Anticipation Of Pain Quotes

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?

She'd expected some backlash; it happened every time she shared her strength. But she hadn't anticipated so much raw anguish from Nico di Angelo… If this was only a portion of Nico’s pain… how could he bear it?

We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.

One can talk good and shower down roses, but it's the receiver that has to walk through the thorns, and all its false expectations.

Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more a misery than the pain itself.

There was no warning, not even a knock. The door flew open, and he forgot his present aches and pains in anticipation of what lay in store. The figure that stood in the door was not that of an enemy. It was worse. It was his mother.

We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our hearts in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's face like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: 'Take my wound.

Look,' he says, 'have you ever looked forward to reading a book so much you can't actually start it?' 'Oh totally. All the time - if I had a grain of self-restraint I never would've been able to read the last Harry Potter book. The anticipation was painful. You know like what if it does live up to the last ones? What if it's not what I hope it'll be?

Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are.

Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.

I tilted my head and tossed my hair back, baring my neck. I saw her hesitate, but the sight of my neck and what it offered proved too powerful. A hungry expression crossed her face, and her lips parted slightly, exposing the fangs she normally kept hidden while living among humans. Those fangs contrasted oddly with the rest of her features. With her pretty face and pale blond hair, she looked more like an angel than a vampire. As her teeth neared my bare skin, I felt my heart race with a mix of fear and anticipation. I always hated feeling the latter, but it was nothing I could help, a weakness I couldn't shake. Her fangs bit into me, hard, and I cried out at the brief flare of pain. Then it faded, replaced by a wonderful, golden joy that spread through my body. It was better than any of the times I'd been drunk or high. Better than sex—or so I imagined, since I'd never done it. It was a blanket of pure, refined pleasure, wrapping me up and promising everything would be right in the world. On and on it went. The chemicals in her saliva triggered an endorphin rush, and I lost track of the world, lost track of who I was.

There is always the easy way out, although I am loath to use it. I have no children, I do not watch television and I do not believe in God- all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier. Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives; by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. Finally, God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease. Thus, as I have neither future nor progeny nor pixels to deaden the cosmic awareness of absurdity, and in the certainty of the end and the anticipation of the void, I believe I can affirm that I have not chosen the easy path.

...your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments; hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born...

So Connor stands there with secret anticipation each time there's a group of new arrivals, hoping beyond hope he'll find that self-righteous, self-important, pain-in-the-ass Lev still alive.

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone. So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.

Therefore, foolish is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will cause pain when it arrives but because anticipation of it is painful.

All suffering is mind-made. Where is suffering in the world? In pain? No. In harsh words people say? How could sounds spoken cause suffering? Suffering only exists in our anticipation of events unfavorable to the mind due to desires not met, or regrets from the past that live as memories in our mind.

This is an ode to all of those that have never asked for one. A thank you in words to all of those that do not do what they do so well for the thanking. This is to the mothers. This is to the ones who match our first scream with their loudest scream; who harmonize in our shared pain and joy and terrified wonder when life begins. This is to the mothers. To the ones who stay up late and wake up early and always know the distance between their soft humming song and our tired ears. To the lips that find their way to our foreheads and know, somehow always know, if too much heat is living in our skin. To the hands that spread the jam on the bread and the mesmerizing patient removal of the crust we just cannot stomach. This is to the mothers. To the ones who shout the loudest and fight the hardest and sacrifice the most to keep the smiles glued to our faces and the magic spinning through our days. To the pride they have for us that cannot fit inside after all they have endured. To the leaking of it out their eyes and onto the backs of their hands, to the trails of makeup left behind as they smile through those tears and somehow always manage a laugh. This is to the patience and perseverance and unyielding promise that at any moment they would give up their lives to protect ours. This is to the mothers. To the single mom’s working four jobs to put the cheese in the mac and the apple back into the juice so their children, like birds in a nest, can find food in their mouths and pillows under their heads. To the dreams put on hold and the complete and total rearrangement of all priority. This is to the stay-at-home moms and those that find the energy to go to work every day; to the widows and the happily married. To the young mothers and those that deal with the unexpected announcement of a new arrival far later than they ever anticipated. This is to the mothers. This is to the sack lunches and sleepover parties, to the soccer games and oranges slices at halftime. This is to the hot chocolate after snowy walks and the arguing with the umpire at the little league game. To the frosting ofbirthday cakes and the candles that are always lit on time; to the Easter egg hunts, the slip-n-slides and the iced tea on summer days. This is to the ones that show us the way to finding our own way. To the cutting of the cord, quite literally the first time and even more painfully and metaphorically the second time around. To the mothers who become grandmothers and great-grandmothers and if time is gentle enough, live to see the children of their children have children of their own. To the love. My goodness to the love that never stops and comes from somewhere only mothers have seen and know the secret location of. To the love that grows stronger as their hands grow weaker and the spread of jam becomes slower and the Easter eggs get easier to find and sack lunches no longer need making. This is to the way the tears look falling from the smile lines around their eyes and the mascara that just might always be smeared with the remains of their pride for all they have created. This is to the mothers.

that you would not anticipate misery since the evils you dread as coming upon you may perhaps never reach you at least they are not yet come Thus some things torture us more than they ought, some before they ought and some which ought never to torture us at all. We heighten our pain either by presupposing a cause or anticipation

Anticipation is foreplay, and...pain is the purest form of pleasure

We think of ourselves as creatures marked by a particular intelligence. But one of our finest features is the inability of our expectation to truly simulate the experience we are expecting. Our anticipation of joy is never the same as joy. Our anticipation of pain is never the same as pain. Our anticipation of challenge is in no way the same experience as the challenge itself. If we could feel the things we fear ahead of time, we would be traumatized. So instead we venture out thinking we know how things will feel, but knowing nothing of how things will really feel.

I don’t miss the frustration of youth, the anticipation of love and pain, the paralysis of choices still ahead. The pressure of “What are you going to do?” makes everybody feel like they haven’t done anything yet.

Fear is the anticipation of pain; it most often never becomes true.

A young man and woman walked past - a handsome young man and pretty young woman, the man in a seersucker suit and the woman in an old-fashioned summer dress - and they were walking a bit apart from one another with a space between them, and the man was looking straight ahead and the woman had her arms crossed against her chest, hugging herself, looking down at her feet, at her toes that peeked out the open fronts of her shoes, and they both had the same gleefully suppressed smile on their faces, and I knew that they were freshly in love, perhaps they had fallen in love having dinner in some restaurant with a garden or tables on the sidewalk, perhaps they had not even kissed yet, and they walked apart because they thought they had their whole lives to walk close together, touching, and wanted to anticipate the moment they touched for as long as possible, and they passed my without noticing me and Miro. Something about watching them made me sad. I think it was too lovely: the summer night, the open-toed shoes, their faces rapt with momentarily ramped-down joy. I felt I had witnessed their happiest moment, the pinnacle, and they were already walking away from it, but they did not know it.

