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nicekillchanceballs · 3 years

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I Might ◑

Pairing: timeskip!Akaashi Keiji x gn!reader Genre: Hurt/comfort, a little bit of romance and fluff? Synopsis: You just wanted your coffee. Instead, you got a stranger together with your drink. Word Count: ~3.7k A/N: I never thought this would be so long please don’t get bored. I also apologize for any grammatical errors, I am so rusty, lol. This is my first work in my Love Me ◑ series. Thank you!! -- sloth 🦥 Listen to I Might ◑ here.

It’s hard to vanish without a trace And whose idea was this in the first place? I might, I might, I might Fake my death tonight So we can start a whole new life

You always have been a regular of this coffee shop you're in right now. Ever since you were a university student, up until now that you're a writer for a lifestyle magazine, you always make sure to visit this café at least every 3 months to unwind and relax -- even if it meant that you will have to starve yourself for days so that you can have the money to treat yourself at this hidden gem of a place.

You ordered your usual. Upon receiving your drink and pastry, you took a seat and table on the balcony outside overlooking the lake below. You are the only person here because the other customers are inside the shop utilizing the fireplace and heater. It is kind of chilly, luckily, you sport a thick cardigan on. You took a deep breath and the scent of coffee, cinnamon, and pine trees helped in calming your nerves down.

As you took a sip of your caramel macchiato, you are mentally listing the reasons why this place became your go-to spot. First, it is located in a place up in the mountains, so it is very cold and only a few people are braving to go here. Second, the coffee and pastries this place offers deliciously hits your coffee-loving sweet tooth. For you, no amount of Starbucks or Tim Hortons can compete with this café. Lastly, and the most important, this place witnessed and cured you of your misfortunes and depression. Every time something bad happens, being the introvert that you are, you tend to go off the grid to escape and do your "soul searching", and this place helped you with that.

You brought out your journal and pen, scribbling random thoughts that fill your overactive brain. Your friend, who is a psychologist, advised you that whenever you feel overwhelmed, you can write the feelings or things that seem to engulf you. “It somehow will help you in releasing your frustrations instead of bottling it up,'' she said.

You looked up and admired the view this place has to offer. The sky is painted pastel orange with hues of blue and purple. You noticed that fog is already forming below, hugging the pine trees around the lake. The lagoon is calm as ever, reflecting the already setting sun. You smiled as you basked in peace and contentment.

However, your tranquility was kind of disturbed when the balcony glass doors opened and a tall man with short, black, tousled hair occupied a seat two tables away from you. He looked like he stepped out of a men's fashion magazine -- he was wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses, a beige turtleneck, black jeans, a long brown coat, and a satchel sling bag. He then settled his tray with his own coffee and pastry on his table. You immediately turned your head away, afraid that this beautiful man may have caught you staring. You felt heat from your cheeks forming as you carried on scrawling in your journal. He's so beautiful, you thought.

However, as you continued to write, you remembered the face of your boss making your blood slightly boil. Well, the reason you are here is because of the stress in your workplace -- asshole superiors, some good-for-nothing co-workers, shitty salary, unreasonable work hours, and your list goes on. Once I gained my needed years of experience, I will immediately resign, I swear on the grave of that ungrateful boss bastard. This anger made you forget about the pretty man meters away from you.

Little did you know that he is also staring at you. He noticed your furrowed eyebrows and the intensity of you jotting away at your notebook. He also noticed your reddened cheeks and the breath vapor that formed as you huffed in exasperation. He was not the one to be observant towards strangers (it is only his friends that he is concerned about), but you have this certain aura that entices him. He smiled as he gulped his black coffee, pulled out his laptop from his bag, opened it, and checked some emails.

You estimated that ten minutes have already passed and you are still writing, anger somehow dissipating when suddenly you heard a loud "Hey, hey, hey, can we talk to the manager?” inside the coffee shop. You sighed because now, your peace is totally disrupted. You whipped your head to look at the commotion inside and you saw a tall man with spiky gray hair and black streaks wearing a black hoodie and jeans. That loud guy was accompanied by another taller man with messy, spiky black hair wearing a white t-shirt tucked in his slacks. The store manager then approached them. What’s with very tall, beautiful people today wanting coffee? You thought.

Shrugging, you looked again at your notebook. Without thinking, you stole a glance towards the direction of the man seated meters away from you. You saw that he was pale and his eyes were wide, frozen in shock. His gaze fell upon you, realizing that you were looking at him. He immediately scrambled from his seat and briskly walked towards you. You instinctively panicked. What is happening?!

He stopped beside your seat and he instantly crouched down, as if hiding from something. You looked down at him, your eyes also a notch bigger than normal from shock. He then softly whispered, “Under no circumstances you will tell anyone, especially them --” he motioned towards the two men inside the shop -- “that I am here. Please.” His emerald eyes are practically begging you. Hypnotized by him, you just nodded. “I’ll just hide in the comfort room, just knock four times when they are gone.” He said and then clambered away from you, making his way towards the bathroom.

You took a deep breath and sighed loudly. You are very confused as to why the man was hiding. Is he a serial killer? Are the two tall men inside detectives or something? Or are they kidnappers? Hitmen? Is the pretty boy gonna be abducted? Your mind was in overdrive. You thought of just packing up and leaving the establishment, but you sympathize with the man you just spoke with. You don’t know why, but you can relate to him.

Your musings are interrupted as the lights in the balcony lit up. Oh, the sun has already set. You glanced at your wristwatch and it was already 6:30 PM. You heard the balcony doors open and the tall, black-haired man entered, with the gray-and-black haired man following suit. Oh, shit, they are here to question me.

“Hi.” The man with black hair smiled at you. “I am Kuroo, and the noisy one there is Bokuto.”

Bokuto is smiling widely, walking towards you but is distracted by the view of the city skyline. He ran and stood beside the balcony railings. “Man, it is beautiful and cold here in Miyagi!”

Kuroo scratched his head, “I apologize for my loud friend, but have you seen a man this tall ---” he gestured his hand just near his temples, demonstrating the height of the man you spoke with earlier -- “he has green eyes and black-rimmed eyeglasses.”

