Problematic Life Quotes

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

Being in love with your best friend is problematic.

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there is something pricking you in the side, telling you, “Look here! This way!” That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash — one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone. To the egoic self, this is a depressing thought. To you, it is liberating.

I'm glad to have known you, oh Queen of Flowers. You are a prickly and problematic person, but life is more interesting with you around.

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

Page 142: "When a spouse says to the alcoholic, "you need to go to AA," that is obviously not true. The addict feels no need to do that at all, and isn't. But when she says, "I am moving out and will be open to getting back together when you are getting treatment for your addiction," then all of a sudden the addict feels "I need to get some help or I am going to lose my marriage." The need has been transferred. It is the same with any kind of problematic behavior of a person who is not taking feedback and ownership. The need and drive to do something about it must be transferred to that person, and that is done through having consequences that finally make him feel the pain instead of others. When he feels the pain, he will feel the need to change...A plan that has hope is one that limits your exposure to the foolish person's issues and forces him to feel the consequences of his performance so that he might have hope of waking up and changing.

At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

So began a divorce between his body and brain that would be problematical for Simon in the years to come.

Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness, because that's where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place.

I have never known how to say goodbye. It is a failing that has been with me all of my life. It’s especially problematic, given how often partings have come up.

Relaxing the shoulders is vital for relaxation in general. However, owing to the effects of gravity, relaxation is problematic unless we let the shoulders remain in their natural place. Let the shoulders drop, or settle in harmony with gravity, into their most comfortable position. It isn’t too difficult to do this for a moment, but to sustain this condition unconsciously in our lives is another matter. We raise our shoulders unnaturally when we lean on a desk or hold the telephone between our shoulders and ears, when we are shocked by a loud noise, and who knows how many other times throughout the day. And the unsettling of the shoulders doesn’t have to be large to produce anxiety, stiff necks, and headaches. Just slightly raising them will create tension, and this tension throws the nervous system out of balance. When do we raise the shoulders in daily life? What are we feeling at that moment and leading up to that moment? Remembering that the body reflects the mind, and that the raising of the shoulders not only creates tension but also is a physical manifestation of psychological tension itself, what are the roots of this tension? Bringing the mind into the moment, let’s observe ourselves in a state free of preconceived ideas or beliefs. Don’t guess at these questions. Observe yourself in relationship to others and the universe

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

Writing is so much more problematic than drawing, full of moral pitfalls, ambiguity, public responsibility. If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the shape of the day? One of Doris Lessing's days in The Golden Notebook is fifty-four pages long. It's complete; the rest are summaries - the "impression" of a day foisted artfully upon the reader by providing a few details. Fiction is made this way - as lineal perspective gives the illusion of three dimensions in drawing. But does the selection of a day - that you begin by knowing you must remember and observe - really affect it? Do you change the balance, distort the truth? The period itself, its choice and selection, does that not in itself constitute a kind of misconstruction, and the rest follow subconsciously?

Plasticity and entanglement imply that every single brain must be unique, for the simple fact that every person’s life experience is different. It is this, argues Daphna Joel at Tel Aviv University, that makes looking for differences between groups so fraught with error. Evidence of sex difference in the brain is statistically problematic because each brain varies from the next.

What is our human dilemma? That the nature of life is problematic. Problems are not an exception; they are the norm. The world offers recurring and seemingly endless conundrums for us to deal with. We cannot stop problems, but we can end our suffering, and we can achieve true, lasting happiness by understanding the nature of our mind and changing the way we approach our emotional struggles.

The Purpose of the Eucharist lies not in the change of the bread and wine, but in the partaking of Christ, who has become our food, our life, the manifestation of the Church as the body of Christ. This is why the gifts themselves never became in the Orthodox East an object of special reverence, contemplation, and adoration, and likewise an object of special theological 'problematics': how, when, in what manner their change is accomplished.

Make love to the present and give birth to your own beautiful future. If you make love to the demons of guilt and worries, you will give birth to a problematic future.

Some of my scientific friends and colleagues confess that they cannot for the life of them see why I don't abandon ship and join them. The short answer is that I have managed, by straddling the boundaries, to have the best of both worlds. By working with scientists I get a rich diet of fascinating and problematic facts to think about, but by staying a philosopher without a lab or a research grant, I get to think about all the theories and experiments and never have to do the dishes

Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.

It isn’t so much life’s problems that challenge us but the emotional turbulence stirred up while trying to deal with them. People possessing the gift of emotional detachment are lucky in that their personal problems seem far less problematic.

The greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilization; knowledge whose nature has become problematic because it has lost its true purpose due to being unjustly conceived, and has thus brought about chaos in man's life instead of, and rather than, peace and justice; knowledge which pretends to be real but which is productive of confusion and scepticism, which has elevated doubt and conjecture to the 'scientific' rank in methodology; knowledge which has, for the first time in history, brought chaos to the Three Kingdom of Nature; the animal, vegetal and mineral.

Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superfluous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.We Romantics need a meaning that we ourselves realize – and the person who is preoccupied with self-realization inevitably has a meaning problem. This is no one collective meaning in life any more, a meaning that it is up to the individual to participate in. Nor is it that easy to find an own meaning in life, either. The meaning that most people embrace is self-realization as such, but it is not obvious what type of self is to be realized, nor what should possibly result from it. The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization.

Someone says something you consider problematic. At first you try not to say anything. But they keep saying something. So maybe you respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel wound up, recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. The feminist killjoy appears here: when she speaks, she seems wound up. I appear here. This is my history: wound up.

The experience of the twentieth century made highly problematic the claims of progress on the basis of science and technology. For the ability of technology to better human life is critically dependent on a parallel moral progress in man. Without the latter, the power of technology will simply be turned to evil purposes, and mankind will be worse off than it was previously.

I've had countless conversations with or about people who are "sleeping in separate bedrooms", as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it's the rest of life that horrifies.

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

To many, the meaning of life—or lack thereof—is not even an issue. Their meaning is prescribed by the religions to which they subscribe, or one of the secular worldviews they choose for themselves... They have a way of living imposed upon them and seem to be content with a problematic world insofar as it has answers. The destiny of those who think for themselves, on the other hand, is wholly different—usually dramatic.

As we will see from these pages man is mostly innocent, really potentially good, even naturally noble; and as we will stress, society is responsible, largely, for shaping people, for giving them opportunities for unfolding more freely and more unafraid. But this unfolding is confused and complicated by man’s basic animal fears: by his deep and indelible anxieties about his own impotence and death, and his fear of being overwhelmed and sucked up into the world and into others. All this gives his life a quality of drivenness, of underlying desperation, an obsession with the meaning of it and with his own significance as a creature. And this is what drives him to try to make his mark on the world, to try to twist it and turn it to his own designs, to bury over the rumbling anxieties; and this usually means that he tries to twist and turn others, make his mark on them, use them to justify his own problematic life. As Rank put it so bluntly: Man creates “out of freedom a prison.” This means everyman, in any society, from the most “primitive” to the most “civilized,” no matter what the child training programs or economic system.

First, you begin to find out how selfish this wonderful person is. Second, you discover that the wonderful person has been going through a similar experience and he or she begins to tell you how selfish you are. And third, though you acknowledge it in part, you conclude that your spouse’s selfishness is more problematic than your own. This is especially true if you feel that you’ve had a hard life and have experienced a lot of hurt.

I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards: First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence—that they do not have an interest in their lives—involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence—every sentient being values her or his life—and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an “eternal present”—and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future—they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist. Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of practicality in the real world. Absolutely not. Welfarists often talk about treating “farmed animals” in the way that we treat dogs and cats whom we love and regard as members of our family. Does anyone really think that is practically possible? The fact that we would not think of eating our dogs and cats is some indication that it is not.

People are noise: the sort of it that disturbs your thinking. It’s only causing problems and the more of them you gather, the more problematic life gets. Their noise was the very reason why Tom was trying to avoid them and used to keep the doors shut when he heard them outside. ~ As the moon began to rust

there’s a lot to like about day-to-day life in the advanced welfare states of western Europe. They are great places to visit. But the view of life that has taken root in those same countries is problematic. It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible—the Europe Syndrome.

I hope I’m being clear, I didn’t say I hate feminists, that would be weird. I said I hate feminist. I’m talking about the word. I have the privilege living my life inside of words and part of being a writer is creating entire universes, and that's beautiful, but part of being a writer is also living in the very smallest part of every word. ...But the word feminist, it doesn't sit with me, it doesn't add up. I want to talk about my problem that I have with it. ...Ist in it's meaning is also a problem for me. Because you can't be born an ist. It's not natural... So feminist includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state. That we don't emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that's imposed on us. That we are indoctrinated with it, that it's an agenda... ...My problem with feminist is not the word. It's the question. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a feminist?" The great Katy Perry once said—I'm paraphrasing—"I'm not a feminist but I like it when women are strong."...Don't know why she feels the need to say the first part, but listening to the word and thinking about it, I realize I do understand. This question that lies before us is one that should lie behind us. The word is problematic for me because there's another word that we're missing... ...When you say racist, you are saying that is a negative thing. That is a line that we have crossed. Anything on the side of that line is shameful, is on the wrong side of history. And that is a line that we have crossed in terms of gender but we don't have the word for it... ...I start thinking about the fact that we have this word when we're thinking about race that says we have evolved beyond something and we don't really have this word for gender. Now you could argue sexism, but I'd say that's a little specific. People feel removed from sexism. ‘I'm not a sexist, but I'm not a feminist.' They think there's this fuzzy middle ground. There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple. ...You don’t have to hate someone to destroy them. You just have to not get it. ...My pitch is this word. ‘Genderist.’ I would like this word to become the new racist. I would like a word that says there was a shameful past before we realized that all people were created equal. And we are past that. And every evolved human being who is intelligent and educated and compassionate and to say I don't believe that is unacceptable. And Katy Perry won't say, "I'm not a feminist but I like strong women," she'll say, "I'm not a genderist but sometimes I like to dress up pretty." And that'll be fine. ...This is how we understand society. The word racism didn't end racism, it contextualized it in a way that we still haven't done with this issue. ...I say with gratitude but enormous sadness, we will never not be fighting. And I say to everybody on the other side of that line who believe that women are to be bought and trafficked or ignored...we will never not be fighting. We will go on, we will always work this issue until it doesn't need to be worked anymore. ...Is this idea of genderist going to do something? I don't know. I don't think that I can change the world. I just want to punch it up a little.