Maria, lonely prostitute on a street of pain, You, at least, hail me and speak to me While a thousand others ignore my face. You offer me an hour of love, And your fees are not as costly as most. You are the madonna of the lonely, The first-born daughter in a world of pain. You do not turn fat men aside, Or trample on the stuttering, shy ones, You are the meadow where desperate men Can find a moment's comfort. Men have paid more to their wives To know a bit of peace And could not walk away without the guilt That masquerades as love. You do not bind them, lovely Maria, you comfort them And bid them return. Your body is more Christian than the Bishop's Whose gloved hand cannot feel the dropping of my blood. Your passion is as genuine as most, Your caring as real! But you, Maria, sacred whore on the endless pavement of pain, You, whose virginity each man may make his own Without paying ought but your fee, You who know nothing of virgin births and immaculate conceptions, You who touch man's flesh and caress a stranger, Who warm his bed to bring his aching skin alive, You make more sense than stock markets and football games Where sad men beg for virility. You offer yourself for a fee--and who offers himself for less? At times you are cruel and demanding--harsh and insensitive, At times you are shrewd and deceptive--grasping and hollow. The wonder is that at times you are gentle and concerned, Warm and loving. You deserve more respect than nuns who hide their sex for eternal love; Your fees are not so high, nor your prejudice so virtuous. You deserve more laurels than the self-pitying mother of many children, And your fee is not as costly as most. Man comes to you when his bed is filled with brass and emptiness, When liquor has dulled his sense enough To know his need of you. He will come in fantasy and despair, Maria, And leave without apologies. He will come in loneliness--and perhaps Leave in loneliness as well. But you give him more than soldiers who win medals and pensions, More than priests who offer absolution And sweet-smelling ritual, More than friends who anticipate his death Or challenge his life, And your fee is not as costly as most. You admit that your love is for a fee, Few women can be as honest. There are monuments to statesmen who gave nothing to anyone Except their hungry ego, Monuments to mothers who turned their children Into starving, anxious bodies, Monuments to Lady Liberty who makes poor men prisoners. I would erect a monument for you-- who give more than most-- And for a meager fee. Among the lonely, you are perhaps the loneliest of all, You come so close to love But it eludes you While proper women march to church and fantasize In the silence of their rooms, While lonely women take their husbands' arms To hold them on life's surface, While chattering women fill their closets with clothes and Their lips with lies, You offer love for a fee--which is not as costly as most-- And remain a lonely prostitute on a street of pain. You are not immoral, little Maria, only tired and afraid, But you are not as hollow as the police who pursue you, The politicians who jail you, the pharisees who scorn you. You give what you promise--take your paltry fee--and Wander on the endless, aching pavements of pain. You know more of universal love than the nations who thrive on war, More than the churches whose dogmas are private vendettas made sacred, More than the tall buildings and sprawling factories Where men wear chains. You are a lonely prostitute who speaks to me as I pass, And I smile at you because I am a lonely man.

Why should I give up revenge? On behalf of what? Moral principles? And what of the higher order of things, in which evil deeds are punished? For you, a philosopher and ethicist, an act of revenge is bad, disgraceful, unethical and illegal. But I ask: where is the punishment for evil? Who has it and grants access? The Gods, in which you do not believe? The great demiurge-creator, which you decided to replace the gods with? Or maybe the law? [...] I know what evil is afraid of. Not your ethics, Vysogota, not your preaching or moral treaties on the life of dignity. Evil is afraid of pain, mutilation, suffering and at the end of the day, death! The dog howls when it is badly wounded! Writhing on the ground and growls, watching the blood flow from its veins and arteries, seeing the bone that sticks out from a stump, watching its guts escape its open belly, feeling the cold as death is about to take them. Then and only then will evil begin to beg, 'Have mercy! I regret my sins! I'll be good, I swear! Just save me, do not let me waste away!'. Yes, hermit. That is the way to fight evil! When evil wants to harm you, inflict pain - anticipate them, it's best if evil does not expect it. But if you fail to prevent evil, if you have been hurt by evil, then avenge him! It is best when they have already forgotten, when they feel safe. Then pay them in double. In triple. An eye for an eye? No! Both eyes for an eye! A tooth for a tooth? No! All their teeth for a tooth! Repay evil! Make it wail in pain, howling until their eyes pop from their sockets. And then, you can look under your feet and boldly declare that what is there cannot endanger anyone, cannot hurt anyone. How can someone be a danger, when they have no eyes? How can someone hurt when they have no hands? They can only wait until they bleed to death.

The most powerful emotions that we experience have very sharp points, like the tip of a thorn. When they prick us, they cause discomfort and even pain. Just the anticipation or fear of these feelings can trigger intolerable vulnerability in us. We know it’s coming. For many of us, our first response to vulnerability and pain of these sharp points is not to lean into the discomfort and feel our way through but rather to make it go away. We do that by numbing and taking the edge off the pain with whatever provides the quickest relief. We can anesthetize with a whole bunch of stuff, including alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationships, money, work, caretaking, gambling, staying busy, affairs, chaos, shopping, planning, perfectionism, constant change, and the Internet.

Most of the 'pain' we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself or may arouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus and is recognised by it as 'danger.

But if these unavoidable separations cause you a measure of pain, they also increase your longing for her, and perhaps that isn’t a bad thing, you decide, for you spend your days in the thrall of breathless anticipation, agitated and alert, counting the hours until you can see her and hold her again. Intense. That is the word you use to describe yourself now. You are intense. Your feelings are intense. Your life has become increasingly intense.

Women have less direct relationship to anger...When a woman "bites" her tongue to avoid expressing anger, its not at all socialization. A lot of it is brain circuitry. Even if a woman wanted to express her anger right away, often her brain circuits would attempt to hijack this response, to reflect on it first out of fear and anticipation of retaliation. Also, the female brain has a tremendous aversion to conflict, which is set up by fear of angering the other person and losing the relationship. Instead of triggering a quick action response in the brain, as it does in males, anger in girls and women moves through the brain's gut feeling, conflict-pain anticipation, and verbal circuits. Scientists speculate that though a woman is slower to act out of anger, once her faster verbal circuits get going, they can cause her to unleash a barrage of angry words that a man cant match. Typical men speak fewer words and have less verbal fluency than women, so they may be handicapped in angry exchanges with women. Often when I see a couple who are not communicating well, the problem I see is that the man's brain's circuits push him frequently and quickly to an angry, aggressive reaction, and the woman feels frightened and shuts down.

In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Oh, the sweet, painful pleasure of anticipation!

