Dodging the daily grind

Passion and desire and shame and sadness don’t signal that you have to change everything immediately, though. These are sensations that don’t require solutions. Your primary job, in the face of renewed lust for life, is to tolerate the shame of joy.

Because embarrassment is sometimes just a sign that you’ve never lived out in the open before, you’ve never cared more about a feeling than you care about how you’re coming across, you’ve never prioritized happiness over control.

This is why it’s good to take risks that might embarrass you regularly. Because every time you dare to embarrass yourself for the sake of who you are, you’re teaching your body to prioritize joy. You’re teaching yourself to let go of seeming better than the things you love. You’re showing yourself how to feel where you are — to soak in the cool fall air, to breathe in the moon, to love every lopsided moment of your glorious, flawed life.

[...] self-blame, like guilt, is an unflagging protector. Believing that the deficiency is ours gives us at least a modicum of agency and hope: maybe, if we just work hard enough, we can earn the love and care we need."

Most didn't understand, why they were so strict that preserves should not be opened till the middle of winter.

It was a memory of famine, war, artificial famine and war again.

Because my mom (born way later, in the 1950s) was raised like this, she too tended to save everything for second usage and avoid buying things that weren't necessary.

Because I (born way later, in the 1980s) was raised like this, I have spent the last ten years reminding myself that it's okay to throw things away and it's okay to buy things I don't genuinely need. I'll never forget the time I realized that, because I was living away from my parents, I could actually buy more washcloths and use two of them in the shower at once (one for upper body and one for lower body), and the world wasn't going to collapse. Because my mother would have told me how wasteful that was, because her mother would have told HER how wasteful that was, because Grandma grew up in the Great Depression and couldn't AFFORD a second washcloth.

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

Me: yeah whatever. i dont feel shit.

1 hour and 5 minutes later: dude I swear it’s only been 5 minutes