“Yes, yes, he looks preppy,” Bokuto said as he finally walked towards your seat.

You cleared your throat. You have this habit of clearing your throat when you are nervous. “No, I haven’t seen anyone with that description.” You lied as you nervously sip your now cold coffee.

“Oh really?” Bokuto pouted, deep in thought. He then looked at Kuroo, pointing at the other table. “That looks like his laptop and bag.”

You almost choked on your drink as you realized that the man left his things at his table. Shit. Your mind quickly formulated a shitty lie. “Uhm, it is a girl -- an employee that is seated there, not a man.”

“Employee?” They said in unison.

“Yes. An employee of this coffee shop. That’s her laptop. They are doing interviews earlier. Job openings…” You trailed off.

The two men just nodded. Bokuto sighed loudly. “Where did Akaashi run off to? I am getting worried. He’s gone for a week already! His ex-girlfriend is so mean!”

“Hey now, he is a grown-ass man okay? I know he knows what he is doing. Let’s just resume the search tomorrow, shall we?” Kuroo patted his friend’s back.

Bokuto looked at you with his somber, amber, owl-like eyes and said, “Thank you for your help. We are very sorry for disturbing you.”

“So we’ll leave you alone now, thank you again.” Kuroo nodded at you and the pair started walking out of the balcony. You awkwardly smiled at their backs.

When Kuroo closed the balcony glass doors, you noticed his cat-like eyes lingered on you for a moment, glimpsed at Akaashi’s table, and at you again. Maybe it is just the lighting inside the coffee shop, or it is only your imagination, but you saw a small, sly smile forming on his lips. He finally turned his back and walked away.

What the heck was that? Did he know that I’m lying?! I am really a shitty liar. You ran your fingers through your hair. You then stood up and glanced around, ensuring that the two men were really gone. You immediately went to the bathroom and knocked four times. There was no response but you can hear shuffling inside. You immediately went back to your seat on the balcony.

Minutes later, Akaashi emerged from the door, went to his table, and started to gather his things. Oh, he’s leaving already, what did I expect? You thought as you softly face-palmed yourself.

“Can I sit here?”

You removed your palm from your face and looked up at Akaashi. You felt your eyes widen again. “You... You were not leaving?”

“No, not yet.”

You just nodded and removed your bag from the seat across you. He then took the said seat.

"So.." He looked sideways, afraid to meet your eyes because of embarrassment. "I think I owe you an explanation."

You just nodded again, still dumbstruck by his charm.

“To start, I am Akaashi Keiji, well… You can call me Keiji.” He took a sip of his coffee. “And contrary to what Bokuto said earlier --”

“You heard them earlier?” You finally spoke, interrupting him. Oh god, he must have heard my pathetic lies earlier.

“Uhh, yes. Those two are so loud, they sound like they swallowed microphones or something.”

You chuckled at his snarky comment. “Yeah, they really are loud.”

“Anyway… Thank you so much for what you did earlier. I am truly sorry for dragging you into this.” He scratched his head. “Good thing they fell for your alibi.”

“Yeah, Bokuto fell for it. He must really miss you.” You broke a small piece from your chocolate chip cookie and munched on it. “But for Kuroo… I don't know. I think he knows.”

“Oh, Kuroo? He really is a pain in the ass.” Akaashi rolled his eyes and sighed. “So to continue, contrary to what Bokuto said earlier, it is not because my ex-girlfriend dumped me. It's been three months ago already. I kind of expected it because I caught her cheating so many times I cannot count it with my two hands.” He said nonchalantly while holding up both of his hands.

How can he be so cool about being dumped?! You thought, then you noticed that although calloused, he has very nice hands. Blue veins were prominent in his palms, running up toward his long, slender fingers. You want to punch yourself for noticing that at this time. Hey, stupid self, this is not the time for simping on a stranger!

He continued, “I disconnected from everyone because everything is overwhelming me. My job, my boss, bills, rent… Adulting is very hard, you know?” He droned on as he fiddled the cup sleeve of his coffee. "Also, I have always wanted to be a literary editor, but instead, they assigned me as an editor in a manga magazine."

You wanted to ask how he went off the grid because you’re interested in doing that too, but he continued on ranting.

“I am usually a calm and collected person.” Akaashi gulped again on his coffee. “I usually handle problems like a breeze, not even my friends can recognize that I have problems because I immediately find ways and solve them with ease. But now, I think I reached my tipping point, and it’s very hard to keep up with this front anymore. I am just tired, then I find myself driving away from Tokyo, and here I am.” He stared into your eyes, expecting for you to say something. Akaashi surprised himself that he bared his vulnerabilities upon a stranger.

Well, you are also astonished just the same. You realized it is getting serious.

“So.. how long have you been into hiding?”

He counted in his mind. “Today is the sixth day.”

You cleared your throat again. "Since you're very honest with me, can I be very honest with you too?"

He looked at you and nodded. "Yes please. I need it."

"Promise that you won't be mad or something?"

"I promise."

"Okay, let's start." You cleared your throat again because you're nervous. "First, it's okay to admit that you're hurt because your ex-girlfriend broke your heart."

"I am not hurt--" He muttered in protest.

"Ah ah ah." You interrupted him. "Your nonchalance about it did not match the way you narrated it. Too many words for someone who did not care."

Akaashi's eyes widened, as if slapped by the truth. He ran his fingers through his hair. "Okay, okay, I think you're right." He exhaled loudly. "I gave her so many chances…" He trailed off.

"Want to talk about it?"

"Maybe later." He looked at you and in all seriousness said, "I am Akaashi Keiji and I admit I am hurt. My heart has been broken. Luckily, very recently, I think I am healing."

You smiled at him. Her ex-girlfriend must be stupid to dump a guy this pure and well.. good looking. “Okay, good, good!" You exclaimed as you took another bite of your cookie. "Well, I don't know if this helps, but I just learned that love is like trial-and-error. Some people get it right the first time, but most of the time, you will try, and try, and try, until you get it right…" Your voice trailed away.