Now that I am older, I am rounder and softer, which isn’t always a bad thing. I remember fewer names so I try to focus on someone’s eyes instead. Sex is better and I’m better at it. I don’t miss the frustration of youth, the anticipation of love and pain, the paralysis of choices still ahead. The pressure of “What are you going to do?” makes everybody feel like they haven’t done anything yet. Young people can remind us to take chances and be angry and stop our patterns. Old people can remind us to laugh more and get focused and make friends with our patterns. Young and old need to relax in the moment and live where they are. Be Here Now,

She drew herself up to her full height—it was a little difficult on a donkey—and said primly, “I have always found that in painful situations it is a sensible idea to take each hour as it comes and not to anticipate beyond. But oh how I wish I could have a bath!

I seem to wish to have some importance In the play of time. If not, Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones, My web of nerves, my wondering brain, to be shaped and quickened with such anticipation Only to feed the swamp of space. What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have Deeply. What is good, as love is good, I'll have well. Then if time and space Have any purpose, I shall belong to it. If not, if all is a pretty fiction To distract the cherubim and seraphim Who so continually do cry, the least I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to The ear of God, until he has appetite To taste our salt sorrow on his lips. And so you see it might be better to die. Though, on the other hand, I admit it might Be immensely foolish.

I don't intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge or people who have knowledge! I don't give a damn for anyone's aggregation of facts, except that it be a reflection [of] basic sensitivity which I do demand... I intend to do everything... to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everything and find it, too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly... everything matters! The only thing I resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect. I am alive... I am beautiful... what else is there?

Pain is nothing but growth waiting for us to give it permission to grow us up.

One of the most painful experiences for victims of abuse is to summon the courage to tell of that abuse, anticipating that a backlash is certain.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil. —Aristotle

I'd felt certain of his eros in the months before this unsterile kiss, but perhaps some small and niggling part of me had believed it pity or forbearance, that his medieval virtues compelled him to love me in my dying. But non! It was this wink of time when I whorled toward understanding, into and resting in the arms of love we shared--an uncommon and vulnerable combination of the four loves we'd traveled with and toward: agape, storge, philia, and now, unquestionably, eros. Our journey--riddled with both pain and joy--culminated in a kiss I would never have anticipated as the revelation it became, as the comfort and mastery of love.

The relations one has with a woman one loves (and that can apply also to love for a youth) can remain platonic for other reasons than the chastity of the woman or the unsensual nature of the love she inspires. The reason may be that the lover is too impatient and by the very excess of his love is unable to await the moment when he will obtain his desires by sufficient pretence of indifference. Continually, he returns to the charge, he never ceases writing to her whom he loves, he is always trying to see her, she refuses herself, he becomes desperate. From that time she knows, if she grants him her company, her friendship, that these benefits will seem so considerable to one who believed he was going to be deprived of them, that she need grant nothing more and that she can take advantage of the moment when he can no longer bear being unable to see her and when, at all costs, he must put an end to the struggle by accepting a truce which will impose upon him a platonic relationship as its preliminary condition. Moreover, during all the time that preceded this truce, the lover, in a constant state of anxiety, ceaselessly hoping for a letter, a glance, has long ceased thinking of the physical desire which at first tormented him but which has been exhausted by waiting and has been replaced by another order of longings more painful still if left unsatisfied. The pleasure formerly anticipated from caresses will later be accorded but transmuted into friendly words and promises of intercourse which brings delicious moments after the strain of uncertainty or after a look impregnated with such coldness that it seemed to remove the loved one beyond hope of his ever seeing her again. Women divine all this and know they can afford the luxury of never yielding to those who, from the first, have betrayed their inextinguishable desire. A woman is enchanted if, without giving anything, she can receive more than she generally gets when she does give herself.

We think of ourselves as creatures marked by a particular intelligence. But one of our finest features is the inability of our expectation to truly simulate the experience we are expecting. Our anticipation of joy is never the same as joy. Our anticipation of pain is never the same as pain. Our anticipation of challenge is in no way the same experience as the challenge itself. If we could feel the things we fear ahead of time, we would be traumatized. So instead we venture out thinking we know how things will feel, but knowing nothing of how things will really feel.

Painfully, the tips of his fingers grazed over her neck, torturing her soul. She didn't move as his hand stroked the length of her nape, feeling the slight warmth of her aura make him lightly tingle with a frenzied anticipation. Her blood burned for him, feeling her veins bubble hot as he continued to linger his seductions along the rims of her body. He listened attentively as the beating of her heart increased tri-fold, the quickening pulse thump beneath his horny fingertips.

If tribulation is a necessary element in the redemption we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a heaven on earth would follow. This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but it is not found in practice to discourage him. On the contrary, a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as men, is at least as good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes which tempt men to seek their realisation by breaking the moral law and prove such dust and ashes when they are realised. If applied to individual life, the doctrine that an imagined heaven on earth as necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal its absurdity. Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them.

Dr. Webb says that life is so full of complications and confusion that humans oftentimes find it hard to cope. This leads to people throwing themselves in front of trains and spending all their money and not speaking to their relatives and never going home for Christmas and never eating anything with chocolate in it. Life, he says, doesn't have to be so bad all the time. We don't have to be so anxious about everything. We can just be. We can get up, anticipate that the day will probably have a few good moments and a few bad ones, and then just deal with it. Take it all in and deal as best as we can.

How the excitement comes upon me to tell it all! In the quest of writing, the heart can speed up with anticipation--as it does, indeed, during the chase itself of whales. I can swear it, having done both, and I will tell YOU though other writers may not. My heart is beating fast; I am in pursuit; I want my victory--that you should see and hear and above all feel the reality behind these words. For they are but a mask. Not the mask that conceals, not a mask that I would have you strike through as mere appearance, or, worse, deceitful appearance. Words need not be that kind of mask, but a mask such as the ancient Greek actors wore, a mask that expresses rather than conceals the inner drama. (But do you know me? Una? You have shipped long with me in the boat that is this book. Let me assure you and tell you that I know you, even something of your pain and joy, for you are much like me. The contract of writing and reading requires that we know each other. Did you know that I try on your mask from time to time? I become a reader, too, reading over what I have just written. If I am your shipbuilder and captain, from time to time I am also your comrade. Feel me now, standing beside you, just behind your shoulder?)

Life is a never-ending process of growth and learning. We can welcome this growth, or choose to reject it. But, the healthy thing to do is welcome it with open arms, no matter how painful or hurtful the lesson may be. Because, if it is in your life, you can be fairly certain that it is there for a reason. We often hear that some of the most significant life change comes about as a result of great pain and suffering. It is comforting to know that on the other side of darkness and despair exists hope, excitement and anticipation for the future and its possibilities.