Disability fluctuates, growing visible, then invisible, then visible again, becoming both ever-present and haunting. Such a problematizing of physical life added a new wrinkle to the genre's double/secret identity trope: the characters now interact with their shifting bodies as bodies with all the complications involved.

If we didn’t feel there was something problematic with eating meat, dairy, and eggs in the first place, we wouldn’t have worked so hard to justify our behavior, we wouldn’t have tried so hard to avoid looking at the processes…Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know is not what we say when confronted with how carrots are harvested from the ground or how plums are plucked from trees. Don’t tell my children what they’re really eating. It would be too upsetting for them is not what we say when asked about how apples become applesauce. In all aspects of our life, guilt serves as a red flag that something isn’t right, tapping us on the shoulder to let us know we may have strayed from our principles or goals.

Makes perfect sense. In a problematic way. But life is problematic, so novels must be too.

Don’t stress too much about stuff because when you do, life gets problematic. Don’t overthink things because life gets in the way.

You are prickly and problematic person, but life is more interesting with you around.

advocates of evolutionary theory since Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) have found altruism problematic.

Stay far away from problematic people. In life...when a person is drowing they will try and pull the person closest to them down with them to save themselves.

There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.

Healing imagery is also problematic because it implies that the damage being done is primarily emotional. The goal becomes one of "getting along" better by being nicer and more tolerant toward one another, forgiving and forgetting, living in more authentic ways. I don’t object to this goal, but it ignores the fact that a lot of the trouble doesn’t begin and end with interpersonal relations and emotional wounds. Much of it is embedded in structures of power and inequality that shape almost every aspect of life in this society, from economics to politics to religion to schools and the family. The idea that we’re going to get out of this by somehow getting to a place where we’re kinder and more sensitive to one another ignores most of what we have to overcome. It sets us up to walk right past the trouble toward an alternative that doesn’t exist and can’t exist until we do something about what creates privilege and oppression in the first place. And that is something that needs to be changed, not healed.

The balcony is a metaphor for a mental and emotional place of perspective, calm, and self-control. If life is a stage and we are all actors on that stage, then the balcony is a place from which we can see the entire play unfolding with greater clarity. To observe our selves, it is valuable to go to the balcony at all times, and especially before, during, and after any problematic conversation or negotiation.

Perhaps too much is said in universities about how "exciting" it is to think. Thinking undoubtedly has its excitements and satisfactions, but these feelings do not disclose its general character, and there is something very much wrong with the idea they should. We do not think in order to have fun but because life is troubling and problematic. We think because we are compelled to. And while thinking occasionally brings exciting discoveries, the periods in between these discoveries are likely to place heavy demands not only on the thinker's energies but on his patience as well. When thinking, we should not need to tell ourselves that it is an exhilarating experience; it should be enough to realize that we are behaving with the seriousness, the rationality, and the self-discipline that the human situation requires of us.

One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative. If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.

It also creates a problematic reflection: If a villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least, then a hero is the person who cares too much without knowing anything. It makes every hero seem like Forrest Gump. But it’s not the intelligence that people dislike; it’s the dispassionate application of that intelligence. It’s the calculation. It’s someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.

Question (The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in (a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man- and womankind will make love and not war? or (b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of life and in ordinary intercourse with others, is now disappointed even in the erotic, its last and best hope, and so erupts in violence--and in that very violence which is commensurate with the orgastic violence in the best days of the old erotic age--i.e., war?

Similarly, in attempting to understand the misogyny paradox, we might ask how it is that so many women are investing in straight relationships, when these relationships so often cause them damage? The queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s analysis of “cruel optimism”—the term she uses to describe “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object”—may be useful here. Berlant asks, “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies . . . when the evidence of their instability [and] fragility . . . abound?” People persist in these attachments, Berlant explains, because the fantasy object provides a “sense of what it means to keep on living and looking forward to being in the world.