Akaashi looked at his untouched croissant. "Yes, I think that helped." He flashed a faint smile and looked up again. "I'm ready for your next one."

"Okay. Here it goes. Yes, I very much agree that adulting is very hard."

"Right? They did not teach this in high school, nor in university." He poked his pastry.

"I cannot give insights on adulting because I'm going through it too, you know? I am just as lost as you." You removed the cup sleeve of your coffee and toyed with it. "But I can assure you, you and me, we are not the only ones lost. We just have to deal with asshole people, I guess?"

"Yeah. Fuck asshole people." He grinned.

You chuckled. You don't know why a sudden warmth spreads through your chest. Maybe it's because you made him smile? Or the fact that you, a stranger, comfort him? Or the relief that you are not alone dealing with the pressure of adulting? Or maybe all of the above?

"Ready for the third one?"

"Yeah."

"I am pretty much aware that I'm in no position to tell you this, but damn, editor already at such a young age?"

"It's not my dream job, though." He retorted.

"But you're still young." You smiled softly, even though you envy him. In the magazine company where you're working, you're only a writer, nothing more, nothing less. "You must be pretty awesome to be an editor already. You still have plenty of time to reach your dream job. No need to rush, it is not a race." Even though you're jealous of him, you can't help but be in awe of him. Good looking plus smart? Damn. I need to stop simping.

"Yeah." He rested his chin on his hands. "Once again, I guess you're right. What am I in a rush for?" He nodded. "Even though I just met you minutes ago, why are you easy to talk to? Why are you so good at this?" He looked at you with his bright, green eyes.

"Believe me, I don't know. I am usually silent but here I am, babbling things to a stranger.” You shrugged, chuckling. “I am only realizing these things now because of you. Earlier, I was down in the dumps too."

"I am going to ask you later why you are in the dumps, but in the meantime, I am ready for the next one."

You purse your lips. "Okay, Keiji, you must rejoice because this is the last one."

"Okay. I'll brace myself."

"Here it goes.” You held his gaze. “I think you're too hard on yourself. You need to loosen up."

He just blinked at you.

You folded your coffee cup sleeve and slowly tore it as you spoke. "Also, expressing emotions is not a sign of weakness. I think you are tiring yourself out because you keep a front that you are strong, that you have no problems.” You noticed that he winced. “Because of that, you get drained. You must remember that you are just as vulnerable as everyone."

He took a gulp of his now cold coffee.

You continue to tear your cup sleeve. “You don’t need to change how you act after this. You can still be withdrawn with your emotions towards others, I mean, it’s not easy to change yourself after one night, right? But the only thing important here is you need to be honest with your feelings. You should not apologize for how you feel. Also, it is never wrong to ask for help from others. If you’re hurt, acknowledge it. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, acknowledge it. If you’re tired, acknowledge it.”

You exhaled, looked up at him, and saw his eyes were watery.

Shit, is he about to cry? “H-hey, I am sorry --”

His tears finally fell. “Oh.” He touched his cheeks wet from the tears and flinched. “It’s weird. It does not stop.” He pointed at his eyes with a slight panic in his voice.

You felt your eyes water too as you grabbed your packet of tissues inside your bag. “Here, you can wipe them if you want.”

“Thank you.” He removed his eyeglasses and wiped his cheeks. “I cannot stop it.” His tears are still streaming like a waterfall.

“Good lord, when was the last time you cried?” You asked, concerned.

“I-- I can’t remember. It’s a long time ago, I guess.” He sniffed, wiped his tears again, then weakly chuckled. “I am sorry for crying --”

“Ah ah ah.” You interrupted again. “Repeat after me. You should never ---”

He cut you off, “Never apologize for how I feel. Also, be honest with my feelings. Ask help from others.”

You smiled. “Great.” It then took about a good five minutes until his silent crying stopped.

He cleared his throat. “Hey. Thank you. Crying feels good.”

“It is not in my intention to make you cry, but you’re welcome, I guess?”

He chuckled. “Uhm, do you want another drink or pastry? It’s my treat.” He offered while he wore his eyeglasses again.

“Really? Wow, thank you.” My broke ass won’t let this one pass.

“On one condition. You’ll tell me about yourself too.”

“Okay.” You beamed. “But I think you’ll be bored.”

“Nope. I am all ears.” He smiled.

“Excuse me.” A barista walked to your table and smiled at both of you. “We will close in ten minutes, any additional orders?”

The both of you shook your head and thanked the barista. He went inside again.

You looked at your wristwatch. "It's almost midnight already?!"

"Really? Time flies so fast." Akaashi said. You did not see it but he looked at you with his soft eyes.

“So... Let’s go?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The both of you packed up your things and went inside. He bowed to the store manager, then the both of you exited the coffee shop. It was so cold outside that you could see your and Akaashi’s breath. You tucked your hand inside your pockets.

“Hey. Did you also tell the manager about Bokuto and Kuroo?” You asked him.

“Yes. Thank god she is also cooperative.”

“You really thought about this, huh?”

“Of course. However, tomorrow, it’s finally time for me to appear before my friends.”

“I think Bokuto will bawl his eyes out.”

The both of you laughed.

When your giggles subsided, Akaashi spoke. “So…”

“Yeah, uhm, I’ll go this way.” You pointed at the other path. “The cabs are this way.”

“Alright.”

“Thank you, Keiji. Goodbye.” You smiled at him and started to walk away. I like him, I like to know him more, but god, he just came from a breakup. If I get attached, that would count as taking advantage of a vulnerable person, right?! You overthink as you felt your heart getting heavy with every step you take. I am very much going to regret this tomorrow. Very much. You continued to walk down the narrow path, thinking about the many things that happened today.

You are seriously pondering when you suddenly hear Akaashi shout your name, making you stop in your tracks. You turned around and he immediately appeared from your view, running, and halted in front of you.

“W-wait.” He panted, catching his breath. “You told me to be honest with my feelings.”

You just blinked at him, already panicking on the inside.