What problems can there be which the mind did not create? Life and death do not create problems; pains and pleasures come and go, experienced and forgotten. It is memory and anticipation that create problems of attainment or avoidance, colored by like and dislike. Truth and love are man’s real nature, and mind and heart are the means of its expression.

It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community? It doesn't mean it's easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because you're not going to go away. It also means commitment to bear witness, and engaging in 'casserole diplomacy' by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitment are real. They are tangible. They are not esoteric or idealistic, but rooted in the bedrock existence of where we choose to maintain our lives. That way we begin to know the predictability of a place. We anticipate a species long before we see them. We can chart the changes, because we have a memory of cycles and seasons; we gain a capacity for both pleasure and pain, and we find the strength within ourselves and each other to hold these lines. That's my definition of family. And that's my definition of love.

The new blood pulsing through Bella’s body altered her scent in a way I should have anticipated, but it took me by surprise. While I was aware of a significant lessening of my thirst-pain, I didn’t enjoy the change. This strange blood seemed an interloper, alien. It wasn’t part of her and I resented the intrusion, irrational as that was. Her scent would begin to return in just twenty-four hours, before she’d even woken up. But she would not entirely replace that which was lost for many weeks. Regardless, this brief distortion was too strong a reminder that, at some point in the future, the scent that had compelled me for so long would be lost to me forever

If…an infant, especially one born with a genetically-encoded altered neurophysiologic reactivity, does not have adequate experiences of being part of an open dynamic system with an emotionally responsive adult human, its corticolimbic organization will be poorly capable of coping with the stressful chaotic dynamics that are inherent in all human relationships. Such a system tends to become static and closed, and invested in defensive structures to guard against anticipated interactive assaults that potentially trigger disorganizing and emotionally painful psychobiological states. Due to its avoidance of novel situations and diminished capacity to cope with challenging situations, it does not expose itself to new socioemotional learning experiences that are required for the continuing experience-dependent growth of the right brain. This structural limitation, in turn, negatively impacts the future trajectory of self-organization.

Once we get the anticipated reward, brain dopamine firing increases well above tonic baseline, but if the reward we anticipated doesn't materialise, dopamine levels fall well below baseline. Which is to say, if we get the expected reward, we get an even bigger spike, if we don't get the expected reward, we experience an even bigger plunge. We've all experienced the letdown of unmet expectations. An expected reward that failed to materialise is worse than a reward that was never anticipated in the first place. How does cue-induced craving translate to our pleasure-pain balance? The balance tips to the side of pleasure, a dopamine mini spike, in anticipation of future reward. Immediately followed by a tip to the side of pain, a dopamine mini defecit, in the aftermath of the cue. The dopamine defecit is craving and drives drug seeking behaviour.

The week passed by swiftly, like a dream....a dream where minutes flew as rapidly as heartbeats. Such a breathless week when something within her drove Scarlett with mingled pain and pleasure to pack and cram every minute with incidents to remember after he was gone, happenings which she could examine at leisure in the long months ahead, extracting every morsel of comfort from them - dance, sing, laugh, fetch and carry for Ashley, anticipate his wants, smile when he smiles, be silent when he talks, follow him with your eyes so that each line of his erect body, each lift of his eyebrows, each quirk of his mouth, will be indelibly printed on your mind - for a week goes by so fast and the war goes on forever.

Life does not go on when our loved ones leave us. Life departs in all ways. The life we have known, the life we have anticipated, the life we hoped for—all of it disappears in an instant when the dreaded telegram arrives. “I regret to inform you . . .” Were any words ever more painful?

He showed the fineness of his nature by being kinder to me after that misunderstanding than before. Nay, the very incident which, by my theory, must in some degree estrange me and him, changed, indeed, somewhat our relations; but not in the sense I painfully anticipated. An invisible, but a cold something, very slight, very transparent, but very chill: a sort of screen of ice had hitherto, all through our two lives, glazed the medium through which we exchanged intercourse. Those few warm words, though only warm with anger, breathed on that frail frost-work of reserve; about this time, it gave note of dissolution. I think from that day, so long as we continued friends, he never in discourse stood on topics of ceremony with me.

Mme de Franval, indulgent and sweet-natured as ever, and always happy when anything brought her closer to a man who was dearer to her than her own life, went along with all the desires of that treacherous husband, anticipated them, served them, and shared them without exception, not daring to make the most of the moment, as she should have done, to persuade that barbarian to treat her better, and not plunge his unhappy wife every day into an abyss of pain and suffering.

Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful- horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And hatred is also a great anodyne for shame.

Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the blondwood table's surface trembling with sunlight and the man's hand steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider – as I did, setting there at the breakfast nook – that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it instant’ (175-176)

Pain is always most acute in anticipation. No, that's not right. Pain is, of course, at its worst when you feel it. But anticipating it is also, very, very bad.

three basic tests. First, your idea has to be big enough to justify devoting your life to it. Make sure it has the potential to be huge. Second, it should be unique. When people see what you are offering, they should say to themselves, “My gosh, I need this. I’ve been waiting for this. This really appeals to me.” Without that “aha!” you are wasting your time. Third, your timing must be right. The world actually doesn’t like pioneers, so if you are too early, your risk of failure is high. The market you are targeting should be lifting off with enough momentum to help make you successful. If you pass these three tests, you will have a business with the potential to be big, that offers something unique, and is hitting the market at the right time. Then you have to be ready for the pain. No entrepreneur anticipates or wants pain, but pain is the reality of starting something new. It is unavoidable

All of it was there but nothing had substance. It was as if they were all shadows, as if her leaving had taken the life out of the living things and left them shadows. he himself was a shadow.he felt no weight in his step, ,no sound to his voice, no solidity to his gestures. he forgot time. he felt the ache of a pain whose depth he could not fathom no whose end anticipate

Is there anything you do that isn't designed to take you a step closer to the other side?" (...) Do you want that for Gen and Chloe? If you're going to take yourself out, do it with flame. Burn it all away, so there's nothing left but ashes, so we can still imagine everything we valued and loved…" He swung before she anticipated him. His fist went through her sheetrock as if it wasn't there, shattering paint and substance.(…) "You'll promise me. And you'll never betray that promise, or I swear to God it will kill me. Do you understand that? Do you know how much you mean to me? Even if you don't want me, you have to give me this." "I promise, I promise." She reached up, gathered him to her. He came inch by resisting inch until his face was against her neck. Suddenly he gave, dropping to his knees, his arms surrounding her so they were pressed against each other thigh to thigh, heart to heart. He pulled her in so tightly against him she couldn't breathe, but that didn't matter. Suddenly the world was about more than herself, more than about her pain and it was easier to let go of it to hold him in her arms, to give him comfort.

Anticipating this loss had a way of refining memory, filing it down to the purest, rawest form of itself. My clouded perceptions grew clearer. And someday soon I'd have to confront that. But not yet.

