I like this Jeremy Bearimy timeline hahaha.

I feel like The Good Place has reached that point, the way it did with Supernatural,
where they grapple with the whole heaven-hell-afterlife backstory and making it plausible;
it gets a bit what, eh at times, but mostly this is still fun and I have no idea where it will go,
hehe. Let's hope this show figures it out.


On other matters,

my long-awaited holiday escape is impending!

And I think it's a good time to take a rest from all of cyber-life for a while,
from the stresses and pressures of societal demands, and everyday expectations.
This year has been a long, taxing lesson (Alhamdulillah! in a lot of ways).
I haven't blogged this prolifically in years:
I have had inner openings; mind-blowing revelations; painful slaps of self-awareness;
made painstaking efforts at establishing inner harmony, which as I go on, I realise
is like sitting on the point of a knife. So difficult to sustain,
and maintained with acute awareness and vigilance. So easy to lapse.

but I'd like to take some time off for now,
switch off, replenish, and be quiet with nature,
with beautiful things.



Ja!

Hypersimplified morality stops you from tapping into deeper recesses of your psyche. It's partly because they're primal forces; it's not surprising that you don't want to have anything to do with them, that you stay away from situations where they might make themselves manifest. But the problem is, by denying the worst in yourself in that manner, suppressing it, you preclude the possibility of the best. Because no one can be a good person without integrating their capacity for aggression. Because without that capacity for aggression you cannot say 'no'. Because 'no' means there is nothing you can do to me that will make me change my mind. Or conversely, I will play for higher stakes than you will. And unless you've got your aggression integrated, there isn't a chance you can say that, and if you said it, no one will take you seriously. They'd know it was just a show.

-- Jordan Peterson talking about Jung's idea of integrating one's shadow




You should be able to do things that you wouldn't do; 
that's the definition of a genuinely moral person.

I actually had to pause so I can post it here,

because it's just so damn good.

Everybody is a strange mixture of victim and victimizer. Lots of terrible things happen to people that aren't justifiable in some sense; illness strikes people randomly; where you're thrown into existence as a consequence of your birth; there's going to be times in your life where things twist in a manner that's unfair to you. But that goes along with the unequally distributed privileges as well. That's the arbitrary nature of existence. But you can't allow those sorts of things to define you, because it's not that useful strategically.

When you're playing a card game, you're dealt a hand of cards; 
well, what do you do? You play the hand the best you can.

Why? Because all the hands are equal? No! Because you don't have a better strategy than playing the hand that you're dealt the best you can. And that doesn't even mean it'll be a winning strategy. Because people don't always win; sometimes we lose, sometimes we lose painfully, sometimes we lose painfully and unjustly. That's not the point. The point is you don't have a better strategy. And neither does anyone else.

If you start to regard yourself as a hapless victim, or even worse, an unfairly victimised victim, well then things go very badly sideways for you, it's not a good strategy. You end up resentful, you end up angry, you end up vengeful, you end up hostile, and that's just the beginning. Things can get far more out of hand than that.

It's better to take responsibility for the hand that you've been dealt.


Everything Dr Peterson says in this resonates with me, especially with respect to new ideas and thoughts that I've pondered over the past year; he basically summed up for me, all of East of Eden, and why it struck me so deeply. That whole thing up there; that's Cal's story! (and each of our stories too) Facing your own capacity for evil and struggling with the hurt and injustice one suffers in life, as a necessity toward real good. He mentions Harry Potter too, haha. I cried at multiple points of this talk.

This man is here to stay on my list of admirable people.
I am floored by how intelligent he is,
and how real and honest he is about the search for truth and meaning.

basic laws of emotional physics

simple but powerful truths that help us understand why courage is both transformational and rare.

1. If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.

2. Once we fall in the service of being brave, we can never go back.

During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists. We want to go back to that moment before we walked into the arena, but there's nowhere to go back to. What makes this more difficult is that now we have a new level of awareness about what it means to be brave. We can't fake it anymore. We now know when we're showing up and when we're hiding out, when we are living our values and when we are not. Our new awareness can also be invigorating -- it can reignite our sense of purpose and remind us of our commitment to wholeheartedness. Straddling the tension that lies between wanting to go back to the moment before we risked and fell and being pulled forward to even greater courage is an in escapable part of rising strong.

3. This journey belongs to no one but you; however, no one successfully goes it alone.

4. We're wired for story.

5. Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we're learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.

6. Rising strong is the same process whether you're navigating personal or professional struggles.

7. Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity.

8. You can't engineer an emotional, vulnerable, and courageous process into an easy, one-size-fits-all formula.

9. Courage is contagious.

10. Rising strong is a spiritual practice.

-- Rising Strong, by Brene Brown.

That night I am sitting at the kitchen table, just lost in my thoughts, when Edison brings me a cup of tea. "What's this for baby?" I say, smiling.

"I thought you could use it," he tells me. "You look tired."

"I am," I confess. "I am so damn tired."

We both know I'm not talking about the first two days of testimony, either.

Edison sits down beside me, and I squeeze his hand. "It's exhausting, isn't it? Trying so hard to prove that you're better than they expect you to be?"

-- Small Great Things, by Jodi Picoult


Exhausting.

the truth untold, but it's raining

just revisiting some beautiful things.


There's a difference between absence and death
and you are needed.
-- Checkmate, Dorothy Dunnett

and this song is really so heartbreakingly lovely.

💔

need to keep up my discipline
--> to keep up my health
--> to do what needs to be done

Every now and then the universe tells you what book you need to read;
it does this by placing the name of that book and author in front of you in various contexts,
until you can't help but take note.

You ignore book recommendations from the universe at your peril.

-- Books For Living: Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting, and Embracing Life, by Will Schwalbe



Amusingly, I feel this is true. It's written tongue-in-cheek, but anybody who's ever felt a connection to reading probably knows this. In fact, I do think, it's not just reading; it can be a talk, a lecture, an encounter, a person you bumped into -- it's a being attuned to the world around you, that nudges you in the direction you need to go.

At the highest level of psychological integration,
there is no difference between you and your experience.
-- Carl Jung