“Doesn’t the dismissal of emotion stem from emotion? Is there a neutral non-emotive state?”
— Erica Avey // Question
Tag: Inspiration
Death of the Periphery
“I’ve often felt like the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, something that actually emancipates you from this smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved. So one of the things we’re most afraid of in silence is this death of the periphery, the outside concerns, the place where you’ve been building your personality and where you think you’ve been building who you are, starts to atomize and fall apart. It’s one of the basic reasons we find it difficult even just to turn the radio off or the television or not look at our gadget — is that giving over to something that’s going to actually seem as if it’s undermining you to begin with and lead to your demise. The intuition, unfortunately, is correct. You are heading toward your demise, but it’s leading towards this richer, deeper place that doesn’t get corroborated very much in our everyday outer world.”
Goals // Week 50
This week I have a lot to get done, again, but not as much as last week. The new class of employees is just about done and by midweek I should start seeing more time for myself and I just hope to have the energy, the mental resources, and the emotional stability to focus on what is important when that time comes along.
This week I will:
Read 100 pages of The Plague by Albert Camus. Last week I didn’t get any reading done at all and while I already know I will fall far short of my reading goals for the year, I had hoped to end with at least two more books under my belt. So, this week I have to get back to it. I don’t think 20 pages a day is too much to ask of myself.
Update: I made it just over half way which was better than nothing so I won’t be too hard on myself. I just have so little energy right now that reading has become a chore. I’m actually really missing it and hoping that paring a cup of black or green tea with my reading time going forward will help perk me up and get me through the pages.
Stay on top of my meal and medication schedule. Between medications and supplements I’m up to at least 17 pills a day. Some of them have to be taken with food, some 30 minutes before I eat, and some make me so nauseous that they have to be spaced out as much as possible front the others. That means I can’t miss a meal, or eat too late, or forget a pill or I end up feeling cruddy or slipping back down hill. My health has to be the top priority now.
Update: I only missed one evening dose of my medication and between 17 pills and having to break my meals up into four a day rather than three I think that’s pretty good. I made some small tweaks to the schedule and wrote it down to keep with me so I won’t forget what to take when. Just 7 more weeks to go like this.
Begin my own list of what I have started calling “Bradbury prompts“. These are simple words or phrases pulled from the mind without too much forethought to kick start blog posts and essays. The list is the first step in the Ray Bradbury WORK RELAX DON’T THINK system. I’m looking for patterns, for concept groups, for my motivation and possibly a project.
Update: I did “start” but I failed to keep going. I did enjoy the exercise very much and saw immediately how it could save me time and help me start writing when I don’t know where to begin. Going forward I really want to make this something I schedule and do every day and follow the list up with 1000+ words toward an essay or blog post based on what pops out of my head and into the list.
Get the Christmas shopping finished for our out-of-town people. December is slipping away quickly and before you know it, the last day for gifts to arrive before Christmas will be long passed. I’m sending to small children and I cannot have them disappointed in on Christmas day when there is nothing from Auntie Lisa under the tree.
Update: I did “start” but I failed to keep going. I did enjoy the exercise very much and saw immediately how it could save me time and help me start writing when I don’t know where to begin. Going forward I really want to make this something I schedule and do every day and follow the list up with 1000+ words toward an essay or blog post based on what pops out of my head and into the list.
Finish my resume! There is a new opportunity coming up very quickly that I know I would be perfect for and I want to be ready but I am procrastinating, badly. I have started but I haven’t finished and half finished means nothing at all. This opportunity was made for me and I have only to be brave enough to reach out and seize it.
Update: I don’t even want to talk about it. I failed miserably to finish it and rather than let myself down again I have taken it off of my list for next week and pledged to revisit the document at home during my winter break. I’ve already added it as an even in my calendar and turned on multiple notifications with note proclaiming “No excuses!”
This week I—hopefully—will slowly be returning to my old self. The temptation will be to overdo it. I’ll want to eat foods I know I can’t eat, to do things that I know I can’t do, and to push myself too far too soon. The danger now is losing progress. This week I have to listen to my body over the needs of anyone else.
