I keep a hand-written journal, to log the often boring, redundant, silly, serious, terrible, hopeful, vulnerable thoughts that I have. My current journal is handmade and has a sister that I gave to one of my best friends back in 2009. Since she and I have never gotten to see each other much, I decided to make us these “sister” journals to exchange every time we met up. The journals have sections divided by envelopes to hold whatever each of us found that we wanted to share with the other.
The first three sections of this journal are her entries, interleaved with some of my own. But it’s been a long time since we’ve even been in the same country. When I filled up my last journal in 2015, I finally turned to this one to complete the last seven sections as mine.
There are still a few pages left in it for 2017, and typed below is my first entry over breakfast this morning. I felt it was worth sharing.
Important Lessons / Thoughts from the Soul
- People are their most attractive, most magnetic, most impressive selves when they are doing what they love.
- The idealistic man is rarely also the ideal man himself.
- What we hate in others is often what we hate in ourselves.
- What we fear in others is often what we fear in ourselves.
- What we hope for in others is often what we hope for in ourselves.
- Opposites are not the same as differences.
- Interesting interests do not make an interesting person.
- It is good to believe in your ideals if you can also learn to use them to guide your pragmatism. Professing your love for an ideal and then flagellating yourself and others with it is destructive to yourself and a destruction of/disservice to that ideal.
- Judgment can be good. Judgmentalness is never good.
- Announce your values. Be your brand. Campaign. Market. Protest. Or call whatever it is you do how you need to call it. Just be mindful that you don’t become the caricature in place of your complexities.
- (And this one’s not mine, but) living well is the best revenge. (Thanks, George Herbert.)
- People can be so certain about their uncertainties of others, and yet be so ambivalent about the things which could otherwise be guaranteed.
- This society disadvantages and advantages extroverts and introverts in different ways. Society celebrates the extroverts and binds them up in social nets disguised as social networks. Society ignores the introverts, perceives them as boring or not leader-like, and they then get to quietly produce results in the background (of a world full of increasingly hotter air) while living out a peaceful life. I envy introverts, but man, do I (usually) love being an extrovert.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Love: A Theory & Meditation on Love
Is the trouble with love anything like the prisoner’s dilemma? There is (ideally) no middleman in the game of love to corrupt us or pit us against each other. There’s only us.
And yet…
Because you know how easily I could leave or change my heart, you withhold the part of you I need to feel confident that you love me.
Because I know how easily you could leave or change your heart, I withhold the part of me you need to fall in love with me.
Love takes a certain amount of compromise, a willingness to stop looking for something else, an agreement to stop questioning what we could have with someone else, to work through our imperfections together. Each of us has the option to walk away, and the “prize” of walking away first is a preservation of ego and the cold comfort of not having to deal with the pain of finding out, “Who loved whom more? Who didn’t want the other one enough?” We could also both walk away and both lose. The individual fear that we could both have more than this keeps us from cooperating. The collective fear is that cooperation, while mutually beneficial, doesn’t get us “high” and is potentially not very romantic.
But it’s worth repeating: being idealistic is not the same as living the ideal. So don’t let your ideals and your pragmatism become a false dichotomy. Don’t let your fears make you doubt or sabotage your emotional bravery.
My Paper Time Machine
A few pages I flipped back to that seemed interesting.
Me (in response): “Even angry fish has friends. Don’t be lonely.”
I have three pages left to fill before starting a new journal for 2017. At the end of the journal I found this entry from my friend. What a nice surprise. Where in the world are you, hon? Regardless, thanks for the note.
