It’s 2 a.m., and Wally’s licking my arm: “Sorry Dad,” he says, “Gotta go.” “Jesus, Wally, now?” And that was the end of that.
I turn to the morning papers, blog posts and RSS feeds. Kaveh Akbar’s words echo: “Time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever…There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everything at once.”
I pull into the parking lot. Sigh, another day, another walk.
1502 consecutive (almost) days on my Cove Island Park morning walk. Like in a row.
I walk.
Eyes burn, fatigue has set in.
65° F, 10 mph winds from the north — I immediately regret not bringing a windbreaker. Left it resting on the front seat of the car.
I’m dragging my a** around the track, directly into the headwinds. Shiver. I could turn back, walk ¼ mile to the car, and grab the jacket. But that simple turn, a few hundred steps back, just seemed to be too much.
At 63, Louis-Dreyfus says she’s still trying to prove herself (“always”), and that “Tuesday” is part of that process. “I’m certain nobody would have considered me for that role 20 years ago, and that’s probably because they just thought of me only as a ‘ha-ha’ funny person.” She’s still interested in TV comedy, she told me, but she’s loving this stage of her career, and getting to do more. “I just want to try it all,” she says. “It’s good for my brain.”
“But anyway, I’m done with that. I’m done with self-doubt. I’m done with shame. I’m done with feeling weird about being ambitious. You know, the list is long. We all know what it is. I think for me, the takeaway is: Oh, we can be done with that sooner than we thought. We don’t have to take 60, 70 [expletive] years to come to that conclusion — I’m working on being done with self-doubt. I’m working on being done with shame. And I’m working really hard on finding joy. […]
There’s always room to learn more, and for me, that is an incredibly joyful adventure.”
The only difference between a lake with waves and a lake without waves is the wind. A lake would be calm except for the wind. We would be calm if not for our thinking. We can tell how much of a turbulent effect the wind has on the lake by the size and strength of the waves. We can tell how much effect our thinking is having on us by the size and strength of our feelings. The wind is invisible. We can only feel the effects of it. Most of the thinking that affects us is also invisible. Our feelings are the only thing that tells us something is amiss.
Video: DK. April 22, 2024 @ 5:30 am at Cove Island Park.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Inspired by: “It is exhausting, dizzying. It is good to feel all sorts of things, even the bad things that scare you, because they, too, push you in the direction of your convictions. — Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 6, 2024)
Also inspired by: “When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” —Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press in 2012)
Hope, neuroscientists say, resides in the orbitofrontal cortex, one of the most confounding parts of the human brain, which somehow directs our decision-making and expectation and memory and emotional behaviors and our hedonic experiences — which is to say, what devastates us and what makes our life worth living. It is located just above our eyes: it dictates how we see the world. I wonder if this is why, to envision a hoped — for beyond or to focus better on a hopeful wish or a prayer, we close our eyes, or look up.
Notes: Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. Quote Source: Thank you Beth @ via Alive on All Channels.
I turned to literature like a maniac. I mean, I was – I just was reading, you know, five hours a day and memorizing all these things and convinced that nothing mattered but being a great poet, and, yeah, that’s what filled the void for 20 years. I mean, I – well, it never did it, but it certainly – I certainly tried to make it fill that void. […]
I have this hunger in me that is endless, and I think everyone probably has it. Maybe they find different ways of dealing with it, whether it’s booze or excessive exercise or excessive art or whatever. I tried to answer it with poetry for years and hit a wall with that. And finally, I decided, or rather – I didn’t decide. That’s not right. I discovered that the only answer to that hunger was God. Answer is wrong, I guess. The only solution to me was to live toward God without an answer. […]
GROSS: So – but what was your understanding of God then?
WIMAN: Well, I probably did have an understanding of God as a person in the sky, you know, or a vision of God as simply the answer to all questions, and also just a being a, like a father figure. And I suffered a real loss of that concept at some point, and to what I have now, which is God is really not an object at all, but a verb.
(GROSS: Why turn to religion and not, say, for instance, philosophy? What did religion – what did faith give you that you felt nothing else could?) […]
Oh, a living God. I mean, as philosophy, there’s nothing that loves you back. I mean, I am moved by my deepest settled belief is in the unity of existence, that there is some fundamental unity in all things. And we are part of that. And in our deepest experiences of joy or of love or suffering, there is a sense sometimes that reality is looking back at us. And it can happen to people who are not religious at all. It happens to poets all the time. They can have an experience in nature in which they’re not blending with nature. It’s as if there’s some kind of reciprocal seeing. And I think that is God. And that’s the leap that I made in my life. I think a lot of people don’t make that leap and perhaps don’t feel the need to make that leap.
Notes: Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