P.S. For a look at how I fared last week check out my updated post for Week 49.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
The Week’s End // A Thought-Provoking Round-Up
Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read or watch while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:
1. “I’m just a guy who’s had 21 years worth of anxiety fixes tried on him by doctors and cognitive behavioral therapists. I’d like to share with you which ones have worked for me over the next 30 days.” — 30 Practical Tactics to Decrease Your Anxiety (Intro) // CJ Chilvers
2. “Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.” — Alain de Botton on Existential Maturity and What Emotional Intelligence Really Means // Brain Pickings
3. “Neurosymphony explores three distinct perspectives on the brain, using videos of the scans made freely available by the NICC. The video pairs the imagery with an excerpt from the album Chapel by the US electronic musician and music-cognition researcher Grace Leslie, in which she converts her brainwaves into music.” — Neurosymphony // Aeon
4. “Training is based on deep-dive EI activities, such as mindfulness and meditation, as well as empathy and compassion exercises to strengthen their relationship with guests. Employees are entrusted to make on-the-spot decisions to improve a client’s experience.” — New research suggests this is the best way to teach emotional intelligence // Fast Company
5. “There is an overflowing pipeline of “feel-good” stories traveling from local to national news, showcasing inspirational tales about adversity and how community members support each other in times of need. However, these pieces, seemingly easy to report out because of their surface-level levity, often eclipse overarching, unexplored narratives about labor, health care, education, and more, indicated by the lack of public or private support detailed in these stories themselves.” — Beware of the feel-good news story // Vox
6. In absolutely sickening news: “A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to ‘reimplant an ectopic pregnancy’ into a woman’s uterus–a procedure that does not exist in medical science–or face charges of ‘abortion murder’.” — The Guardian
7. “A general view shows a statue among abandoned items and debris in an entry area for the canteen inside Hong Kong Polytechnic University on November 20, 2019.” — Photos of the Week // The Atlantic
8. “Maybe you’ve heard Biden talk about his boyhood stutter. A non-stutterer might not notice when he appears to get caught on words as an adult, because he usually maneuvers out of those moments quickly and expertly. But on other occasions, like that night in Detroit, Biden’s lingering stutter is hard to miss.” — What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say // The Atlantic
Bonus: More notes on stuttering // Austin Kleon
9. “You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” — The Wisdom Your Body Knows // The New York Times
10. A re-aired episode of The Ezra Klein Show I missed from last year with Lilliana Mason. From the synopsis “…Mason offers one of the best primers I’ve read on how little it takes to activate a sense of group identity in human beings, and how far-reaching the cognitive and social implications are once that group identity takes hold.”
Bonus: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity
Have you read, watched, written, or posted an interesting or inspiring thing this week? Has something on the internet made you feel strongly, think deeply, or see the world in a new light? If so, drop a link in the comments, we’d love to check it out!
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
Different perspective // Samuel Jaramillo
“This is the reasoning behind my manifesto, a move towards transparency in my intentions, motives and views. Perhaps this will inspire you to craft your own. And if you do, by all means to do so with enough cheeky humor and kindness to remind yourself and the reader that you fully own that you are but one fabric in the cosmic thrift store.”
The Week’s End // A Thought-Provoking Round-Up
Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read and see while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:
1. “Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, On Being: Imagining a New America
2. “There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram—the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data—but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself.” — Tavi Gevinson, Who Would I Be Without Instagram? An investigation.
3. “Should our society be capitalist, socialist, or something in between? To adjudicate this debate, we must understand the definitions of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism.’” — Defining Capitalism and Socialism Bonus: Arguments for Capitalism and Socialism
4. “There is something peculiarly—even paradoxically—appealing about taking a dim view of human nature, a view that has become unquestioned dogma among many evolutionary biologists.” — David P Barash, Do human beings have an instinct for waging war?
5. “So mindful are we of the risks of selfishness, we run into an opposite danger: an abnegation of the self, a modesty that borders on self-erasure, an automatic impulse to give everything over to competing parties, a shyness about pressing oneself forward and a manic inability to say ‘no’ or cause the slightest frustration to others.” — The School of Life
6. “the thing beyond the body which is you is peeled back and massive barely anything at all” — Robin Richardson, Origin Story Ad Nauseam (via Grace)
7. “…it’s interesting and instructive that you’ve named your theory terror management theory as opposed to death management theory. It’s not about avoiding death. It’s about avoiding the fear of death.” — Shankar Vedantam, Hidden Brain
8. “Having existential anxiety is what it means to be a human being” — Olessa Pindak, 4 Ways To Cope With Existential Anxiety, According To A Psychiatrist
9. “That pain is incommunicable is a lie in the face of the near-constant, trans-species, and universal communicability of pain. So the question, finally, is not whether pain has a voice or appearance: the question is whether those people who insist that it does not are interested in what pain has to say, and whose bodies are doing the talking.” — Anne Boyer, What is the Language of Pain?
10. “It may be that life is just an example of Grover’s quantum search at work, and that this algorithm is itself a fundamental property of nature. That’s a Big Idea if ever there was one.” — An important quantum algorithm may actually be a property of nature, MIT Technology Review
Have you read, watched, written, or posted an interesting or inspiring thing this week? Has something on the internet made you feel strongly, think deeply, or see the world in a new light? If so, drop a link in the comments, we’d love to check it out!
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
Lisa Marie Blair 