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.

Following Strupp (1980), clients change when they live through emotionally painful and long-ingrained relational experiences with the therapist, and the therapeutic relationship gives rise to new and better outcomes that are different from those anticipated and feared. That is, when the client re-experiences important aspects of her primary problem with the therapist, and the therapist’s response does not fit the old schemas or expectations, the client has the real-life experience that relationships can be another way. When clients experience this new or reparative response, a response that differs from previous relationships and that does not fit the client’s negative expectations or cognitive schemas, it is a powerful type of experiential re-learning that readily can be generalized to other relationships (Bandura, 1997).

To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. She felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. She thought that if the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, Pete would shrug his shoulders and say, "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes." She anticipated that he would come again shortly. She spent some of her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin. She made it with infinite care, and hung it to the slightly careening mantel over the stove in the kitchen. She studied it with painful anxiety from different points in the room. She wanted it to look well on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's friend would come. On Sunday night, however, Pete did not appear. Afterwards the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation. She was now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins.

How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we don't miss it; perhaps we will wait our older faces with anticipation, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on us that is not precious.

It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife - that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, 'You're going to get tired of hearing from me. I'll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. JESUS, you'll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.' And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, 'Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She's in heaven, after all.' It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance, but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception...There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life - hadn't that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph?

When Gabriel returned, he eagerly opened the wine, smiling to himself wickedly. He was in for a treat, and he knew it. He knew how Julianne looked when she tasted wine, and now he would have a repeat of her erotic performance from the other night. He felt himself twitch more than once in anticipation and wished that he had a video camera secretly placed in his condo somewhere. It would probably be too obvious to pull his camera out and take snapshots of her. He showed her the bottle first, noting with approval the impressed expression that passed across her face when she read the label. He’d brought this special vintage back from Tuscany, and it would have pained him to waste it on an undiscerning palate. He poured a little into her glass and stood back, watching, and trying very hard not to grin. Just as before, Julia swirled the wine slowly. She examined it in the halogen light. She closed her eyes and sniffed. Then she wrapped her kissable lips around the rim of the goblet and tasted it slowly, holding the wine in her mouth for a moment or two before swallowing. Gabriel sighed, watching her as the wine traveled down her long and elegant throat.

It was time for Cork to return to the bed in the guest room. But he lingered beside this son who trusted him lay awake knowing there were monsters in the wind outside, that his son's fear was not unjustified, and that Stevie would have to face them alone someday. There were people out there so cruel they would wound him for the pleasure of it, dreadful circumstances no man in his worst imaginings could conjure, disappointments so overwhelming they could crush his dreams like eggshells. For a child like Stevie, a child of special graces, there would be such pain that Cork nearly wept in anticipation of it. Against those monsters, a father was powerless. But again the simple terrors of the night, he would do his best.

The same subversion of power by truth is evident in the way in which Luke begins his account of Jesus of Nazareth. Luke is at pains to put his readers on notice that this is no ordinary history. He has an angel anticipate cousin John by saying, “with the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him” (1:17). He has Gabriel declare that “nothing will be impossible with God” (1:37). He offers us an alternative genealogy that refuses the royal recital of Matthew and provides a list of the uncredentialed, rather like Roots by Alex Haley that traces a genealogy that the plantation masters never suspected (Luke 3:23–38).6 In the midst of this playful subversion, Luke has John go public in the empire. He does so by locating the reader amid all the recognized totems of power:

I hear my name rippling through the hot air, spreading out into the hospital. “Katniss! Katniss Everdeen!” The sounds of pain and grief begin to recede, to be replaced by words of anticipation. From all sides, voices beckon me. I begin to move, clasping the hands extended to me, touching the sound parts of those unable to move their limbs, saying hello, how are you, good to meet you. Nothing of importance, no amazing words of inspiration. But it doesn’t matter. Boggs is right. It’s the sight of me, alive, that is the inspiration.

What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life.

Radu shrugged. “All the missing items were found under their beds by a servant.” A servant who was no longer painfully underfed, and considered Radu his best and only friend in the world. Radu smiled. There had been no real reason to wait as long as he had, delaying the punishment of his enemies and prolonging his father’s embarrassment. The anticipation had been delicious, though. And now, the reward. Lada turned to look at him, suspicion drawing her brows together. “Did you do this?” “There are other ways to beat someone than with fists.

Her slender arms instantly circled his neck so that she could press her body against his hard frame. "I am a superstar,lifemate,yet you wish to leave me along at every opportunity. There are men everywhere who would be happy to take your place by my side." He bent his head, his teeth scraping a provocative rythm over her pulse. Desari went liquid, boneless, her stomach clenching in anticipation. "No, they would not be happy to take my place at your side,cara mia, because I would promptly end their lives in a most unhappy way." "You are such a caveman, Julian. You look tall and elegant and princely, yet you have not matured beyond the cave." Desari allowed her tongue a brief inspection of the taste of his skin. She closed her eyes to savor the moment. "I have no intention of rising above caveman mentality," he growled in her ear, his breath teasing tendrils of hair and sending little flames dancing through her bloodstream. "There are so many benefits for the caveman." "You like playing the part of the dominant male,no doubt," she whispered, her voice so husky with need that his body tightened in urgent, painful response. Her mouth moved over his throat, her hands seeking skin beneath his shirt. "I have a need of you, lifemate, and you are deliberately ignoring your sworn duties to me." "Little minx.

The room was almost dark, with just flickers of light coming from the logs burning in the hearth. I could just see his shape, sitting in the leather, wing-backed chair, silhouetted by the fire. “Come here.” His voice was quiet, but with the firmness I had come to expect from him. I moved closer and knelt down in front of him, my naked bottom facing the warmth of the fire. I bent my head downwards and looked at the floor as I had been taught, but he surprised me by lifting up my chin with his hand. “You look so beautiful.” He bent and kissed me softly on the lips, and I shivered in anticipation. Was it to be pleasure or pain this time? Or perhaps a combination of both, given in the way that only he can.

I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it. I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed, such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of waterglasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. One said, “Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the right to begin.” The other added, “He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all.” I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood. I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It's unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting. We crave love, can't live without its intimacy, though it pains us. Judi told me that every person in therapy has a love disorder: never felt love, can't find love, trapped by love, unraveled by love, thinks love is lust or love is loss, fears love, loves too much, uses love for profit, jealous in love, lost in love, love affairs, unrequited love...love in embers, love in vain, love in shackles, love maligned, love that warps the mind a little.

