One of my favorites quotes goes something like “No man has ever accumulated enough wealth, knowledge, or power to escape the simple fact that ‘you win some, you lose some’.” Now, the guy who wrote that wrote a lot of stuff I don’t like or agree with, but this quote has always rang deeply true for me. I adapted it into “All life comes with problems, but I have the agency to arrange my life to have better problems than worse ones.” When the worst part of my day is, say, blisters from walking or a rude cashier, I genuinely feel happy to realize, ahhh, these are great life problems.
While part 1 had me ranting to my partner about the nuances of attachment & aversion, wondering if this article would frustrate me, haha, I ultimately found this piece to be such a breath of fresh air.
The part about negative emotions being motivating seems critical. In my opinion (and experience), it makes far more sense to cultivate skills that properly digest emotion (a middle ground between expelling & repressing), instead of cultivating a practice to never ever feel negative emotion at all. The latter sounds like a recipe for neuroticism.
One of my favorites quotes goes something like “No man has ever accumulated enough wealth, knowledge, or power to escape the simple fact that ‘you win some, you lose some’.” Now, the guy who wrote that wrote a lot of stuff I don’t like or agree with, but this quote has always rang deeply true for me. I adapted it into “All life comes with problems, but I have the agency to arrange my life to have better problems than worse ones.” When the worst part of my day is, say, blisters from walking or a rude cashier, I genuinely feel happy to realize, ahhh, these are great life problems.
While part 1 had me ranting to my partner about the nuances of attachment & aversion, wondering if this article would frustrate me, haha, I ultimately found this piece to be such a breath of fresh air.
The part about negative emotions being motivating seems critical. In my opinion (and experience), it makes far more sense to cultivate skills that properly digest emotion (a middle ground between expelling & repressing), instead of cultivating a practice to never ever feel negative emotion at all. The latter sounds like a recipe for neuroticism.