At the same time, if we were feeling a knot of guilt about our decision re: dying, it might have been because we regretted our failure to achieve a certain kind of wisdom born from certain kinds of life experiences...Our skittishness when it came to any crisis, the preference we had for deflecting important conversations with jokes, rather than facing them head-on. It was fine, we agreed, not to want to grow old. Fine, too, to take steps to ensure we didn't grow old. But we'd also avoided growing up. We'd lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women.

Time has to be converted, then, from chronos, mere chronological time, to kairos, a New Testament Greek word that has to do with opportunity, with moments that seem ripe for their intended purpose. Then, even while life continues to seem harried, while it continues to have hard moments, we say, “Something good is happening amid all this.” We get glimpses of how God might be working out his purposes in our days. Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s work with us. Whatever happens— good things or bad, pleasant or problematic—we look and ask, “What might God be doing here?” We see the events of the day as continuing occasions to change the heart. Time points to Another and begins to speak to us of God. We

No matter what stage you are in, acknowledging that our possessions, homes, and affairs can be problematic to those we leave behind is the first step toward taking proactive measures to reduce potential chaos and strife among those destined to deal with it.

There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if ‘productivity’ and/or ‘usefulness’ are the measures of human value, and — particularly for artists — this is deeply problematic. We shouldn’t given in.

A control strategy is any attempt to change, avoid, or get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings. Control strategies become problematic when they are used excessively or inappropriately or in situations where they can’t work, or when using them reduces our quality of life in the long term.

Hladik had rounded forty. Aside from a few friendships and many habits, the problematic exercise of literature constituted his life, Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Life often seems to be “about” paying attention—and the general trend seems to be toward an ever more attentive way of life. Behind the crisis of distraction, in short, there is what amounts to a crisis of attention: the more valuable and in demand attention becomes, the more problematic even innocuous distractions seem to be.

For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. The clear-headed man is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth —that to live is to feel oneself lost— he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground.

Socrates. The whole Socratic problematics of ‘to know’ (to think you know, to know that you do not know, to know that it is possible to know or that it is possible to try to know, etc.), on which ultimately depends the way we choose our lives, seemed to Dragomir to be the supreme enigma of philosophy, and the thing to which it was worth dedicating your life.

our most problematic dualism is not life fearing death but a fragile sense-of-self dreading its own groundlessness, according to Buddhism. By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra’s Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.

Why is financial inequality a problem? There are two very different answers. One kind of harm is material: not being able to get a decent house, quality health care, a proper education, and a hopeful future for one’s children. But there is also a psychological reason why inequality proves so problematic: because poverty is intricately bound up with humiliation. The

More problematic was Stanley’s persistent interest in other women, which he saw no reason to hide. Dowson’s poem about a man who confesses infidelity even as he pines for his lost love—“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion!”—became their personal shorthand. (“My fashion has been acting up again,” Stanley would sometimes say, addressing Shirley as “Cynara,” after he had been out with another woman.)

There are many types of teachable moments in life. Contentment is not always the most fertile ground to garner self-knowledge. At times, bitter memories can force us to change and teach us to avoid duplicating past conduct that led to regret and remorse. The greater the degree of anxiety that we assign to periods of uncertainty and distress the less likely we will resort to duplicating these problematic experiences in the future.

The poetry of the new year is problematically punctual. An impeccable guest who arrives on time when you are running frantically behind schedule. Catching you precisely at that awkward stage of housecleaning when the contents of closet and cupboard are strewn across the room and there is no sensible place left to sit down. No, you haven’t had a chance to change the guest room towels, your clothes or your habits. It is at this stage that you begin to stammer out apologies and resolutions. The visitor fixes you with a gaze that breaks like dawn over your clutter and chagrin. 'What a beautiful life,' murmurs your guest, pressing an oddly shaped package into your hands. Gladness rises in the heart like a cloud of hummingbirds. Always the same, unpredictable, utterly original gift. You consider the paradox of that as you hold it between your palms. Like freshly kneaded dough: this brand new day.

The reluctance of unschooled workers to follow orders has taken many forms. For example, workers won’t show up for work reliably on time, or they have problematic superstitions, or they prefer to get job instructions via indirect hints instead of direct orders, or they won’t accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with coworkers, or they won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before.

In the process, you obscure the actual reasons why people might risk their life to cross the sea – the wars and dictators that forced them from their homes. By denying the existence of these real root causes you simultaneously absolve yourself from the duty of providing sanctuary to those fleeing from them. Acknowledging this duty would prove very problematic: it would be an admission that your own failure to do so previously was the reason why so many thousands then turned in their desperation to smugglers – and why so many of them then drowned in the ocean. It would be an admission that a Syrian boards a boat only when he realises that there’s no realistic means of winning asylum from the Middle East. And an admission that Libya’s current predicament is in part the result of NATO’s (justifiable) airstrikes against Gaddafi in 2011 – and subsequent (and unjustifiable) failure to help Libya’s post-Gaddafi transition.