When we lose a righteous person who is dear to us, we have the wonderful opportunity to honor that person by incorporating the best principles from his or her life into ours. What were his gifts? What were her talents? A desire to serve, a happy outlook on life, generosity with material possessions, an even greater generosity in having a heart that included everyone? Following the example of a loved one, we can love the Lord, make covenants with the Lord, and keep them faithfully. We too can seek to understand the Savior's great mission of atonement, redemption, and salvation. We too can seek to become worthy followers of the Son of God. And we too can anticipate that when the time comes for us to step through the veil of mortality, leaving our failing and pain-filled bodies behind, we will see the loving smile and feel the welcoming embrace, not only of our Heavenly Parents and of the Savior, but also of our loved ones who will greet us in full vigor, full remembrance, and full love. When we are in the valley of the shadow, it is a time of questions without answers. We ask, "How can I bear this? Why did such a good woman have to die? Why aren't my prayers being answered?" In this life, we will not receive answers to many questions of "why"—partly because the limitations of mortality prevent us from understanding the full plan. But I testify to you that the answer of faith is a powerful one, even in the most difficult of circumstances, because it does not depend on us—on our strength to endure, on our willpower, on the depth of our intellectual understanding, or on the resources we can accumulate. No, it depends on God, whose strength is omnipotence, whose understanding is that of eternity, and who has the will to walk beside us in love, sharing our burden. He could part the Red Sea before us or calm the angry storm that besets us, but these would be small miracles for the God of nature. Instead, he chooses to do something harder: He wants to transform human nature into divine nature. And thus, when our Red Sea blocks our way and when the storm threatens to overwhelm us, he enters the water with us, holding us in the hands of love, supporting us with the arms of mercy. When we emerge from the valley of the shadow, we will see that he was there with us all the time.

Eros: Real love is an all-consuming, desperate yearning for the beloved, who is perceived as different, mysterious, and elusive. The depth of love is measured by the intensity of obsession with the loved one. There is little time or attention for other interests or pursuits, because so much energy is focused on recalling past encounters or imagining future ones. Often, great obstacles must be overcome, and thus there is an element of suffering in true love. Another indication of the depth of love is the willingness to endure pain and hardship for the sake of the relationship. Associated with real love are feelings of excitement, rapture, drama, anxiety, tension, mystery, and yearning. Agape: Real love is a partnership to which two caring people are deeply committed. These people share many basic values, interests, and goals, and tolerate good-naturedly their individual differences. The depth of love is measured by the mutual trust and respect they feel toward each other. Their relationship allows each to be more fully expressive, creative, and productive in the world. There is much joy in shared experiences both past and present, as well as those that are anticipated. Each views the other as his/ her dearest and most cherished friend. Another measure of the depth of love is the willingness to look honestly at oneself in order to promote the growth of the relationship and the deepening of intimacy. Associated with real love are feelings of serenity, security, devotion, understanding, companionship, mutual support, and comfort.

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. — You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase — in blood, in suffering, in death.

I don't miss the frustration of youth, the anticipation of love and pain, the paralysis of choices still ahead. The pressure of "What are you going to do?" makes everybody feel like they haven't done anything yet. Young people can remind us to take chances and be angry and stop our patterns. Old people can remind us to laugh more and get focused and make friends with our patterns. Young and old need to relax in the moment and live where they are.

Anticipating sorrow to neutralize sorrow—that’s paltry, cowardly stuff, I told myself, knowing I was an ace practitioner of the craft. And what if it came fiercely? What if it came and didn’t let go, a sorrow that had come to stay, and did to me what longing for him had done on those nights when it seemed there was something so essential missing from my life that it might as well have been missing from my body, so that losing him now would be like losing a hand you could spot in every picture of yourself around the house, but without which you couldn’t possibly be you again. You lose it, as you always knew you would, and were even prepared to; but you can’t bring yourself to live with the loss. And hoping not to think of it, like praying not to dream of it, hurts just the same. Then a strange idea got hold of me: What if my body—just my body, my heart—cried out for his? What to do then? What if at night I wouldn’t be able to live with myself unless I had him by me, inside me? What then? Think of the pain before the pain. I knew what I was doing. Even in my sleep, I knew what I was doing. Trying to immunize yourself, that’s what you’re doing—you’ll end up killing the whole thing this way—sneaky, cunning boy, that’s what you are, sneaky, heartless, cunning boy. I smiled at the voice. The sun was right on me now, and I loved the sun with a near-pagan love for the things of earth. Pagan, that’s what you are. I had never known how much I loved the earth, the sun, the sea—people, things, even art seemed to come second. Or was I fooling myself?

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value. I had imagined, of course, a My Friend Flicka scenario: my horse would see me in the distance, wiggle his ears in eager anticipation, whinny with pleasure, canter up to my side, and nuzzle my breeches for sugar or carrots. What I got instead was a wildly anxious, frequently lame, and not terribly bright creature who was terrified of snakes, people, lizards, dogs, and other horses – in short, terrified of anything that he might reasonably be expected to encounter in life – thus causing him to rear up on his hind legs and bolt madly about in completely random directions. In the clouds-and-silver-linings department, however, whenever I rode him I was generally too terrified to be depressed, and when I was manic I had no judgment anyway, so maniacal riding was well suited to the mood. Unfortunately, it was not only a crazy decision to buy a horse, it was also stupid. I may as well have saved myself the trouble of cashing my Public Health Service fellowship checks, and fed him checks directly: besides shoeing him and boarding him – with veterinary requirements that he supplement his regular diet with a kind of horsey granola that cost more than a good pear brandy – I also had to buy him special orthopedic shoes to correct, or occasionaly correct, his ongoing problems with lameness. These shoes left Guicci and Neiman-Marcus in the dust, and, after a painfully aquired but profound understanding of why people shoot horse traders, and horses, I had to acknowledge that I was a graduate student, not Dr. Dolittle; more to the point, I was neither a Mellon nor a Rockefeller. I sold my horse, as one passes along the queen of spades, and started showing up for my classes at UCLA.