He fished his phone out of his pocket and handed it to you. “Please input your phone number. I want to see you again.”

“B-but Tokyo is far from Miyagi --”

“Ah ah ah.” He copied the way you interrupted him earlier and smirked. “It will be worth the drive.”

You felt your heart beat faster as if it wanted to escape your ribcage. “Okay.” You mustered as you typed your number in his phone and thanked the gods that it is somehow dark or else he will see your tomato cheeks right now.

You looked up at him and handed him his phone with your cold, trembling hands.

“This not a fake number?”

“What? No.”

“Just making sure.” He smiled at you.

The moon has never been so bright that night.

#akaashi keiji #akaashi x reader #hq fanfic #hq akaashi #haikyuu songfic #haikyuu reader insert #haikyuu fluff #haikyuu time skip #haikyuu!!#haikyuu #haikyuu x reader #haikyū!!#haikyuu comfort #akaashi #akaashi scenarios

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paradise-of-guilty-pleasures · 4 years

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Shattered Reflections {22}

[Helsa RP- Fanfic]

Fandom: Frozen

Genre: Post-Frozen/ Canon Divergence

- Hurt/Comfort, Drama, Romance

Pairing(s): Hans/Elsa, Kristoff/Anna

Previous Chapter:21. Nonchalant

A/N:

Direct continuation of the previous chapter. I'm really bad at updating I had this done since I posted the last chapter, but just kept pushing off the update. I have two other chapters. IDK how soon I should post them, cause I don't want to spam them.

22. Waltz of the Snowflakes

Elsa was appeased knowing that in the future, even if Hans didn't continue to stay in the castle, he would still want to put down roots somewhere nearby, remaining somewhere between the castle and the sea. Not straying far from her, staying at her beck and call. The idea eased more than her mind, it really seemed to warm her heart as well.

Her heart had been feeling a little lighter that night. It was a strange sensation to have it be constantly aflutter. She didn't quite fathom why the feeling seemed to be lingering longer than it usually did. Though she just thought it was more peculiar than particularly unpleasant. Her heart's flutter was not the most abnormal thing she was presently experiencing either. Stranger still was the sudden surge in her magic, that desperately wanted to break free. A tingling extruded from her extremities, yet the unexpected swirling of magic within her didn't feel like any of the normal outburst that often occurred when she got anxious. This burst of power was somewhat different, it seemed more euphoric, if she had to make a comparison she'd consider it to be closer to the feeling of when she let it go for the first time in forever, more than anything else. The abrupt sensation scouring through her body puzzled her a bit because she didn't understand why now? Most of the time her powers started acting up was when she felt more negative emotions, currently she was feeling quite the contrary, in fact she was rather content, but she didn't think that alone would warrant her powers to swell inside her.

Elsa had a soft smile on her face. She had been curiously looking down at her hands.

"Yeah, I-Oh?" she began to respond, but she suddenly stopped when she spotted a snowflake slowly drift by her nose. Elsa looked up and saw that a small flurry had formed above her which was starting to softly drop snowflakes around her. This was new. "That's...strange. What is going on?'' She commented pointing up a bit stunned at what was occurring, being surprised by her own powers was something that didn't happen quite often. Her icy blues were opened wide, transfixed on the abnormal snowfall. "I have absolutely no idea why my powers decided to be unruly right now."

Hans grimaced a little at the thought.

"Should I be worried, your Majesty? I seem to recall the last time they got unruly was a rather painful experience for all of us." He laughed a little nervously and shifted somewhat uncomfortably to give her space. Not because he was afraid of her, but because he was reminded that she should be afraid of him.

"Hm? No, I don't think so, it's nothing that drastic," she assured, she flicked her wrist and the flurry vanished. "I think I have it under control."

Elsa turned facing towards the window and began to test her control over her powers. She quickly conjured a variety of forms which she quickly transfigured. She began the release of her pent-up magic with a snowman much like Olaf which collapsed and reconfigured to a horse, followed by a replica of her Ice Castle that then turned in on of the Arendelle Castle. After seeing enough of her perfect precision over her magic she let it dematerialized.

She hummed in confusion. "That was rather odd, I know my powers sometimes seep out when I feel anxious, but the thing is I didn't think I was feeling that way at all, also it usually tends to be ice not snow." Elsa was perplexed, she pressed her lips. She might have thought it wasn't due fatigue but she didn't think that was the case either. She really was clueless.

"Hmm, ice for danger, snow for... something else? Something lighter?" Hans proposed, perplexed and intrigued as he leaned back to watch her work upside-down. He grunted a little and righted himself when she was done, finding he couldn't process anything upside-down, anyway. He seized upon a strange idea, and pushed himself to his feet. In spite of his drinking earlier, he seemed perfectly steady. He'd had some time to process the alcohol, after all. He offered her his hand.

"Perhaps it only makes sense to women who've known me in more pleasant circumstances, but I've just realized we've known each-other for a rather long time now, and I'm not certain I've ever asked you for a dance. That's not very like me." He mused. He wondered if that would change the ice as well. He wasn't sure what he thought he was doing, but somewhere deep down, it felt like that made sense. Dancing would illuminate things. He often liked to dance and think at the same time.

Elsa thought Hans' hypothesis about the snow seemed rather reasonable, but she wondered why something similar hasn't occurred sooner. Dance? The invitation caught her off guard, bringing out a blush on her cheeks yet again. She gawked at him, from his offered hand to his contemplative face. Elsa couldn't determine whether his proposition or the snow were the far stranger between the two. Though she decided she'd take his suggestion as part of the tipsy foolishness he'd warned her about earlier.

"Um, you have not," she responded. "Though I'm uncertain what that has to do with anything," she started in confusion, yet her own hand already seemed to be hesitantly dancing to determine whether or not she should take his hand. "Also I'm not much of a dancer, I'm certain I'm quite bungling at it."

"Not a thing." He assured sweetly. "Unless it does and I don't know. You don't have to be good, I like a simple box-step. Trust me to lead and you'll do fine." He assured, never wavering in his offer. "I'm in the habit of dancing often. There were always maids around to dance with at home, so it was a good way to pass the time, hold a conversation, pretend everything was alright." He assured, at least he admitted the truth; it was pretending.