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror. Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura.

Self-identity has become problematic for the individual in ways that are historically unprecedented, and the consequence is a cycle of endless self-questioning and introspection that serves only to confound the individual even more. Ultimately, the result is that our experience of ourselves and everyday life is increasingly played out against a backdrop of ongoing anxiety, restlessness, and unease about who we are, our place in the world, and the rapidity of the changes taking place around us.

In accepting as two primary texts, Singer's Animal Liberation and Regan's The Case for Animal Rights--texts that valorize rationality--the animal defense movement reiterates a patriarchal disavowal of emotions as having a legitimate role in theory making. The problem is that while on the one hand it articulates positions against animal suffering, on the other hand animal rights theory dispenses with the idea that caring about and emotionally responding to this suffering can be appropriate sources of knowledge. Emotions and theory are related. One does not have to eviscerate theory of emotional content and reflection to present legitimate theory. Nor does the presence of emotional content and reflection eradicate or militate against thinking theoretically. By disavowing emotional responses, two major texts of animal defense close off the intellectual space for recognizing the role of emotions in knowledge and therefore theory making. As the issue of caring about suffering is problematized, difficulties with animal rights per se become apparent. Without a gender analysis, several important issues that accompany a focus on suffering are neglected, to the detriment of the movement. Animal rights theory offers a legitimating language for animal defense without acknowledging the indebtedness of the rights-holder to caring relationships. Nor does it provide models for theoretically engaging with our own emotional responses, since emotions are seen as untrustworthy. Because the animal advocacy movement has failed to incorporate an understanding of caring as a motivation for so many animal defense activists, and because it has not addressed the gendered nature of caring--that it is woman's duty to provide service to others, while it is men's choice--it has not addressed adequately the implications that a disproportionate number of activists are women motivated because they care about animal suffering. Animal rights theory that disowns or ignores emotions mirrors on the theoretical level the gendered emotional responses inherent in a patriarchal society. In this culture, women are supposed to do the emotional work for heterosexual intimate relationships: 'a man will come to expect that a woman's role in his life is to take care of his feelings and alleviate the discomfort involved in feeling.' At the cultural level, this may mean that women are doing the emotional work for the animal defense movement. And this emotional work takes place in the context of our own oppression.

People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings and conflicts. Think about the people you are closest to: Are their values aligned with yours? Do you even know what their values or principles are? Too often in relationships, people’s principles aren’t clear. This is especially problematic in organizations where people need to have shared principles to be successful. Being crystal clear about my principles is why I labored so much over every sentence in this book.

I figured scraps were better than nothing at all. I failed to realize that the same thing that distinguishes addiction from passionate interest also divides unhealthy love from that which is the highest experience of humanity. That is, love is real when it expands and enhances your life—and troubling and problematic when it contracts or impairs it. Whether you love a person, a drug, or an intellectual interest, if it is spurring creativity, connection, and kindness, it’s not an addiction—but if it’s making you isolated, dull, and mean,

Being scared and nervous means you care, and not only is caring a beautiful thing, but it also means you value the outcome of a situation. However, fear and nervousness become problematic when they affect your performance. Understanding when to adopt and abandon these feelings is an important first step in controlling them. It’s helpful to think of fear and nerves as an outfit you wear before doing something nerve-racking. Don’t try to avoid these feelings altogether; rather, get comfortable with taking the outfit off when it’s time to execute.

I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.

Analysis of your social network and its members can also be highly revealing of your life, politics, and even sexual orientation, as demonstrated in a study carried out at MIT. In an analysis known as Gaydar, researchers studied the Facebook profiles of fifteen hundred students at the university, including those whose profile sexual orientation was either blank or listed as heterosexual. Based on prior research that showed gay men have more friends who are also gay (not surprising), the MIT investigators had a valuable data point to review the friend associations of their fifteen hundred students. As a result, researchers were able to predict with 78 percent accuracy whether or not a student was gay. At least ten individuals who had not previously identified as gay were flagged by the researchers’ algorithm and confirmed via in-person interviews with the students. While these findings might not be troubling in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, they could prove problematic in the seventy-six countries where homosexuality remains illegal, such as Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, where such an “offense” is punished by death.

