208. Hidden Treasures

He looks at her but she does not return his glance. Her eyes are aimed elsewhere, but where exactly, he does not know. She seems to be looking straight ahead, but there is nothing there but a blank wall. He decides she must be lost in thought.

He would like to know what she is thinking, but even more than that, he would like to know what she is feeling. He has noticed that she hides most of her feelings and shares only what passes through a narrow filter. He thinks most people do this, but she has taken the practice to an extreme. She hides almost everything, supplying little more than a carefully-curated portrait of herself. What is she actually feeling? This is the question he wants to answer more than any other.

207. Wanting To Feel Better

When I’m feeling down, I can also feel unable to do anything. There are tasks I need to complete, actions I must take to support myself and others, but I feel I can’t do them because my negative feelings are too strong. I logically infer I need to improve how I feel before I can take action. I feel it’s only when my emotional state changes that I’ll be able to start making progress.

206. The Pain Of Failure

You put your whole being into everything you do. You do this automatically, because you care about the things you do and you want them done right.

To act in any other way would feel hollow and false. You cannot do less than your absolute best. If you did, you would detect the lie in your actions. It would be like you were performing a simulation rather than doing the real thing. You either give everything to what you do or you don’t do it at all.

205. Building Patience

When I discover something new, I want to understand it immediately. I want to know its position in the interconnected web of objects that is my rational understanding of the world. I want to be able to justify its existence and grasp its full meaning.

It’s because I’m able to do this for most of the things I encounter that I expect every new thing to be quickly assimilated. Any delay in my comprehension is experienced as frustration, as though something has gone wrong. With unlimited information at my fingertips, these expectations are regularly emphasized and enhanced.

204. Order Through Agreement

We need rules for there to be order. Without rules, people could do whatever they want, and they might do things that would harm us or compromise our ability to live happily. When we have rules that everyone knows and follows, the actions of others become predictable, and this helps ensure our security and safety.

When we encounter disorder, we believe it should be resolved by creating a new rule. Once the new rule is formulated and proclaimed, we expect order to be restored. But creating a rule does nothing by itself. We also need some means of enforcing the rule.

203. The Object Of Desire

She knows she sometimes has a strong effect on people. She has been told it’s because she’s attractive, but she doesn’t allow herself to believe this. When she’s around, people start to act strangely, as though they’re unable to simply accept her presence. Their attention turns to her and their actions become incomprehensible.

She doesn’t know if this lack of comprehension stems from her own inability to read people or if people are just stranger than she imagines. She assumes it must be some combination of the two, for she knows she often misses signals and everyone is weird in some way, even her.

202. What Seems Meaningful

What has already been noticed becomes more noticeable. If I’m reading a book and an unusual word stands out to me, I give it extra attention, I ponder its meanings, and I might even look it up to explore its etymology. Having noticed it, I’m struck when I see it again later that day. I have not seen this word in so many years of reading and now I’ve seen it twice. When I then see it a third time, I begin to wonder if it might be haunting me.

201. Writing Is Not Enough

We live in a world of endless writing. We write to each other constantly, texting, messaging, commenting, posting our opinions, our experiences, our ideas and dreams.

We trust that our written language is doing what we want, that it’s expressing the core of our thoughts and feelings, and that others will know and understand these things. We expect others to grasp our meanings, to comprehend our intentions, and to read our words in good faith.

200. At War With The World

It’s easy to fall into the habit of seeing myself in conflict with the world. All it takes is to see everything around me as separate from me and thus as something I must resist. I must resist it because it opposes my will and stands in the way of getting what I want. I then become alienated from the world and obsessed with myself and my desires.

At best, this develops into a bleak isolation where I’m imprisoned in the rigidity of my own mind, blocked from the possibilities of life, and barred from loving connections to other people. At worst, I become cynical about the world, and I see everything and everyone as a hostile threat to my security or even my existence itself.