I thought I would take a few moments today to look over some spare thoughts from Tim Kreider’s essay collection, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.
It is a pity that many prefer to confide certain things in total strangers rather than with the closest people in their lives.
When you want nothing from another, you can give freely and without fear.
I think these two thoughts work well in tandem. A total stranger is often a person we make no demands of and the lack of history makes it easier to share without risking anything valuable about the relationship.
A lack of reinforcement can quickly turn the desire for connection into its opposite. Babies have been seen to do this when their parents do not smile back at them – they will start fussing and finding ways to avoid eye contact with their parents.
An unshared life has a way of feeling like it isn’t happening.
It seems like we have very strongly developed instincts for self-preservation. This goes beyond merely the physical – like knowing to quickly break physical contact with a burning surface. The first quote suggests that even in our earliest years our instincts steer us away from the possibility of emotional harm.
What I found interesting about the second thought is the implication that reversing our self-preserving instincts might take years of focused effort. The loneliness and isolation of the unshared life will compel us to reverse the instinct for disconnection demonstrated by the ignored infant – but how long must a life go unshared before such a counter measure might develop?
The difficult part of identifying your own maladaptive patterns is how it invalidates much of the life you’ve lived by the programming of those patterns.
The end of relationship means the death of the person you were in that relationship.
The biggest opponent to any change is loyalty. In the context of self-reform, most people must overcome their instinct to remain true to a past self and the decisions made by that person.
The core of a protest is that it matters when the truth is spoken even if nobody seems to listen.
A truth is valuable to the extent that it values and promotes life.
This pair of ideas struck me as a decent rule of thumb for how to know difference between the time to speak up and the time to bite the tongue.
An aging pet is often just that – a vet will diagnose a dog as being seventeen years old. As long as the pet is eating and mobile, it’s probably best to keep it comfortable.
One thing that helps hospice caregivers think about how to care for a patient is to understand the patient’s goals. What would a patient like to continue doing to maintain a desired quality of life over the course of a terminal illness? These goals can be used as guidelines for treatment decisions. I liked this thought because it gives a pet owner a simple framework to consider during a related situation – if a pet has goals for its final months, what would those goals be? I suppose if an aging pet can eat and maintain a certain level of mobility, it’s probably appropriate to focus on comfort measures intended to maintain these two functions.
An institution goes into terminal decline when it starts giving irrelevant or obsolete answers to new, urgent questions.
I suppose the fundamental challenge for any institution is to find new problems to solve once it’s addressed the issues that prompted its original formation. This note suggests how to identify a failing institution because the inability to answer questions reveals an inability to adapt existing knowledge to new ways of thinking.
I want to go out but I want to stay home…
The final thought captures the spirit of the many small dilemmas discussed so far. The toughest decisions we have in life aren’t easily determined simply by calculating the positives and the negatives because at the core of the dilemma is a competing set of desires.
Huh?
Well…
Fine, that isn’t from the book, it’s from Courtney Barnett’s “Nobody Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party”. But who better to end a riff off?
Thanks for reading.
