8/25/2023 Notes: Steinbeck, The Curve, Mussbaum

This showed up today and seemed appropriate.

 We are lonesome animals.

We spend our life trying to be less lonesome.

One of our ancient methods is to tell a story

begging the listener to say

-- and to feel --

'Yes, that's the way it is,

or at least that's the way I feel it.

You're not as alone as you thought.'

-- John Steinbeck

Interventions: Related to Journal

Focus on Dreams and Twilight Imagery ... forward leaning ... emerging

Entrance meditations ... turning off analysis

Not: Where we've been but where we're going

Share readings even if stupid ... allow stupid ... learn from stupid. Neither of us are stupid so stop using the word!

Journaling is not writing ... it does not have to be "composed" nor intelligible ... it's our subconscious speaking. It's just us sharing the random bouncings of our brains in hopes of leading us forward.

Nussbaum considers the essence of good personhood, which necessitates accepting the basic insecurity of existence and embracing uncertainty. 

Mussbaum quotes I liked:

Tragedy happens only when you are trying to live well, because for a heedless person who doesn’t have deep commitments to others, Agamemnon’s conflict isn’t a tragedy…

Popova quotes I liked:

Now the lesson certainly is not to try to maximize conflict or to romanticize struggle and suffering, but it’s rather that you should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you. If you hold your commitments lightly, in such a way that you can always divest yourself from one or the other of them if they conflict, then it doesn’t hurt you when things go badly. But you want people to live their lives with a deep seriousness of commitment: not to adjust their desires to the way the world actually goes, but rather to try to wrest from the world the good life that they desire. And sometimes that does lead them into tragedy.