Dealt with Adversity

Gold star image

Yay! I finished reading the "How to Deal with Adversity" book by Christopher Hamilton. It has been many years since I read an entire book, yes finished all of it!

I get a gold star sticker and my choice of coloring pictures for free play! Woohoo!

Here are notes I wrote with response to various quotes that prompted my thoughts throughout the book. It's a lot of unorganized brainspew... so... I don't know... wear a hat or something if you intend to look at it!

"life occurs within massive organized structures that we do not fully understand nor are able to control - I mean, principally, the workplace." 63

Nobody fully understands how this organization of society works. The people in charge don't control what happens, even though they dictate the rules. The organism takes life of its own. As Steinbeck describes the dominant capitalistic institution of his time in Grapes of Wrath, 1939, "The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

"[Love], then, is a kind of escape. But it is also a kind of escape that enables us to feel at home in the world. That was what the old religions did; they gave us a sense that this world is our home, that we can find our meaning here, even if that meaning eventually led outside the world to the kingdom of God." 64

I think that the external concept of home as something beyond our existence is just as important as the identification with this world as our home. We want to know not just that life as it is now is a welcome environment, where we feel safe and loved, but that the unknown, what lies beyond, promises a similar hospitality.

"[Love] makes not simply the beloved person but everything lovely to behold, is an experience that seems to give us a sense of homecoming, of finally being at peace with the world." 64

Cope with disappointments. "It is a kind of madness, something that at least partially blinds you both to the nature of your beloved and to your own condition. If you can do this, you might, with luck, be able to gain a certain kind of distance from it." 70.

"If love is conditional, then nurture the conditions. Do not seek to cultivate a love that can disperse with them." 76

"As the French essayist Montaigne put it, if you seek to fly like an angel you will crash all the more violently to earth." 88.

"It is no use expecting not to be criticized. He accepts the fact that one will inevitably be criticized, and that the best thing is not to rail against that." 89. on Antigonus.

"Antigonus, who overheard some of his soldiers cursing him close to his tent, unaware that he could hear them. He looked out at them and said: 'O dear, can't you go further away to criticize me?'" 87

""If you want your love to flourish, accept that you cannot fully know your beloved, that your beloved cannot fully know you, and that, per impossible, were you to know each other fully, that would kill the love." 91.

Comment: I disagree with this. Hiding information from each other for the sake of 'mystery', is a superficial fix. Eventually you get to know the other person well enough to understand everything that you can about them.

Any unknowns that remain are limitations to your comprehension, characteristic that you don't have and can't really explain because you don't possess them in your personality toolkit. If that's one of the sources of your mutual attraction, so be it.

But the attitude that the mystery, the unknowns about each other must be actively preserved by not asking, but artificially creating unknowns is stupid. If you can find out, you will find out given enough time. You can't stay in that 'fresh' period of dating forever where everything is new, unknown, mysterious, and interesting.

You ought to go out and push each other's limits to explore your mutual unknowns. See what the other person doesn't even know about him or herself. Have it be a surprise to both of you, individually and for each other, to know what each person is like when your mettle is tested.

Face new challenges together: start a business, relocate to a different place, help each other achieve individual and mutual goals. There are enough unknowns out there and within ourselves, that we ought to seek them out! It only becomes stale and lifeless if we stop pursuing the unknowns, get complacent, and lazily spread a bed sheet over some superfluous details to 'preserve mystery'.

"Whilst we can often look on the illness and pain of others with equanimity, we complain bitterly when we experience the same things... we are nothing special as individuals - what happens to others can happen to us, and that is just the way things are." 105

"ask for ourselves what we truly and deeply want and need in life, and that the removal of illness (as with other adversities) might well, in some cases at least, make getting closer to that more difficult." 111

Comment: Don't drug away my problems. Problems exist to motivate us toward a better existence. The first step is recognizing that we have a choice how to face the problem. If we do nothing about them, then the suffering is pointless... but we always have a choice to do something, if we are brave enough to accept the consequences.