The most problematic depression episodes plunge me into a feeling of disconnection. I am no longer a part of the world. All the colours, meaning and richness become hidden or lost to me. There is a numbing absence of feeling that strips away any inspiration and creativity. I become dead to myself, a husk, a shell. The fall into this state can be violently fast, although the triggers have all been external. Life does not treat many of us kindly. Most of the time, I draw inspiration from the world around me. That sense of connection to all other living and perhaps-not-living things nourishes and sustains me. Being pushed out of that sense of belonging is brutal. I have self-esteem issues and, subjected as I was to barrages of abuse, bitter criticism, invasive scrutiny and some terrifying processes in my life, I’ve been crushed, repeatedly. I’ve come to places where I’ve felt so awful that the only imaginable way out, I thought, was to die. I’m still alive because of the love and dedication of my husband. I hold the hope that I won’t have to crawl through hell again anytime soon, that I can build internal reserves strong enough to resist external pressures.

When society felt adrift in the wake of its loss of religious belief, people turned to science as the anchor that could stabilize them. Again, this is not an argument about the importance or lack thereof of religion. It's rather a statement that humans seek frameworks by which to guide their understanding of the world, and whether they turn to religion or science or something in between, they'll find something to grasp hold of and use to make sense of an often senseless and chaotic world. In my view. we've done that with science over the last 150 years, resulting in many problematic outcomes.

I thought of the three of us—myself, Trumilcik, and Elaine—each present there via our more or less phantasmagorical versions of each other, our recondite emblems of ourselves. And for a moment I felt I was at the point of grasping what it was that made the full unfolding of another human being into one’s consciousness so painfully dazzling that one spent one’s life contriving ways of filtering them, blocking them out, setting up labyrinthine passageways between oneself and them, kidnapping their images for various exploitative purposes of one’s own, and generally doing all one could to fend off their problematic, objective reality. The phone rang.

Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal: The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. For

Jesus is a little problematic for Christian nationalists, and Matthew 10: 34 is one of the mechanisms they use to blunt his impact where it is not welcome. He was something of a nonjudgmental, socialistic peacenik, which is inconvenient to a movement characterized by judgment, unfettered capitalism, and war. So Christian nationalists gave Jesus a makeover, combining the unflinching, violent judgment and punishments of the Old Testament with a Jesus who provides eternal life through his death and resurrection for our sins. I often wonder how Jesus would feel in a modern, evangelical megachurch, as he would have precious little ideology in common with his followers there.

It was spring, and the long months of desolation melted into running water, with streamlets pouring from every hill and miniature waterfalls leaping from stone to stone to stone. The air was filled with the racket of birds, a cacophony of melody that replaced the lonely calling of geese passing by far overhead. Birds go one by one in the winter, a single raven hunched brooding in a barren tree, an owl fluffed against the cold in the high, dark shadows of a barn. Or they go in flocks, a massed thunder of wings to bear them up and away, wheeling through the sky like handsful of pepper grains thrown aloft, calling their way in Vs of mournful courage toward the promise of a distant and problematic survival. In winter, the raptors draw apart unto themselves; the songbirds flee away, all the color of the feathered world reduced to the brutal simplification of predator and prey, gray shadows passing overhead, with no more than a small bright drop of blood fallen back to earth here and there to mark the passing of life, leaving a drift of scattered feathers, borne on the wind. But as spring blooms, the birds grow drunk with love and the bushes riot with their songs. Far, far into the night, darkness mutes but does not silence them, and small melodious conversations break out at all hours, invisible and strangely intimate in the dead of night, as though one overheard the lovemaking of strangers in the room next door.

[God] tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s—merely descriptive. Merely. And here is why: As human beings evolved, the brains that eventually gave rise to self-consciousness expanded tremendously. This produced an evolutionary arms race between fetal head and female pelvis.56 The female graciously widened her hips, almost to the point where running would no longer be possible. The baby, for his part, allowed himself to be born more than a year early, compared to other mammals of his size, and evolved a semi-collapsible head.57 This was and is a painful adjustment for both. The essentially fetal baby is almost completely dependent on his mother for everything during that first year. The programmability of his massive brain means that he must be trained until he is eighteen (or thirty) before being pushed out of the nest. This is to say nothing of the woman’s consequential pain in childbirth, and high risk of death for mother and infant alike. This all means that women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.

I’m going to recommend a simple framework for evaluating and changing your behavior based on a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and ancient Stoic practices. It consists of the following steps: 1. Evaluate the consequences of your habits or desires in order to select which ones to change. 2. Spot early warning signs so that you can nip problematic desires in the bud. 3. Gain cognitive distance by separating your impressions from external reality. 4. Do something else instead of engaging in the habit. In addition, consider how you might introduce other sources of healthy positive feelings by: 1. Planning new activities that are consistent with your core values. 2. Contemplating the qualities you admire in other people. 3. Practicing gratitude for the things you already have in life.

Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled, forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.