While some of our deepest wounds come from feeling abandoned by others, it is surprising to see how often we abandon ourselves through the way we view life. It’s natural to perceive through a lens of blame at the moment of emotional impact, but each stage of surrender offers us time and space to regroup and open our viewpoints for our highest evolutionary benefit. It’s okay to feel wronged by people or traumatized by circumstances. This reveals anger as a faithful guardian reminding us how overwhelmed we are by the outcomes at hand. While we will inevitably use each trauma as a catalyst for our deepest growth, such anger informs us when the highest importance is being attentive to our own experiences like a faithful companion. As waves of emotion begin to settle, we may ask ourselves, “Although I feel wronged, what am I going to do about it?” Will we allow experiences of disappointment or even cruelty to inspire our most courageous decisions and willingness to evolve? When viewing others as characters who have wronged us, a moment of personal abandonment occurs. Instead of remaining present to the sheer devastation we feel, a need to align with ego can occur through the blaming of others. While it seems nearly instinctive to see life as the comings and goings of how people treat us, when focused on cultivating our most Divine qualities, pain often confirms how quickly we are shifting from ego to soul. From the soul’s perspective, pain represents the initial steps out of the identity and reference points of an old reality as we make our way into a brand new paradigm of being. The more this process is attempted to be rushed, the more insufferable it becomes. To end the agony of personal abandonment, we enter the first stage of surrender by asking the following question: Am I seeing this moment in a way that helps or hurts me? From the standpoint of ego, life is a play of me versus you or us versus them. But from the soul’s perspective, characters are like instruments that help develop and uncover the melody of our highest vibration. Even when the friction of conflict seems to divide people, as souls we are working together to play out the exact roles to clear, activate, and awaken our true radiance. The more aligned in Source energy we become, the easier each moment of transformation tends to feel. This doesn’t mean we are immune to disappointment, heartbreak, or devastation. Instead, we are keenly aware of how often life is giving us the chance to grow and expand. A willingness to be stretched and re-created into a more refined form is a testament to the fiercely liberated nature of our soul. To the ego, the soul’s willingness to grow under the threat of any circumstance seems foolish, shortsighted, and insane. This is because the ego can only interpret that reality as worry, anticipation, and regret.

We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our heart in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's faces like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: "Take my wound". Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all; one simply expects to get rid of one's one.

A number of wise men have warned us against the would-be benefits of vengeance. Mark Twain said, “Therein lies the defect of revenge: it’s all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.” Walter Weckler further observed that “revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst.” And Albert Schweitzer noted that “Revenge . . . is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.

All those beings who revealed truths to me and who were no longer there, seemed to me to have lived a life from which I alone profited and as though they had died for me. It was sad for me to think that in my book, my love which was once everything to me, would be so detached from a being that various readers would apply it textually to the love they experienced for other women. But why should I be horrified by this posthumous infidelity, that this man or that should offer unknown women as the object of my sentiment, when that infidelity, that division of love between several beings began with my life and long before I began writing? I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted. I had anticipated the profanation of my memories by unknown readers. I was not far from being horrified with myself as, perhaps, some nationalist party might be in whose name hostilities had been provoked and who alone had benefited from a war in which many noble victims had suffered and died without even knowing the issue of the struggle which, for my grandmother, would have been such a complete reward. And the single consolation she never knew, that at last I had set to work, was, such being the fate of the dead, that though she could not rejoice in my progress she had at least been spared consciousness of my long inactivity, of the frustrated life which had been such a pain to her. And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced.

You are now equipped to use the Hook Model to ask yourself these five fundamental questions for building effective hooks:   1.   What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal Trigger) 2.   What brings users to your service? (External Trigger) 3.   What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) 4.   Are users fulfilled by the reward, yet left wanting more? (Variable Reward) 5.   What “bit of work” do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment)

The Lord is my rock…. —Psalm 18:2 (KJV) Even though my father retired as minister of the church where my sister, Keri, and I grew up, we were committed to staying and raising our own families there. Neither of us anticipated just how difficult this was going to be. All those years my father faithfully led the congregation, he had a knack for bringing peace to the most stressful situations. When an interim minister was hired, we watched helplessly as the church became divided. Keri and I often met for lunch, just to comfort each other. One day a realization suddenly appeared: “This isn’t about where we are with the church. It’s about where we are with God.” While it was a painful time of change, our hearts needed to be aligned with God. The same God Who had been with us every moment of our lives was still here, and His house was still our true home. Finally the Sunday came when my family joined Keri’s to hear our new pastor’s first sermon. He exuded a peaceful presence, and his message was strong and confident. Already he embraced our beloved church and its congregation as if he had known us forever. “God is surely the rock of this church,” he was saying. I caught Keri’s eyes and smiled. Pastor Chris was saying what we already knew, but we certainly didn’t mind hearing it again. Father, let us look past every difficulty and see You ever as our rock. —Brock Kidd Digging Deeper: Ps 18; Is 44:8

If you could step inside my world, here is what you would see...... A lifeless soul who is in constant search of not only someone to love but for someone to please show me how to love myself. Someone whose deepest wish is to feel what it is like to truly be loved for who I am. You would see a desperate being in a constant battle with her emotions. Praying no person could see the obvious envy that consumes her soul as she longingly observes the happiness and the joy that accompanies family and true friendships. A gathering of those who most certainly care about each other, to create cherished memories that will be forever etched in their hearts. Memories they have created to fondly look back on in the years to come. You would see the forced insincere smile that must be worn when in the public eye because being pleasant is a requirement amongst your peers, even though you are completely dying inside. You would see how i wake up every morning alone in the barely inhabitable box i reside in that hides me from having to share my pain and sadness with the world. And when the night skies appear, you would see me grateful that it is once again time for me to be reunited with the lonely, yet welcoming call of my bed in that same inhabitable box. You would see me, most eager to surrender to the sleep that would soon follow, for that is when my pain ceases to exist. My world....when most of you fantasize and anxiously anticipate what adventures lie before you when the sun comes up, i struggle hour by hour, wishing I could fast forward time, so the pain will cease to exist when the sun goes down.

Yes, O hermit. That’s how you fight Evil! If Evil wants to do you harm, inflict pain on you–anticipate it, ideally when Evil isn’t expecting it. If, though, you didn’t manage to anticipate Evil, if you were harmed by Evil, then pay it back! Catch it, ideally when it has forgotten, when it feels safe. Pay it back twofold. Threefold. An eye for an eye? No! Both eyes for an eye! A tooth for a tooth? No! All its teeth for a tooth! Pay Evil back! Make it howl with pain, so its eyeballs burst from its howling. And then, looking down at the floor, you may confidently say: what’s lying there won’t harm anybody any longer, it won’t threaten anyone. For how can it threaten anyone without any eyes? If it has no hands? How can it do any harm when its guts are trailing over the sand, and the gore is soaking into it?’ ‘And

That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever? "What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan... "When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..." "It's been going on a long time," said Irwell. "All the more reason for a change," said Rud.

Everything on earth is in a state of constant flux. Nothing keeps the same, fixed shape, and our affections, which are attached to external things, like them necessarily pass away and change. Always beyond or behind us, they remind us of the past which is no longer or anticipate the future which is often not to be: there is nothing solid in them for the heart to become attached to. Thus the pleasures that we enjoy in this world is almost always transitory; I suspect it is impossible to find any lasting happiness at all. Hardly is there a single moment even in our keenest pleasures when our heart can truly say to us: 'if only this moment would last for ever', and how is it possible to give the name happiness to a fleeting state which still leaves our heart anxious and empty, and which makes us regret something beforehand or long for something afterwards? But if there is a state where the soul can find a position solid enough to allow it to remain there entirely and gather together its whole being, without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present lasts for ever, albeit imperceptibly and giving no sign of its passing, with no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than simply that of our existence, a feeling that completely fills our soul; as long as this state lasts, the person who is in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness, such as one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness, which leaves in the soul no void needing to be filled. The feeling of existence stripped of all other affections is in itself a precious feeling of contentment and peace which alone would be enough to make this existence prized and cherished by anyone who could banish all the sensual and earthly impressions which constantly distract us from it and upset the joy of it in this world.