"illness is construed as a temporary hiatus or deviation in the narrative of a life, after which life returns to 'normal'... triumphalist, as if all illnesses were curable; another is that it helps us conceal from ourselves the reality of death." 113

Max Blecher. Scarred Hearts. 84. ironic hero. "An invalid expends exactly the same amount of energy and willpower one would need to conquer an empire... Except only that he consumes it in pure loss... It is a surprisingly ironic form of heroism." 118

"Make the pain part of your deeper understanding of life... feeding his curiosity about the human scene... affirm all things, good and bad." 71

All good, all bad... just a lesson to be had.

"sharing joy is absolutely superior in this respect to sharing suffering. Gladness, not sadness, is talkative" 'On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing':15 Hannah Arendt. p127.

Come to me with a solution, not a problem.

I share my response to my unhappiness, not the unhappiness itself. A clown performs a joyful act, because there is a joyless void to fill.

"We in the modern West are becoming hypersensitive to pain, leading us to take medicines in an obsessive manner." p132.

"Only when you accept death can you free yourself from it. Acceptance is the key. In the moment of acceptance you gain freedom power courage." Philip Gould. his quote is butchered into this sentence, but there it is. p144.

"Everything we are by way of instinct, need and desire, leads us to seek our own security... in the face of imminent death, this relentless self-concern drops away, because in such a situation there is nothing left to defend. This means that the self can open out to the world and accept it in a way that is otherwise very rarely possible. And this is a source of joy, not least because it is an immense relief." p146.

"It is a matter less of what one does than of how  one does it... We all die, but we each die our own death." 153

Comment: We each live, but we live our own life.

"Death has been stripped of much of its ritual quality and removed to the edges of our lives: death is not a permanent presence for us, as it was for those of previous ages. We have created a world in which death has no place." p164.

"Perfumes, furs, lingerie, jewels: luxurious arrogance of a world where death dos not have its place. But it is crouching behind this facade, in the secret greyness of clinics, hospitals, closed rooms. And I no longer know any other truth. (Une mort tres douce:92)" Simone de Beauvoir. p165.

"Men and women I admire, and who have died, have managed to achieve something - precisely, their death. And that gives me a powerful feeling that, if they were able to do this, so can I." p169.

Comment: Treating death as an end objective, an achievement, is missing the point in my view. The point is life, to live each moment to your death as you would want your whole life to be remembered. To be consistent, to be homogeneous in resolve, heterogeneous in experience.

Live each time-slice of your life as you would want it to be remembered, to have any slice of your life be representative of the whole, but varied, interesting, and delicious with different experiences. The only need for fear of death is of a sedentary, easy existence concerned with pleasures, luxury, and indulgence. To them, life is as temporary and fleeting as the indulgences they pursue so theirs is a fear driven by attachment to the temporary. 

I view death as a call to dinner, to bring the cows home. My work here is done. A signal to put down the drawing pen, take your foot off the weaving loom, and lay down the responsibility to live life. A weight off my shoulders, an end to suffering, a respite from a difficult and important task.

It's like a swim test, to tread water for one minute to demonstrate your ability, or tread water for 10 minutes. No one complains that the testing time was too short! No matter how much one enjoys being in the water, we would prefer to have our worth recognized in a shorter time.

That is the way I see life. I would much rather have done all that I valued in a shorter time, than to ration out life over interminable years scarce in meager portions, fearing my time is running short... that there remains so much undone... yet, doing little with the time I have.

Live fast, die young! And if life abides, then keep on living, carrying more responsibility and doing good work on this earth. Encore, be happy! Maestro play on.

But when the curtains do fall, beam with pride at the performance you've given and be grateful that the show does end! Feel relief that you are not forced to play on forever, stumbling over your keys and fumbling the notes until the tune goes sour and neither you the performer nor your thinning audience cares much at all for the show!

