There are so many times when I reflect on
what I longed to be as a child and who I am today, where I am, honestly; sometimes,
it is frail but one profound truth remains: I found myself and I can give a
part of me that is good, at any rate. There is no god-send picture of myself
that I will present, or have ever presented; it is a message straight out of my
heart: the explanation is creativity embedded in artistry. Yes, the
common traits that people across all creative fields seem to have in common are
an openness to one’s inner life; a preference for complexity and ambiguity; an
unusually high tolerance for disorder and disarray; the ability to extract
order from chaos; independence; unconventionality; and a willingness to take
risks.
“…I stand among you as one
who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who
dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social
acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating
existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are faithful
to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God,
communication on the deepest level is possible. And the deepest level of
communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond
words, and it is beyond speech and beyond concept.”— The
Asian Journal of Thomas Merton
Healthy reminder is: things do
not always work out so well, of course. History is full of tragically failed
visions of possibility, and the more profound the vision, the more likely we are
to fall short of achieving it. But even here, Merton
has a word of hope for us, a paradoxical word, of course:
“…do not depend on the hope
of results. …you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently
worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to
what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to
concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of
the work itself.”
In broaching the possibility of
being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which
celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of
celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the repertoire;
and in which we praise whatever we can.
Our masochistic impulse for
self-criticism, he argues, arises from the fact that ambivalence is the basic
condition of our lives. In a passage that builds on his memorable prior
reflections on the
paradox of why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in romance,
Phillips considers Freud’s ideological legacy:
In Freud’s vision of things we
are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate, we love; wherever we
love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can also frustrate us; and if
someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us. We criticize
when we are frustrated — or when we are trying to describe our frustration,
however obliquely — and praise when we are more satisfied, and vice versa.
Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means
opposing feelings.
[…]
Love and hate — a too simple, or
too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right names for what we might
want to say — are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we
apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you can’t
have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way
we hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that
these contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything
we do. They are the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in
Freud’s view, about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed,
ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become
significant to us… Where there is devotion there is always protest… where there
is trust there is suspicion.
[…]
We may not be able to imagine a
life in which we don’t spend a large amount of our time criticizing ourselves
and others; but we should keep in mind the self-love that is always in play.If we give in to fears that come
with lowest of the lows, it is so often very easy to assume that those who “have
it all” are okay but beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you
question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up
for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for
any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making
paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that
there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are
limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.
In The Paradox of Choice,
Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom
and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our
psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal
prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to
the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has
paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how
our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse.
“In the course of studying learned
helplessness in humans, Seligman found that it tends to be associated with
certain ways of thinking about events that form what he termed a person’s
"explanatory style." The three major components of explanatory
style associated with learned helplessness are permanence, pervasiveness,
and personalization.
Permanence refers to the
belief that negative events and/or their causes are permanent, even when
evidence, logic, and past experience indicate that they are probably temporary
("Amy hates me and will never be my friend again" vs. "Amy is
angry with me today"; "I’ll never be good at math").
Pervasiveness refers to
the tendency to generalize so that negative features of one situation are
thought to extend to others as well ("I’m stupid" vs. "I failed
a math test" or "nobody likes me" vs. "Janet didn’t invite
me to her party").
Personalization, the
third component of explanatory style, refers to whether one tends to attribute
negative events to one’s own flaws or to outside circumstances or other people.
While it is important to take responsibility for one’s mistakes, persons
suffering from learned helplessness tend to blame themselves for everything, a
tendency associated with low self-esteem and depression. The other elements of
explanatory style–permanence and pervasiveness–can be used as gauges to assess
whether the degree of self-blame over a particular event or situation is
realistic and appropriate.
The last word: Expressing emotion when
you’ve gone through extreme pain is not weakness. It is humanity. For every man
that willfully shares a story, or an insight, be thankful—even if it makes you
mad in the heat of the moment, just think about it, hopefully you will
something—always.
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