humanity
Very quickly, “healing” became less about connection and more about control. Less about understanding ourselves, and more about explaining ourselves; justifying every boundary, every reaction, every ~vibe shift~ with a diagnosis. We’ve developed this not-so-subtle kind of smugness — often cruel and alienating — where if someone doesn’t speak our... See more
Gloria Alamrew • Healing is Making Us Mean
Human beings aren’t meant to be optimized. We are meant to be in relationship. In conflict. In care. In community. And community, here, doesn’t mean constant harmony. Because, ew, that’s not real life, nor should it be. Community comes with burden, it comes with inconvenience, it comes with conflict. But somehow, we’ve deluded ourselves into... See more
Gloria Alamrew • Healing is Making Us Mean
My specialty is cultural anthropology" the Professor said. "I gave up being a scholar some time ago, but I'm still permeated with the spirit of the discipline. One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in these images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those
... See more1Q84 (186)
All she had done was record a story—or, as she had put it, things she had actually witnessed—that she possessed inside her, and it just so happened that she had used words to do it. She might just as well have used something other than words, but she had not come across a more appropiate medium. (...) And yet, the sentences and paragraphs that
... See more1Q84 (85)
I don't mind what happens. Perhaps these words need a little unpacking; I don't think Krishnamurti means to say that we shouldn't feel sorrow, compassion or anger when bad things happen to ourselves or others, nor that we should give up on our efforts to orevent bad things from happening in the future. Rather, a life spent 'not minding what
... See moreFour Thousand Weeks, 122
French philosopher Henri Bergson tunneled to the heart of Kafka’s problem in his book Time and Free Will. We invariably prefer indecision over-committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally
... See moreFour Thousand Weeks, 83
And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over time, the lonelier you get.
—Oliver Burkeman
Four Thousand Weeks, 31
Notwithstanding the many real privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him. Untroubled by any notion of time 'ticking away', he might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness that Richard Rohr, a contemporary
... See moreFour Thousand Weeks, 21
To find a deeper sort of freedom in surrendering to temporal constraints, instead of always dictating how things unfold.
—Oliver Burkeman
Four Thousand Weeks, 185