Without sex, the only way for bacteria to adapt is through mutation, which is caused by reproductive error or environmental damage. Most mutations are hurtful; they make for even less successful bacteria—though eventually, with luck, a mutation would arise that made for a more heat-resistant bacterium. Asexual adaptation is problematic because the dictate of the world, “Change or die,” runs directly counter to one of the primary dictates of life: “Maintain the integrity of the genome.” In engineering, this type of clash is called a coupled design. Two functions of a system clash so that it is not possible to adjust one without negatively affecting the other. In sexual reproduction, by contrast, the inherent scrambling, or recombination, affords a vast scope for change, yet still maintains genetic integrity.

Normal people find it difficult to grasp the reality that predators really do think differently. We tend to want to evaluate them from the point of view of our own experience and life values, and then try to figure out what it is that “went wrong.” In other words, what is the aberrant piece that once identified and “fixed” will make them think “normally” again? Well, in many cases there is an aberrant piece that either determines or influences behavior. But by the time some individual acts on his predatory urges, it is usually so completely assimilated into his entire personality that you can’t simply take it out and replace it as you can a defective mechanical part. That is why the concept of rehabilitation is so problematic for violent offenders. Once the damage is done, it is often all but impossible to repair it.

In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape. "Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped . . . It feels like a kind of weird - just weird, man. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like - you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid," he said. Likening instances of being flustered or uneasy to the often life-shattering experience of rape has become a far too common comparison in modern lexicon. The phrase "Facebook rape" is perhaps the most widely used, which implies one person has posted on another person's Facebook account - usually something intended to embarrass the person. But the casual, flippant use of the term "rape" in instances that do not involve sexual violence is highly problematic in that it trivialises one of the most despicable invasions of a human being. Desensitising the masses to the term "rape" is just another way the conversation surrounding sexual assault is derailed or diluted in society. Rape is, and should be considered universally, as a serious societal sickness that occurs within the "toxic silence" that surrounds sexual assault as Tara Moss put so elegantly in her recent Q&A appearance. Further to that, the use of the term can be a trigger for rape survivors in that it may jolt terrifying memories of their own experience. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, up to 57 per cent of rape survivors suffer post-traumatic stress disorder in their lifetime, with "triggers" including inflammatory words like rape causing deeply traumatic recollections. Beware desensitising the term "rape", Newcastle Herald, June 6, 2014

The standard narrative of sexual desire is that it just appears-you're sitting at lunch or walking down the street, maybe you see a sexy person or think a sexy thought, and pow! you're saying to yourself, "I would like some sex!" This is how it works for maybe 75 percent of men and 15 percent of women...That's "spontaneous" desire. But some people find that they begin to want sex only after sexy things are happening. And that's normal. They don't have "low" desire, they don't suffer from any ailment, and they don't long to initiate but feel like they're not allowed to. Their bodies just need some more compelling reason than, "That's an attractive person right there," to want sex. They are sexually satisfied and in healthy relationships, which means that lack of spontaneous desire for sex is not, in itself, dysfunctional or problematic! Let me repeat: Responsive desire is normal and healthy.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

It is interesting, really: The Old Testament fits far more easily with Christian nationalism but is so problematic to defend that they often retreat from it when pressed. For example, you might have noticed in Leviticus that the wording for the verse condemning homosexuality is almost identical to those condemning cursing or attacking one's parents and adultery. The wages of those sins are death, and the sinner is held responsible for that outcome. But a significant number of Christians commit these sins, including many clergy members (at least, it would seem, when it comes to adultery), so it is very difficult to hide the hypocrisy inherent in strongly enforcing one rule while taking a relatively understanding stance on the others. In some cases, the rules are deemed historical artifacts to sidestep troublesome challenges. The Bible is the literal Word of God… but Christians see no problem in wearing clothing woven of two materials, wearing gold, pearls, and expensive clothing, cutting their hair and beards, and getting tattoos. Those commands are deemed no longer relevant, while, inexplicably, other very similar proscriptions are still thought to apply to modern life.

Free will and the choices that we make every day provides for self-identification. We all hold the plenary powers of discretion to script who and what we are. Self-determination comes from refusal to passively accept whatever doctrine is convenient and move beyond glib answers and popular canons to staunch the torrent of life’s abuses. Intensely pushing forward into troubled waters the clear becomes murky, the certain become problematic, and the real become ethereal. Striping our consciousness of all familiar handholds can lead to dissolution of the sense of a transient self. Disintegration of a preconceived notion of self-identity can lead to either psychosis or a degree of self-mastery, depending upon an individual’s ability to absorb and integrate the secret reserves of their psyche power. Self-awareness comes at a high price but it has distinct rewards. Shrewdly shredded of all falsities we can see what is apparent. Brusquely scouring our brain of layers of toxic emotional sludge reveals a sterling center point. Starting anew we can launch ourselves in a more charming and cheerful image that is both natural and necessary to build upon in order to achieve and sustain our robust constitutional fortitude.