Elsa teetered a bit more, she paused, looking him over one more time, intently gazing into his eyes for a long moment.

"Alright," she said softly as she gently grasped his warm hand with her own. Elsa figured dancing was something a bit more formal anyway, an activity royals partook in often, even if she herself wasn't one of them. Besides, they had certainly already been a lot more intimate than that before, so taking up on his offer couldn't possibly hurt, could it? He was also her friend now, surely that's something they do together. Regardless of all the logical reasoning (or excuses as others may prefer to see them) the reality was that a part of her strongly wanted to feel his ever emanating warmth against her skin once again.

Hans smiled a little to himself and positioned their arms as he walked her out a little ways from the bed. Just as well that it was simple, he was still injured and couldn't exactly do a whole lot of activity. He hummed a tune with the appropriate rhythm and held her close while he led, starting slow for her and picking up to match the music as she got the pattern.

"There we are. An easy box-step." He sounded pleased with that, continuing at the same pace, as constant and inevitable as the tide.

Elsa did struggle a bit at first, stumbling and not perfectly matching the pattern, but with Hans taking the lead and his gentle guidance she seemed to be getting the hang of it fairly quickly. She had been pretty preoccupied at first trying to focus all her attention on her feet, but now she had gotten more control over her motor skills and could actually look at him.

"I do beg your pardon if I step on your toes too hard, but I do think I'm finding my footing."

"Oh, you're not the first person I've guided through the steps, and you've had a little more practice than some of the maids." He assured her, not minding at all. "I'm a tough young man, I can handle being trodden on once or twice." He joked, carrying on the pace without worry, and just enjoying the rhythm of the movement. It wasn't often that he shared something from home that wasn't angry or depressing. It was just a nice thing he held onto and brought wherever he went. An odd habit he enjoyed. A simple box-step for no good reason other than that it was enjoyable.

"Only a bit of practice, not much though, definitely not the adequate amount that a Queen should know. Certainly ill-prepared for any royal social gathering. Luckily I don't have to partake in those if I don't desire," she assured. "Hopefully you don't get trodden thrice I'm afraid to find out what happens then," she joked back with a giggle.

Their dancing had made yet another bittersweet memory re-emerge, it was her dancing with her father when she was a little girl, stepping on his toes being half his size. Happy memories with her parents were so few and far between she often wondered if they had just been lovely dreams she made up in her solitude.

"Everyone misses a few things they ought to know, there's not enough time in one's youth to get all that information at once." Hans assured, with unusual amounts of forgiveness for himself. He said it as if to brush away her anxieties and shield her from them. "At any rate, you're doing a lovely job. You've got the grace to dance, just not the training. Never mind it, it will come." He assured her, though confident for no particular reason except to make her feel better.

"That's for certain, might as well learn how to do some of that stuff now," Elsa smiled. "Thank you, probably wouldn't be as lovely without an excellent instructor." She complimented. Elsa thought the two of them just dancing for no particular reason was rather nice. Just being in each other's company always felt right, more so when they shared pleasant moments (which unexpectedly involved much warmth and caresses exchanged between an Ice Queen and a quondam Prince).

"It's surprising, I must've danced with half the girls in the Isles by now, just by fact of how many maids we hire. But I don't tell everybody I play the harp. Funny how one can get things out of order, going to a new place." He observed, smiling slightly as he danced with her. He hummed again, a slow, perhaps even romantic song. It had to be slow, starting to learn, every song felt much faster, but that didn't ease the romantic tension any. Romantic tension that Hans didn't seem to mind, if he noticed it. "Hmm. Is that so? I guess that makes me part of the lucky few. You know I'd still very much love to hear you play for me, and there's a harp waiting to be used in the music room, most likely untuned, but it's there," she reminded him warmly. "But perhaps not right now, but someday soon would be nice," she encouraged with a sweet smile and softness in her eyes.

"Certainly, I'd love to play for you. Any time you and I are both in, perhaps a tea time, if you're not occupied elsewhere." He proposed lightly. 'elsewhere' being Anna, no doubt. "I suppose it's only fair, I'm one of the lucky few who has seen you with your hair down, I've no doubt." He glanced to her hair, with something all too fond in his eyes. Perhaps it was good that his hands were occupied with the form of the dance, else he might have tried to touch it. That surely would have been... bad?

"Of course, tea time might actually be the most opportune time to have a rendezvous, I'm seldom occupied during tea time, I usually spend them alone in the library, so I would definitely enjoy it if you joined me and spend one together," she eagerly assured him. Elsa became a bit more bashful with his observation of her hair, especially with the way he looked at her with his green gleaming eyes. She slightly averted her face from meeting his gaze directly, bringing one of her crimsoning cheeks near her shoulder, yet a smile stayed on her face. Suddenly, another soft sprinkling of snowflakes started to surround, not just Elsa, but the both of them.

Hans couldn't help but smile a little at the snowflakes. "I thought a dance might draw a little flurry out of you." He hummed. But he wasn't sure yet what they meant. Just that they were a good thing. "That, or I'm very wrong and it's a sign you're coming down with a... cold." He giggled a little at the pun he only realized was there as he was telling it. "Oh there's snow way to talk to me without puns eventually, I'm afraid." He had been spending time with Kristoff and Olaf. If anything he now had more horrible puns.

Elsa was still bemused by the snowflakes produced by her unpredictable powers. She looked at them with wonder trying to make sense of what they meant, but still had no clue besides recognizing that it was somehow linked to her current bliss.

She laughed a little at his pun. "Oh, I don't get colds and even if I did I think you'd snow." She thought it was rather silly, but that didn't stop her from trying.

Hans laughed a little more at her returned pun. He looked different when he smiled with his eyes, hints of crow's feet that showed only in the rare event that he was genuinely that happy.

"Should we stop, or should I go for 'Icy what you did there'?" He teased. "Ah, it's late, isn't it? Or perhaps early, by now? Should I stop distracting you before bed?" Yet they still danced. He seemed to dance by habit, hardly noticing he was doing it.

