152. Forgiveness Saves

Imagine you live in a small town in a remote area, isolated from the rest of civilization. One day, a member of your community does something that significantly harms other members of the community. The wrongdoer recognizes their error and takes responsibility for their actions. But the community struggles to accept the apology. You are angry because you cannot understand how anyone could do this and you feel betrayed.

The community must decide what to do. You cannot send the wrongdoer away, for they have no other home than here. There is literally nowhere else for them to go. The only solution is to come to terms with what has happened and rebuild. The community can punish the wrongdoer, but eventually forgiveness must come. You must forgive because any chance of living happily with the wrongdoer depends on them being brought back into the fold.

151. Paying Attention To Attention

In a world so vast and varied, there are endless things to see. Curiosity pulls my attention away from whatever is ordinary and towards whatever seems new or out of place. I investigate what I see, gaining knowledge about the world and developing a greater awareness of it.

My attention is especially drawn to the things I like — the objects of my desires. Conversely, my attention tends to flee from the things I dislike — the objects of my aversions. But when my attention is stuck between the boundaries constructed by my desires and aversions, the range and depth of my vision will be severely limited. There are important facets of my experience I will necessarily miss and this will inhibit the ability of my awareness to expand.

150. To Communicate A Feeling

To write a text that communicates information is relatively straightforward. Provided I understand the rules of grammar and the accepted meanings of words, I can write sentences that carry whatever information I want to share. The reader can extract the information from my text just by comprehending the literal meanings of its sentences.

But to share a feeling or sense that cannot be directly communicated, I need to expand my approach. I need to use language in ways that bend and perhaps even break the rules of grammar or the norms of meaning. I need to use metaphor to allow language to do more than it is literally able to do.

149. Political Questions

When we think about politics, we think of things like governments, laws, parties, elections, and so on. This is because we live in societies with political systems that put these institutions at the forefront. Our understanding of politics tends to orbit these concepts, and our political landscape is dominated by questions like what our government should do about a particular issue and who should win the next election.

But politics is much more than this. The practice of politics is fundamentally about determining the kind of society we want to have together. By focusing on technocratic distinctions between binary positions on narrow issues we completely lose sight of this much bigger issue. We get caught up in the details without questioning or even seeing the broad agreements that construct our political reality.

148. The Well Of His Mind

He needs to be distracted at all times. His attention has to be completely occupied. If it isn’t, he will be overwhelmed by his own thoughts and feelings. Only when he is distracted does he feel somewhat calm.

In the absence of distraction, he starts to descend. He falls deeper and deeper into the well of his mind, and the darkness is soon too much to bear. Memories arise constantly, memories of horrors he wishes he could forget. Memories of lost people and things he has done, each accompanied by a judgment.

147. Delusional Beliefs

Everyone holds a multitude of different beliefs. Some of these beliefs pertain to simple facts about the world, while others are more complex or even theoretical.

In the ordinary course of life, I will almost certainly discover that one of my beliefs is false. Realizing this, I should discard the false belief, and replace it with a different belief that is more true. But sometimes this doesn’t happen.

Sometimes the false belief is lodged too deeply inside me for it to be quickly evicted. I’ve somehow formed an attachment to this belief. I see it as part of me, and I cannot discard it because that would mean discarding myself. I know the belief is false, but it still influences my choices and actions. It does so in exactly the same way as a superstition might influence me even though I already know it’s fantastical.

146. The Right Kind Of Help

You want to help others in every way you can. When you see people helping in a certain way, you feel you should help in that way, too. If you cannot do this, you begin to feel guilty of being less helpful than you ought to be. Perhaps someone even asks you why you are not helping in that particular way, with the silent implication that only that kind of help is important.

145. Openness To Change

We first learn how to use language through trial and error. By using words and watching the reactions of others, we discover a set of general rules about how and when words should be used. If we vary from these rules, we are quickly corrected by others. In this way, we become competent language users — insiders to the set of agreements that make language possible and practical.

Soon afterwards, we begin to encounter people using words in unfamiliar ways. The same rules we were taught to follow carefully are now being bent or even broken entirely. When we hear this new language, we feel an impulse to correct it or replace it with language that conforms to our rules. We might even complain to others about the new usage and seek confirmation that it is wrong.

144. The Dizziness Of Freedom

You are here and you are not. You are physically here, but you feel out of place. You’re unsure of how to act, of how to exist. You don’t know what to do with yourself. Time is passing but too slowly. You want something to happen, something that will clarify things, something that will show you what you’re supposed to do. But nothing happens. Everything is uncertain. There are no clues pointing to a clear answer. And you’re completely on your own. No one offers any hints. You want someone to save you but no rescue is forthcoming. Asking what to do is no use, for you’re only told that you can do anything you’d like. But you know this isn’t true. The subtext says otherwise. It says there are paths that are right and others that are wrong. You’re supposed to know which is which. You can see you’re being evaluated, even at this very moment. But you don’t know the criteria and they could be anything. Your strongest instinct is to flee. But it’s obvious you can’t run from life itself. You must manage. You must survive. You must contend. This is what you have to do no matter how uncomfortable it feels. For you also have to manage your feelings. You have to navigate your feelings and the world at the same time. You have to locate a path forward through time that gets you from here to there. The path will be narrow and it will be yours alone. The paths of others might look more appealing but they are not for you. Your path will be yours because you will choose it. And in choosing it you will become responsible for it. You will be responsible for everything you do and everything you do not do. Others will see what you have done and they will judge you. To be completely consumed by anxiety is to be always focused on your responsibility and the choices you must make. It is to feel out of place in every moment of life.