A woman once told me that, for a time after her husband died, her grief was as constant as breathing. Then one day, while pushing a shopping cart, she realized she was thinking about yogurt. With time, thoughts in this vein became contiguous. With more time thoughts in this vein became sustained. Eventually they won a kind of majority. Her grieving had ended while she wasn’t watching (although, she added, grief never ends). And so it was with my depression. One day in December I changed a furnace filter with modest interest in the process. The day after that I drove to Gorst for the repair of a faulty seat belt. On the thirty-first I went walking with a friend—grasslands, cattails, asparagus fields, ice-bound sloughs, frost-rimed fencerows—with a familiar engrossment in the changing of winter light. I was home, that night, in time to bang pots and pans at the year’s turn: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” It wasn’t at all like that—this eve was cloudy, the stars hidden by high racing clouds—but I found myself looking skyward anyway, into the night’s maw, and I noticed I was thinking of January’s appointments without a shudder, even with anticipation. Who knows why, but the edge had come off, and being me felt endurable again. My crucible had crested, not suddenly but less gradually than how it had come, and I felt the way a newborn fawn looks in an elementary school documentary. Born, but on shaky, insecure legs. Vulnerable, but in this world for now, with its leaf buds and packs of wolves. Was it pharmacology, and if so, is that a bad thing? Or do I credit time for my healing? Or my Jungian? My reading? My seclusion? My wife’s love? Maybe I finally exhausted my tears, or my dreams at last found sufficient purchase, or maybe the news just began to sound better, the world less precarious, not headed for disaster. Or was it talk in the end, the acknowledgments I made? The surfacing of so many festering pains? My children’s voices down the hall,

The rock came loose, but Jake’s satisfied grunt turned into a howl of outraged pain as a set of huge teeth in the next stall clamped into Jake’s ample rear end. “You vicious bag of bones,” he shouted, jumping to his feet and throwing himself half over the rail in an attempt to land a punch on Attila’s body. As if the horse anticipated retribution, he sidled to the edge of his stall and regarded Jake from the corner of his eye with an expression that looked to Jake like complacent satisfaction. “I’ll get you for that,” Jake promised, and he started to shake his fist when he realized how absurd it was to threaten a dumb beast. Rubbing his offended backside, he turned to Mayhem and carefully put his own rump against the outside wall of the barn. He checked the hoof to make certain it was clean, but the moment his fingers touched the place where the rock had been lodged the chestnut jerked in pain. “Bruised you, did it?” Jake said sympathetically. “It’s not surprisin’, considering the size and shape of the rock. But you never gave a sign yesterday that you were hurtin’,” he continued. Raising his voice and infusing it with a wealth of exaggerated admiration, the patted the chestnut’s flank and glanced disdainfully at Attila while he spoke to Mayhem. “That’s because you’re a true aristocrat and a fine, brave animal-not a miserable, sneaky mule who’s not fit to be your stallmate!” If Attila cared one way or another for Jake’s opinion, he was disappointingly careful not to show it, which only made Jake’s mood more stormy when he stomped into the cottage. Ian was sitting at the table, a cup of steaming coffee cradled between his palms. “Good morning,” he said to Jake, studying the older man’s thunderous frown. “Mebbe you think so, but I can’t see it. Course, I’ve spent the night freezin’ out there, bedded down next to a horse that wants to make a meal of me, and who broke his fast with a bit of my arse already this mornin’. And,” he finished irately as he poured coffee from the tin pot into an earthenware mug and cast a quelling look at his amused friend, “your horse is lame!” Flinging himself into the chair beside Ian, he gulped down the scalding coffee without thinking what he was doing; his eyes bulged, and sweat popped out on his forehead. Ian’s grin faded. “He’s what?” “Picked up a rock, and he’s favoring his left foreleg.” Ian’s chair legs scraped against the wooden floor as he shoved his chair back and started to go to the barn. “There’s no need. It’s just a bruise.

We are more than simple people - we are the creators of this world. We are here to live, to exist, to learn. So, live the pain. . live the pleasure, live. Be alive in this life. . be who you want to be! Be aware and live this. . the attitude of others, it has nothing to affect you, it has nothing to do with you, it is not part of you, it is part of them. The only ones affected are themselves. Be aware that the true treasures of life are within you. Be aware that the mind is a great friend, but also a terrible enemy [for fools]. Be aware that everything is interconnected, you are a co-creator! .. and if you want to be happy, all you have to do is think positive! Acts! give what you want to receive, love and you will be loved. . smile at life and life will smile to you. Be aware that everything, everything - every gesture, word, thought, smile. . everything creates energy and therefore moves. Anticipate events! Recognize your role in this world too big, among millions of possibilities, among countless squinting eyes. Be aware that no matter what you experience. . everything remains a part of you and turns you into what you are today. . get rich though. Be aware that to change your life, you don't need charms or spells, you don't need books or psychologists. You need the strength and courage to do this ... Put down the "how to ..." books, get close to you again and if you want to take off your shoes and walk barefoot through the grass, Do it ! Prove that you have imagination and show your strength, overcome the rules that make you not take life seriously. Unfortunately, these rules have not improved your mental state, and medical research in recent years has clearly shown that "rules" do not have the power to reduce depression and stress. Of course, we need rules, as long as they do not lead to dictatorship, but not from the existing ones: how you should have the body or what measure to wear. Rules about how to dress, how to raise your children, how to socialize, how to behave with your girlfriend / boyfriend. Be aware that the Book of your life is fascinating if you know how to write it yourself, especially since you never know what the end will be like. You are the main character and no one is allowed to take away your right to be happy. . Yes ! Her joy and normalcy are part of your life, and if you wait to do only things that seem to follow the rules, you may wake up later because you have not lived too many moments that will make you happy. .you don't know how to really enjoy your moments of happiness - when they appear, you think scared "it's too easy, is it okay?" Be aware that self-knowledge goes much deeper than adopting a system of ideas or beliefs; because ideas and beliefs can at best function as useful indicators 3-4 times out of a thousand, but "to know yourself means to be rooted in the Being, not lost in the mind". Eckhart Tolle When you do these things, you begin to become aware that you want to be a detail, which improves another detail. You realize that you don't want to be the essence - essential, because there is nothing that can't be replaced!