Day 540: Out of the Fire and into the Frying Pan
Day 540: 7 September 2022, Wednesday
The days continue to slip by like thieves in the night. Am I making progress? How am I doing, really?
‘What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.’
Charles Bukowski
I am hiding from my shadow, yet it lurks behind me with unconscious force. Like gravity, the unconscious works right on the surface of reality, or right beneath it. Right on the periphery. Sometimes you can catch it in the corner of your vision. Calling my name. Is it a warning? A sign? How do you know if a sign is for you? It’s only a sign.
‘In our economy, politics, and education, the so-called goals are too alien and the ways of reaching them therefore too complicated, not enough to hand. Everything is preparation, nothing realization and satisfaction.
The result is that the problems cannot be worked through and assimilated. The system of education results in a number of unassimilated introjects. After a while, the self loses confidence in its own appetites. There is a lack of faith, for faith is knowing, beyond awareness, that if one takes a step there will be ground underfoot: one gives oneself unhesitatingly to the act, one has faith the background will produce the means. Finally, the attempt to assimilate is given up and there is bafflement and nausea.’
Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy, p. 343
‘Fear results in giving up the appetite.’
Perls, GT, p. 343
Balance, balance, balance. There is a reason the Buddha describes the path of enlightenment as the middle way.
Providence or atoms? Why not both?
‘Without aggression, love stagnates and becomes contactless, for destroying is the means of renewal.’
Perls, GT, p. 345
Everyone you’ve ever met, those you will see today and tomorrow and next Tuesday, everyone you interact with, will eventually die and lose everything that makes them who they are. We are all in this existential condition whether we like it or not. The time is at hand when death will come. So why be anything at all? Why be anything but kindness, but love for the journey? Why be anything but considerate to the very end?
Every tragedy presupposes a hero. Every success fills the space of failure. Don’t wait for surprises to happen, instead, prepare for their arrival.
Always, always ask: How might one live?
‘You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.’
Ursula K. Le Guin
‘One must learn to distinguish between the present expressed in the feeling and this object that is merely a particular memory, and as particular lost and unchangeable.’
Perls, GT, p. 296
Are we making gradual or sudden progress? Gradual or sudden change? Is it not a rapid alternation? A lightning flash. A blink. Between them, suddenly here, now there, gradually one after the other, the whole becomes different.
Practice makes perfect, so they say. It’s all practice. Nothing is outside this, nothing escapes the wheel of time.
‘How many times a rose
Returns after the snows.’