"It would indeed be wise to get some rest before daybreak,"she said softly, yet was reluctant to let go, not knowing when they'd be able to share another warm moment like this again.

Hans slowed the dance all the same.

"Another dance another time?" He proposed gently. "I can see I still have some healing to do before I take on the guard training full time. I'll have a little time." He suggested. He smiled a little to himself, perhaps realizing how that sounded. Almost as if he would be going away to war, though it was truthfully not far a walk from the castle doors to the guard's barracks. But, he knew she was a busy woman.

"Perhaps," she smiled. "This has been rather nice and I could also really use the practice." And there it was again, adding some other justification, she just couldn't seem to allow herself to admit that she wanted to do it solely for her own pleasure.

Even though Hans wasn't going too far once he healed, she still wanted to cherish and indulge herself with more of these warming moments. She wanted to enjoy this freedom of spending time together, since it wasn't going to last forever.

He nodded, and finally let her go, if slowly. He was as reluctant for her to leave as she was.

"I shall see you when you next want my presence, I suppose." He hummed, but he said it with a little smile. He liked it when she visited. She had asked herself if she was treating him like a bird in a cage to sing for her-- but she had never thought about whether he liked to be her songbird.

The snowflakes ceased, yet she hadn't been paying so much attention to them anymore.

"I suppose so," She affirmed, tucking some of her hair behind her ear, with her now free hand. "I guess, I'll see me, wait no, I meant you, ah anyway, I'll see you fairly soon then." Elsa assured with a slight stumble with her words, similar to how she'd done earlier with her feet. "Possibly tomorrow if I'm able." Of course, she was talking about finding time rather than asking permission. She had already been keeping her promise (to the best of her ability) of coming to visit him, if only for a short amount of time. So there was no doubt she'd be back, but she liked to reassure him anyway.

Hans nodded, looking hopeful and encouraged about it.

As soon as Elsa left, he returned to the bed, to sleep almost instantly. He'd had quite a busy day, after all. But he would sleep comfortable, thinking of all the positive things-- but especially of the snow.

Elsa had gone to sleep much later than she intended, she laid in bed, her mind lost in contemplation. You'd think sleep would come easy after such a lovely evening with both Anna and Hans, and perhaps it would have if something else wasn't tormenting her thoughts.

What kept her mind restless was the mystery surrounding why her magic had been acting up that night. It had only caused her powers to amplify and an involuntary snowfall, two things that weren't at all bad, just unexpected.

It had also been a different sensation than prior times her magic had been rowdy and that was a bit disconcerting. Something like that had never happened to her before, even blissfully being with Anna, which she believed bore the closest resemblance to what she felt with Hans. Yet with Anna she only felt a warmth that flowed from her heart, a melting sensation, but in a good way. That was not at all what had happened with Hans, she did feel something strange in her heart, but it wasn’t quite the same.

So that brought up the pressing question: Did the new outburst have something special to do with Hans? If so, what was so different? Why did it only happen with Hans and not with Anna too? She started thinking about what made her powers tick, she knew that both fear and love were catalysts that amplified her magic, she hadn't been feeling the former so that only left the latter. Love. Could love really be involved in what caused the outburst? She was certainly fond of Hans, there was no doubt about that, he was her friend now, but could it be she felt something more than amiable affinity? Could she maybe really...no, that'd be silly. Elsa brushed that thought away, perhaps she was overthinking things again, like she tended to. Whatever caused the occurrence Elsa decided it was best not to continue worrying about it that night and instead get some much needed rest.

#Helsa #Iceburns #Hans x Elsa #frozen #Fanfiction #Frozen Fanfiction #Fanfic #Shattered Reflections

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bookburnt · 5 years

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a primer course on T.MA for my mutuals who followed me from other blogs and would like to know what the fuck i’m talking about! (hi, guys. love you.) GONNA BE SPOILER-HEAVY IN HERE.

First off, big ups to the T.MA wiki, which you can consult on anything here, but this post is intended to serve as a very basic overview of the concepts relevant to this blog without forcing y'all to go into wiki levels of detail. The first part of this post is some general TMA terms and concepts, and the second part is some characters who have been relevant to Gerry's story specifically. If you're here for a better understanding of Gerry’s arc and don't care so much about the worldbuilding, scroll down to where I start talking about “who’s...?” and that should help you out.

what’s a “Leitner?” A Leitner is a book but spooky. They make bad things happen and, optionally, give you weird powers. They're usually tied to one of the fourteen(ish) Entities, which I will get into in a bit. Gerard hates these goddamn books, and has a knack for finding them and destroying them. His mother, Mary Keay, ran an antique bookstore that did serious business in them.

what’s an “avatar?” An avatar is a (former?) human working closely with one of the Entities. Over time, the influence of their Entity changes them, often granting them certain powers in exchange for a psychological and physiological need to serve their Entity.

what are these “Entities?” / what’s this “Hunt?” Put as simply as possible, the Entities are, like... fear elementals. There are roughly 14 different entities, though the boundaries between them aren’t clearly drawn in all circumstances. As follows, a quick overview:

The Eye. Fear of being surveiled. The need to know the answers to questions that may destroy you. The Eye is tied to the Magnus Institute. Its avatars can have the ability to magically Know things, understand all languages, and compel others to answer any questions they ask. Gerry was tied to the Eye and had some capacity for Knowing stuff, but wasn’t fully its avatar - or if he was, he refused to feed it, which must have hastened his death.

The Desolation. Fire, but without the warm fuzzy bits. Pure unhinged destruction. Desolation avatars can and will set you on fire with their minds. Gerry’s extensive burn scars are the result of fucking around with a Desolation cultist and finding out. (The cultist also fucked around with Gerry and found out. He’s not around anymore.)

The Hunt. Being tracked by something that won't stop until it kills you. The thrill of the chase. Hunt avatars are capable of killing other avatars, even those who would otherwise be unkillable. The possibility of Gerry being tied to the Hunt is never discussed in canon, but I’ve got my theories. (That last phrase is a link to a post discussing those theories, it just isn't showing up like a link on desktop for some reason.)