"[in the past people threw themselves] into all the vicissitudes and dangers of war, or staked their all upon a single die, or some one passion, which if they could not have gratified, life became a burden to them." William Hazlitt 'On the Fear of Death' (479). p171.

"We live in an age of the 'atrophy of the heart and the dulling of the senses[,] in a world where conformism and commerce, the civil service and bourgeois taboos, have taken the place of heroism and adventure' J. P. Stern. Idylls and Realities:37) p171. 

Comment: I think that idea that 'back then people were noble' is a fantasy. His complaint is an example of the "Nowadays people aren't as good' fallacy that I wrote a post about. Because back then, you'll find writings of people saying the exact same thing about their generation, compared to an even older past.

But supposing these arguments are true, I do think because security, safety to continue living seems attainable with modern living conditions (in first world countries at least. It's probably not equally true in all parts of the world, and why you have third world extremists willing to give their lives for irrational causes, whose actions are incomprehensible and repugnant to first world civilians who are sheltered in trappings of safety)...

I do think that because safety seems so securable, that we obsess over it... security controls us... we become slaves to our need for safety... we can be easily manipulated and exploited by our fear of death. The colloquialism, 'if someone puts a gun up to my head' is never answered with the choice, fuck what he wants, let him pull the trigger! Death is never an acceptable outcome because have excluded our deaths from our lives. We view life in terms of our rights, that we have the right not to die and we are offended when death either threatens our perfect plan for our future, or affects our lives through people we care about. It is rude for death to affect the living, it is reprehensible. Well, I never!

But in the societies where death is an everyday occurrence, death is talked about as daily news. It is sad, but not offensive, people don't take slight and indignation that God would let someone he cared about die. Wang died of cancer this weekend. Yes, Yan died just two months ago. Our lives go on, but acutely aware that we who are alive belong to the same selection pool as one of those who died... there is no outrage that we could be next, but a sense of fortune, maybe a little gratitude that we go on living.

We fight wars and even then we are unsettled to hear reports of casualties. "War" used to describe military invasion of these virtually militarily defenseless countries is a complete folly. They are guerilla fighters made up of resentful civilians: young men, old men, even women and children, who don't want imperial powers interfering with their country, their economy, and supporting their enemies who kill their people. If we were them, we would be heroes.

But we are not them; we use our religion and our freedom and our human rights to justify what separates us from them is good and evil. But when we fought the war of independence from Great Britain, did we not own slaves, people of an ethnicity different from ours, 1776 -1865? I'm not advocating their side as heroes, I'm trying to say, "don't forget your own idiocy" stop being such hypocrites and admit that them, us, you, everyone is evil; that you must condemn yourself as equally as you condemn others for the same acts, and not tout an air of righteousness, glorifying your own heroes and demonizing theirs.

You will argue, 'those aren't the same acts, what they do is no ways the same as the mistakes we made! Now we have learned from those mistakes and we are good people TM. Their sins are much worse!" Stoppit. That's your ego, your defense of your own guilt, your need to be right all the time doing the talking. So what if theirs is 'nothing like yours'. Oh they 'don't fall under the same category'. They are wrong and we are right. The simple observation that invalidates that argument is plain symmetry. There are self-justifying people on the other side, doing the exact same thing, with sides reversed talking about how evil you are.

Both sides are symmetrical. They can't be both right; we must conclude they are both wrong. Believing you are somehow virtuous over your enemies, that there is simple right and wrong, and that by miracle of your virtue you are always on the right side perpetuates endless violence.

The real difference is power. We are powerful, they are not. We use our claims to morality and virtue to mask that we are using power to achieve what we want. Those deluded into believing this seizing of morality to justify our selfish pursuits are the ones most capable of inflicting the most atrocities, evil, and cruelty upon their 'enemies'.

The ones who see they are simply using morality as a ruse, at least have some accountability to themselves for their crimes. The hell they inflict is dilute, because its is the power they are after, not the torturing of 'evil ones'. But the morally deluded 'good people' are the ones who have endless depths of what they would allow to be done to the 'evil', because their motivation is to defeat their wicked enemy who they think deserve the pain inflicted upon them.