What was new in this book was my willingness to acknowledge the ‘traditional’ side of Catholicism. Nevertheless, I could not avoid express¬ ing certain reservations. Firstly, I maintained that Catholicism ought to be distinguished from primitive Christianity, and that the latter is to be held in lesser esteem. In other books of mine (including Revolt), I was later to em¬ phasise the negative, problematic aspects of Christianity from a historical perspective - which is to say: those aspects of Christianity antithetical to the Classical and Roman worldview. On the other hand, I acknowledge the fact that primitive Christianity' potentially provided a desperate, tragic path of sal¬ vation for both the mass of outcasts devoid of any tradition who originally embraced the Christian message, and, more generally, for a specific human type. The idea of a choice to be made once and for all in this life between eternal salvation and eternal damnation — an idea conveyed all the more ex- asperatingly by resorting to frightening descriptions of the afterlife and of the Final Judgment. . . was a way to fill certain individuals with an extreme tension which, combined with a predisposition to the supernatural, might

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84

If, in the case of Amfortas and the union of spear and Grail, only the sexual problem is discerned, we get entangled in an insoluble contradiction, since the thing that harms is also the thing that heals. Such a paradox is true and permissible only when one sees the opposites as united on a higher plane, when one understands that it is not a question of sexuality, either in this form or in that, but purely a question of the attitude by which every activity, including the sexual, is regulated. Once again I must emphasize that the practical problem in analytical psychology lies deeper than sexuality and its repression. The latter point of view is no doubt very valuable in explaining the infantile and therefore morbid part of the psyche, but as an explanatory principle for the whole of the psyche it is quite inadequate. What lies behind sexuality or the power instinct is the attitude to sexuality or to power. In so far as an attitude is not merely an intuitive (i.e., unconscious and spontaneous) phenomenon but also a conscious function, it is, in the main, a view of life. Our conception of all problematical things is enormously influenced, sometimes consciously but more often unconsciously, by certain collective ideas that condition our mentality. These collective ideas are intimately bound up with the view of life and the world of the past centuries or epochs. Whether or not we are conscious of this dependence has nothing to do with it, since we are influenced by these ideas through the very air we breathe. Collective ideas always have a religious character, and a philosophical idea becomes collective only when it expresses a primordial image. Their religious character derives from the fact that they express the realities of the collective unconscious and are thus able to release its latent energies. The great problems of life, including of course sex, are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are balancing or compensating factors that correspond to the problems which life confronts us with in reality.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction. A good night kiss. Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other - and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life and unpredictable adventure rather that a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composed music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things. Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest's customary climate is perfect for a writer. It's cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called "the bottom below the bottom," those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria's Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs. Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they're missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as they non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they're too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete's foot), the roof leaks, they can't stop coughing, and they feel as if they're slowly being digested by an oyster. Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. "Paradise!" you'll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

In Western culture today, you decide to get married because you feel an attraction to the other person. You think he or she is wonderful. But a year or two later—or, just as often, a month or two—three things usually happen. First, you begin to find out how selfish this wonderful person is. Second, you discover that the wonderful person has been going through a similar experience and he or she begins to tell you how selfish you are. And third, though you acknowledge it in part, you conclude that your spouse’s selfishness is more problematic than your own. This is especially true if you feel that you’ve had a hard life and have experienced a lot of hurt. You say silently, “OK, I shouldn’t do that—but you don’t understand me.” The woundedness makes us minimize our own selfishness. And that’s the point at which many married couples arrive after a relatively brief period of time. So what do you do then? There are at least two paths to take. First, you could decide that your woundedness is more fundamental than your self-centeredness and determine that unless your spouse sees the problems you have and takes care of you, it’s not going to work out. Of course, your spouse will probably not do this—especially if he or she is thinking almost the exact same thing about you! And so what follows is the development of emotional distance and, perhaps, a slowly negotiated kind of détente or ceasefire. There is an unspoken agreement not to talk about some things. There are some things your spouse does that you hate, but you stop talking about them as long as he or she stops bothering you about certain other things. No one changes for the other; there is only tit-for-tat bargaining. Couples who settle for this kind of relationship may look happily married after forty years, but when it’s time for the anniversary photo op, the kiss will be forced. The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it. So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up.” You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it’s revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing. If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage. It Only Takes One to Begin

The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.

We tend to problem our problem why not let our problems become more problematic than us

The exquisite world of imagination opened up by any powerful music is itself problematic, for it tempts listeners to put into words the feelings it arouses in them and so to visualise a composer's priorities and even personality. There must be few people who have played, sung, listened to or written about Bach's music who do not feel they have a special understanding of him, a private connection, unique to themselves, but ultimately coming from their idea of what music is and does.

Displaying good character as a means of avoiding retribution after life is not just problematic but inherently selfish.