The End. Death and dying. Manifestations of the End often involve disruptions of the natural processes of life and death. For instance, the fucked-up necromancy book that Gerry got trapped in after dying was an outcropping of the End.

The Corruption. Bugs, disease, rot, etc. The Corruption's avatars may spread disease wherever they go, or they might just be chock full of worms. Potential of controlling a worm army.

The Flesh. The inherent weirdness of existing in a body. Cannibalism. Flesh avatars may be hulking, twisted parodies of the human form. They might steal your bones, turn you inside out, eat you, or all of the above.

The Distortion. The inherent weirdness of existing in a mind. Doors that shouldn't be there. Getting lost. Being unable to trust your own thoughts. Distortion avatars look, well, distorted when seen in reflections or through glass. Will probably try to get you to go through a door that wasn't there before. You won't like what's on the other side.

The Slaughter. War. Violence. Man's inhumanity to man. The Slaughter often manifests in groups as well as in individuals, so you could get an episode of mass hysteria where an entire small town turns to butchering one another, or you could get an office assistant who just aches to do murder.

The Web. Spiders. Being controlled by external forces. Can operate in extremely subtle ways. Can also just be an unkillable spider who wants you to have a bad time.

The Vast. Really big things. Heights. Your own terrifying insignificance on the cosmic scale.

The Buried. Claustrophobia. Being buried alive.

The Lonely. Being completely alone. Like, completely alone, and never coming back.

The Dark. What it says on the tin.

The Stranger. Something that's not quite right. A joke that you're not in on. Clowns and/or mannequins that might kill you and take your skin.

BONUS: The Extinction. While the other 14 fears have been established for a while (the most recent is the Flesh, which only really came into its own with the advent of mass meat farming), the Extinction is a nascent entity born of anxiety around the idea of the human race destroying itself, and/or being replaced by something else. The boundaries of what constitutes an Extinction manifestation, rather than just a warping of one of the other fears, are unclear.

what’s a “ritual?” Rituals are ways the Entities’ followers and avatars try to influence the world, usually with the end goal of making our world somewhere their Entity can live and feast full-time instead of just sporadically popping in.

what’s the “fearpocalypse?” The only successful ritual to date, as of the end of S4. Possibly the only successful ritual ever, given that it ended the world as we know it and let all 14 fears fully through the gate to fuck everything all the way up. The sky is full of eyeballs now and that's not even the biggest problem. This happened a while after Gerry’s death, but I have a verse where, due to his previous ties to the End and the general befuckening, Gerry is brought back to have a bad time with everyone else.

who’s Mary Keay? Gerard's mother, founder and proprietor of Pinhole Books. Had ambitions of starting a dynasty of supernatural power, starting with her only son Gerard, who ended up having other ideas. Flayed herself in a ritual to make herself “beyond death” via the fucked-up necromancy book mentioned earlier. Gerard was primed to take the fall for her seeming murder, but was let go after the book disappeared from evidence and several key witnesses retracted their testimony. Despite the ritual being incomplete, Mary remained tethered to the world of the living for five years before Gertrude Robinson finally wrapped that up.

who’s Gertrude Robinson? Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, and a stone-cold BAMF with a habit of sacrificing those close to her for (her idea of) the greater good. The late Eric Delano asked her to look after his son Gerry, so naturally she let him live in torment with his abuser’s revenant for five fucking years, then swooped in when he was truly desperate. She got rid of Mary Keay for good, and got Gerard to travel the world with her attempting to prevent various apocalyptic rituals. The two would often pose as mother and son to strangers. Being tied to the Eye, Gertrude seemed to be aware of Gerard’s impending death. After he passed away, she bound him into that fucked-up necromancy book and left him behind. (More on that here.) Gertrude was shot to death about a year later while trying to burn the Magnus Institute down and thereby prevent its head, Elias Bouchard, from doing anything apocalyptic. (Tragically, she did not succeed. SEE: “fearpocalypse.”)

who’s Eric Delano? Gerry’s father. Died too early to ever really get to know Gerry, despite the sacrifices he made to restructure his life for fatherhood. (We don’t need to go into the why of it here, but he did have to gouge his eyes out to try to be a stay-at-home dad. And he did it. We stan.) Unfortunately, he’d fallen in love with Mary Keay, who used him to produce an heir for her planned empire, then murdered him with a pair of garden shears and bound him into that fucked-up necromancy book. She later passed his page off to Gertrude Robinson, who spoke with him. In that conversation, he asked her to look after Gerry and begged her to burn his page, as being bound into the book was a world of suffering.

who’s Jurgen Leitner? A rich, reclusive Norwegian who thought it would be cool and smart to start a library explicitly for corralling forces beyond human comprehension. (He was wrong, and also stupid.) Collected spooky books and put his name in them, giving them their common name. Gerard hates this guy, associating him with the books that dominated his mother’s mind and indirectly ruined his life. He hunted Leitner down and nearly beat him to death for personal reasons. Upon meeting Leitner, he came away with the impression that this was just a scared old man, and couldn’t possibly be actually responsible for Jurgen Leitner’s library. Ultimately, he chose to spare Leitner's life. Unless we're talking about my canon-divergent Hunter!Gerry au, in which case he did not.

Anyways, hope this has been helpful. There's... a lot going on in TMA, but hopefully I've hit the parts that are most relevant to my writing here. If you have any questions about canon, please feel free to ask!