Got way off track, but the thought to begin with was, we fight wars expecting our soldiers not to die, that's how different our perceptions of death have become! Death is what happens to other people, to bad people, not to good decent folk who go to church and pay taxes. We shouldn't die, we don't deserve such things happening to us. What loathsome self-dignified entitlement!

"What matters is much less the length of your life than the spirit in which you live it. The struggle to live in a spirit of integrity is also a struggle to see one's mortality for what it is, to live one's mortality... Being an individual is not so much a matter of doing what others have not done or do not do, as it is is a matter of doing it in a spirit expressive of your whole being." p176.

Comment: yeah this kind of gets to what I was saying about the consistency of living life, as you believe it, as you would want to be assessed.

Be skeptical of your own sureness!

"The advantage of being sceptical is that it helps to undercut adversity, both in oneself and with others. As Cioran points out, history is a scene of such relentless suffering inflicted by human beings on themselves and on each other because - or, at any rate, largely because - there have been endless individuals who were sure they knew the truth and sought to get others to agree with them. For those who feel sure they have the answers are usually pretty keen to impose them on others. I would add to this the point I made in the Introduction, that human beings are ontological misfits: the claim that one knows the truth is invariably an attempt to conceal from oneself one's ontological insecurity, by making it seem that one ahs the stability of truth - that one is not insecure after all." 179

comment: Stop being so sure of yourself. When you are willing to entertain the notion that you may be wrong, that others may be right, there is less of a dire situation in a Mexican stand off where it's kill or be killed.

You may be sure that a situation is all bad, someone else's fault, or even all your own fault. But don't be so sure of yourself! If you entertain the idea that you don't fully understand after all, your eyes may be open to other things going on that suggest a different picture! Or even if perspective doesn't change, be willing to use a different model of reality, if it checks out just as well to be truth but predicts better outcomes! We exist in reality, but rarely are we not living in some interpretation of reality, and not the actual thing!

"Forms of adversity - ambivalence, incomprehension, vulnerability and dissolution - are also things for which we can be grateful. We could not become adults without experiencing feelings." p183.

Comment: don't take away my emotions. They are the guide rails to personal growth. Don't drug them away, or placate my mood. It is up to me to develop internal mechanisms to grapple with them, and with that development comes growth and strength of character. There is no simple fix; you cannot swallow a pill to grow character, as modern people believe can be done to ingest vitamins, or suppress a cold, or improve mood. To take away my suffering is to take away my humanity! To feel nothing is to be devoid of humanity. You do not take away my humanity by making me suffer, but heighten my awareness of it. Ironically, mood medications are designed to suppress, when they ought to enhance emotions. They are treating the problems that arise from having humanity, by bleaching humanity out.

"Good and ill are universally intermingled and confounded; happiness and misery, wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Nothing is purely and entirely of a piece." Hume. Dialogues and Natural History of Religion: 183. p184

Comment: Happiness and sorrow are sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other. You may try to efface one side away, but a new layer will expose beneath the old one. You can keep going until you wear away the entire coin, but in destroying one side, the opposite side will be gone also.

The way to use the coin well is to flip it, let it tumble in the air, experiencing joy and pain as it animates mid-air, and let chance determine which side lands face up... then let it go for another spin.

Being happy constantly for the sake of happiness is artificial. Stupid even. Why not use our emotions for which they are intended? If sorrow, unhappiness, and discontent were such undesirable emotional mechanisms to be avoided, why do we have them in the first place? The emotions themselves are greatly useful! They alert us to sources that cause us harm, and we ought to listen to our nature, to be motivated to make something good of it! Move away, fix the problem, or become more adept at managing the threat, so that it no longer can harm us. It's only when we are not permitted, or are incapable of acting out one of these three strategies (or others) that it becomes a problem. Well, the problems are not the emotions, but that we are impotent to act!