Phoenix of Love

Pain, like noise, is one of those vague nouns that reduces a vast array of sensations to a single, dull concept.
Today, I’ve been wishing that a particular collection of excruciating jaw pains were more of a concept and less of a sensation. It’s occurred to me, though, that the concept of pain—all our thinking about [...]

I’ve been reflecting on how much the feeling of control influences happiness. It is really very difficult to get into a state of flow—to get engrossed in what you are doing—without feeling in control, and when you can’t get into that state of flow regularly, your satisfaction with life inevitably plummets.
I think that one of [...]

Here’s a story for you. Harold Hartley is a sales representative for a Detroit steel company. Every Monday, he catches the disastrously early 5:45am Northwest Airlines flight to Indianapolis to work with a major client there. Every Thursday, after three and a half long days of hard selling, he topples into his coach class seat [...]

Sartre’s famous aphorism that “hell is other people” is backwards.
Hell is disconnected self-consciousness. Hell is the lack of other people.
A characteristically brilliant and frank recent post by Mona brought this to mind:
My biggest test for the last couple of years, though, has been feeling (relatively) alone in my quest for human interdependence. It pulls me [...]

Anxiety is a uniquely human disease. It’s an unwelcome byproduct of our ability to imagine: to create a world in our minds that does not match the immediate input of our senses. Because we can feed these fabricated images and experiences back to ourselves, and because the less sophisticated parts of our brains lack the [...]

One of the less fortunate qualities separating us from animals is the way that stress gets stuck in our bodies. Stress is handy for dealing with immediate threats to life or dignity, and if we never experienced it we would have a good deal more in common with cucumbers than with birds or dogs or [...]

One of the reasons that this business of not thinking is both tremendously simple and surprisingly difficult is that it isn’t about trying not to think so much as not trying to think. It’s no good smashing thoughts down forcefully as they arise, like that arcade game where you bop the alligator heads with a [...]

I’m considering designating my bedroom a no-thinking area, to fend off the encroachment of work-related deliberation into my sleep. It could be healthy anyway to have at least one place where I can take a break from the continuous churning of my neocortex. I can’t imagine that excessive rational thought is any more wholesome than [...]

So many processes, so many adjustments, boil down to the resolution of dissonances. I remember once reading an article on Bruckner’s symphonies which described their progressions from start to finish, very broadly, as the gradual resolution of musical tensions declared in the introduction, so that each finale concludes in a sort of harmonic nirvana.
Since reading [...]

When I was younger, it bothered me tremendously that I couldn’t think straight in noisy places. I thought it was some defect of my mind that I had trouble feeling spiritual in the midst of commotion. Recently, I heard about some research that showed that, although we can become used to noise in the sense [...]