end up: a long-term state of carefully nurtured sobriety.
And alcoholism? The simplest and most useful account I ever heard is this: It’s not what you drink or how much you drink, it’s why you drink and what it does to you. You might drink every day and not be an alcoholic; you might have been sober for twenty years and still be an alcoholic.
A good guideline to an illness’s moral status is the use of a noun to describe its sufferers - a leper, an alcoholic, an anorexic - rather than using the illness as a quantifier, which allows the inclusion of other qualifiers and thus preserves the patient’s humanity: a child with flu, a woman with gastro-enteritis, a man with cancer. The use of a noun also re-iterates the illnesses’ chronic nature. These are conditions which must be managed but cannot be cured.
Here is something I learned at an AA meeting. Twenty years earlier, the speaker, a healthy, cheerful woman, had been jobless, thrown out by her husband, banned from seeing her children, depressed, insomniac, skint, hopeless, sick, shameful, in constant pain. Suicidal. She thought it through and made her decision. She spent her last money on two bottles of gin. Back at the flat she was about to kicked out of, she drank one bottle, and put the plastic bag it had come in over her head, and tied it, and prepared to die. But through the clear plastic she could see the other bottle, sitting on the side. The alcoholic in her couldn’t just leave it there. She had to drink it. She tore the plastic bag off her head, drank the remaining gin until she passed out, was found by her flatmate and rescued. So, her compulsion to drink had saved her life.
As the Frenchman said, Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.
Chopin’s description of how English ladies play his music - “looking at their hands, with great feeling, and many wrong notes.”
Tuesday, 16 July 2019
Joseph Osmundson - Freedom county
Interesting article about the author’s origins, Arlington WA, how it once wanted to secede and all the differences in the Pacific Northwest. Intriguing style.
https://therumpus.net/2014/02/notes-from-freedom-county/
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