“GIRL NEXT DOOR” is “The Tender Bar” meets “Harriet the Spy” plus lyrical natural beauty. A mom who dies in her 40s leaves her little girl with inner strength to get through the hardest of times, and to make a safe-enough path to adulthood.
“The more we can be ourselves, the more positively we influence others.” – Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person Rogers and other psychologists have said that everyone wants to be influential. But Rogers doesn’t talk about it in the power-hungry sense, or the “compensate for our sense of inferiority” sense. Like most of his writing, it takes a positive view of the human mind, and I appreciate that. Reading about the need to be influential reminded me of when I opened my fitness training business, and how inspired I was to share my own life-improving experiences with other people. Recently a…
The scenarios I thought I confronted were:
1) Be erased by meeting the standards of a universe in which I can’t exist; or
2) Resist and prevent rites of passage that can neither be resisted nor prevented.
First draft completed, I’m reading through it, marking it up, and using Scrivener to outline and lay out the rewrite. It’s compelling and is the only thing I want to do these days.
Headlines state that she was “booed offstage,” but that’s untrue. She remained standing, stopped her band from playing, and performed Bob Marley’s “War” acapella.
We have to accept that we are creatures with limited time, and that sometimes we are subject to disappointment and there’s no way around it. Which means we have to be patient. On the positive side, we get to set the priorities that make us feel like our real self, and being patient feels good. The implications Burkeman lays out grow bigger with each chapter.
When I’m patient with other people, I’m more patient with myself too. Patience can mean willingness to wait, which is a virtue, and patience can also mean willingness to expend effort to put oneself into others’ shoes, also a virtue. How about expending effort to look at what’s really going on, in order to decide how to respond? To me, that’s also patience. If I scatter my speech with labels and exaggerations, I’m displaying my (impatient) frame of mind, not portraying what I want to describe. I hope I’ve never said anything like this, but as an example: “This old…
When I can’t sleep, it isn’t that I can’t fall asleep to start with — it’s that I wake up either hot or revved-up or both. I tell myself the feeling is from a hormone, maybe cortisol, which will clear out in about twenty minutes, and until then I should relax my body by focusing on my breath. Of course, going back to sleep isn’t always that straightforward. What is it like for you, if you awaken in the night? Sunday Jan. 17, 2021, 4 AM — I woke up two hours ago and am not sure I’ve been back…
I always prick up my ears when someone talks about losing a parent during childhood. I think this is the first time I’ve heard someone explicitly say he isolated himself. He had also been bullied. He didn’t say a lot about feeling isolated, and he didn’t describe “holing up” as self-protection, but still I felt I could relate.
My journals have helped me get some perspective on an aspect of my personality that I’ve often disparaged: I’m not a natural at self-promoting and competing in a public setting or a career setting. I cooperate easily rather than fighting for my own agenda. In fact, I forget NOT to cooperate.