154. A Helpful Provocation

You come across a quotation from a book and you are immediately frustrated by it. It seems to undermine an idea that is important to you, and so your reaction to it is both strong and negative. You judge it harshly, and you want to argue passionately against it.

But a quotation is only a fragment of a much larger text. To argue against it, you would first need to understand its broader context. On its own, a fragment is always only a provocation. And you already know this, because the quotation has just provoked your frustration and judgment.

153. The Other Side

I’ve been working all day, but it feels like I’ve achieved nothing. Despite my best efforts, I’ve failed to produce anything of note. I feel miserable because of this. When tangible results are lacking, the effort itself feels like a failure.

I’m stewing in my discontent when I receive a message from a friend. They want me to come to dinner this evening so that they can introduce me to someone — a person my friend claims I’ll find interesting.

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.