CxD #170: 👯♂️🌼; 1️⃣🖼; 👍🍎?; 🧓➡️👶; 🤦♀️💊?
1. One trouble of growing older, is that depth of new friendship is hard to come by. You have your old friends, some of whom you’ve outgrown and might no longer even really connect with. And then there’s all kinds of acquaintances littering about. And your beloved, who gets to hear about most of the things at all hours, serves multiple duties—friend, parent, cook, manager, lover, accountant, therapist—and needs some space to just sit on the couch and eat some bon-bons every once in a while.
But sometimes new friendships can bloom as though by surprise, as though out of nowhere. Except: would you be open to spending some time in the friendship garden to nourish them?
What would you do if someone you’ve never met before walked into your life with some shared interests, ideas, and a curiosity about them and about you? Would you dismiss them or allow whatever needed or wanted to happen to happen?
Are you living entirely in the restricted past or is there space for new blossoms in your garden of friendships? 🌸🌷🌼 Are you open to continuously cultivating one of life’s greatest gifts?
2. Poem for a new friend:
One Art ~ Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
3. A profound question in a time of tragic systemic oppression and death: Where are all the good apples?
4.
Listen to this insightful conversation about a framework of mind that is the bread and butter of Zen: Beginner’s Mind.
It probably won’t surprise you that I’m one of those parents who reads a lot of books about parenting. And they’re mostly bad, particularly the books for dads. So many of those books have this weird, “dude, you’re going to be a dad, bro,” tone. It’s a terrible literature. But one of the great finds for me in the parenting book world has been Alison Gopnik’s work. Gopnik runs the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab at UC Berkeley. She’s in both the psychology and philosophy departments there. She’s part of the A.I. working group there. And one of the things about her work, the thing that sets it apart for me is she uses children and studies children to understand all of us. She takes childhood seriously as a phase in human development. And why not, right? You’re watching consciousness come online in real-time. You’re watching language and culture and social rules being absorbed and learned and changed, importantly changed. Her books haven’t just changed how I look at my son. They’ve really changed how I look at myself, how I look at all of us. And one of them in particular that I read recently is “The Philosophical Baby,” which blew my mind a little bit. Because what she does in that book is show through a lot of experiments and research that there is a way in which children are a lot smarter than adults — I think that’s the right way to say that — a way in which their strangest, silliest seeming behaviors are actually remarkable. This is her core argument. Children are tuned to learn. And when you tune a mind to learn, it actually used to work really differently than a mind that already knows a lot. The efficiency that our minds develop as we get older, it has amazing advantages. Unlike my son — and I don’t want to brag here — unlike my son, I can make it from his bedroom to the kitchen without any stops along the way. I can just get right there. But also, unlike my son, I take so much for granted. I have so much trouble actually taking the world on its own terms and trying to derive how it works. I’ve learned so much that I’ve lost the ability to unlearn what I know. And that means I’ve also sometimes lost the ability to question things correctly. So this isn’t just a conversation about kids or for parents. It’s a conversation about humans for humans. We spend so much time and effort trying to teach kids to think like adults. A message of Gopnik’s work and one I take seriously is we need to spend more time and effort as adults trying to think more like kids.
5. Why “Why the addiction?” is the wrong question:
I think for a lot of people, maybe the majority of people, maybe all people, I don’t know, many of our compulsive behaviors are to mask, or override, things that we don’t want to feel, so if there is something you feel you need to focus on, something you feel you need to do, if there’s a pack of cigarettes you need to pick up, it ties into what Gabor Maté, who I recommend people check out, he’s been on the podcast as well will sometimes talk to with respect to addiction. He says people ask “Why the addiction?” They shouldn’t ask “Why the addiction?” They should ask “Why the pain?” because the addiction is a consequence of the pain and trying to mask the pain.”
Source: The Tim Ferris Show
I’m fixing to start making mind-maps of lots of useful books I’ve been reading and am going to read, focusing on character design and learning how to learn. If you’d like to receive these in the coming days/weeks/months, please consider becoming a subscriber to support my little character shoppe.
Yes, addiction comes from pain... but doesn't it also become pain itself as any other disease creates pain?