#and return from the ashes you call | RE: MARY ⚿#with all the lies in the books | RE: LEITNER ⚿#I'm writing this letter and wishing you well | RE: GERTRUDE ⚿#⁠he said son when you grow up— | RE: ERIC ⚿

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dil-efgar · 5 years

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How to Create a Vision Board 2020

I lately invested time revising my personal vision/mission declaration for my coaching method. While doing this, it struck me that the vision I have for my job is carefully associated to my personal vision. Working that reflects my individual vision is powerful since it has permitted me to create an organisation life for myself that absolutely reflects who I am.Companies understand all concerning vision

and objective statements and getting their staff members on board. Vision and goal declarations propel the business in the instructions that they desire, as well as inevitably towards success. A lot of us have spent countless hours servicing these declarations for our employers and also doing our part to add to their vision as a part of the team. Just like a company, we, as people have a function or mission in life.What if we

spent as much time learning more about that we are and what we desire for ourselves? A personal vision/mission declaration is the structure for developing a powerful life. Unlike an objective, a vision or objective seldom changes. It is a factor for our existence. It overviews us in the choices we make and also the instructions we take.Your Personal Vision Close youreyes and also photo on your own in the future.

It might be a few months or years from today. See the individual you are; what you are doing, who you are with, what you have achieved, what is essential to you, and also how people connect to you. How does it really feel to be you? Really feel the person you are, your real self. Now, open your eyes and see your life and also on your own in today, through those eyes. You will begin to notice the modifications you require to make to honour this vision and lead a powerful life. A Personal Vision is a photo of your True Self in the future. An effective individual vision includes all the important aspects of your life and job; it is who you want to be, what you wish to do, exactly how you wish to really feel, what you wish to own, as well as who you intend to connect with. Although your individual vision aids you to see into the future, it has to be grounded in the existing. It is a declaration of who you are, and who you are ending up being. It is the framework for the procedure of creating your life. Your vision is where you are headed, just how you get there is your mission statement.Your Personal Goal Statement A Personal Objective Declaration is just how you will

materialize your Individual Vision in your daily life.

It might be a couple of words or several web pages, however it is not a"to-do "list. It mirrors your originality and should speak with you powerfully about the person you are as well as the person you are coming to be. Keep in mind, it's fine to be where you are while heading someplace else. In reality, the only place you can begin is where you are right now. Having an individual vision does not imply your life modifications over night. Yet it will certainly transform. Your individual mission statement offers the actions to obtain you there.Your Personal Goal Statement should address 3 inquiries: What is my life regarding(Purpose)? What do I mean(Values )? What actions do I require to manifest my Function and myValues?Stephen Covey writes that an equipping Objective Statement: Stands for the inmost and best within

you. It appears of a solid link with your deep internal life. Is the fulfilment of your very own special presents. It's

the expression of your unique ability to add. Addresses and also incorporates the

four basic human requirements as well as abilities in the physical, social/emotional, mental and also spiritual dimensions. Manage all the considerable functions in your life. It stands for a lifetime equilibrium of individual, household, job, community-whatever duties you really feel are yours to load. Is written to inspire you-not to impress any individual else. It connects to you and also inspires you on the most crucial level."Producing a Personal Mission Statement will certainly be, without inquiry, among the most effective and also significant points you will ever do to take management of your life. In it, you will certainly determine the most crucial duties, connections, and also points in your life -who you intend to be, what you wish to do, to whom and also what you desire of providing your life, the principles you

want to anchor your life to, the legacy you want to leave. All the objectives as well as choices you will make in the future will be based upon it. It's like determining very first which wall you wish to lean your ladder of life against, and also then beginning to climb. It will certainly be a compass-a strong resource of assistance amid the stormy seas and also pressing, drawing currents of your life. "Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Practices of Highly Effective People An Individual Vision/Mission can aid push you into a brand-new task or make your present task work better for you. The even more connected your Individual Vision/Mission is to yourself, the better it can guide your profession and also your life.What makes effective individuals successful?We would all love to be able to stroll down to the local supermarket as well as grab a bottle of success. However let's look past that fantasy as well as figure out one of the a lot of fundamental factors why individuals

end up being successful.Right now, consider someone that you recognize directly that achieves success. Can you see their face in your mind? Good.Now ask on your own this question,"Does this person have a successful regular or set of practices that makes them effective?"I would be surprised if they didn't. Occasionally the only difference in between succeedingand also being typical is having successful practices. Some examples of successful practices could be standing up earlier, doing point when they need to be done, being prepared, or efficient time management.So how do you begin to develop these success routines in your life? Right here are 4 ideas on producing effective routines.1. Recognize-- Locate the locations in your life that requirement transforming. Document these brand-new routines that need to be developed. Do not

come to be overwhelmed at trying to identify just how you are going to develop all of these habits.2. Pick 2-- Many people undermine themselves by trying to transform everything at the same time.

Rather, select one significant and one minor habit that you intend to form. For the following 30-90 days these will certainly be the success habits that you will certainly produce.3. Begin little-- Since you have your two success practices, create a daily or once a week routine that is easy to adhere to. For circumstances, allow's say that you wish to get up

a hr previously to make sure that you can get more successful points done. As opposed to setting your alarm system a hr earlier right at the beginning,

only established it 2-5 minutes previously every morning up until you reach your objective. In this manner it would certainly take you 30 days or 12 days specifically to develop your success habit.Remember, the ideal method to consume an elephant is one bite at a time.4.

Repeat-- As soon as you have created your new habits go on to the following 2 success practices that you want to develop. Prior to you recognize it you will certainly have produced a whole new life full of success loaded habits.Just imagine where you will remain in one

year if you comply with these 4 secrets to developing effective behaviors. If it takes you only 60 days to produce 2 behaviors, you will certainly have created 12 success habits in just one year!

If you want to learn how to create a vision board in more detail, check this video https://youtu.be/pkIB3v_umP8

youtube

#how #to #create #vision #board #2020

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Homicide: Life on the Street seasons 1-2 full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

7.69% (one of thirteen).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

20.58%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Zero.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Five (season one episode three ‘Night of the Dead Living (16.66%), episode six ‘Three Men and Adena’ (11.11%), episode eight ‘And the Rocket’s Red Glare’ (15%), and episode nine ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (11.11%), plus season two episode one ‘See No Evil’ (12.5%)).

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty. Five who appeared in more than one episode, one who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixty-eight. Eighteen who appeared in more than one episode, nine who appeared in at least half the episodes, and five who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Surprisingly good, even progressive for a show from the early nineties. There are some very self-aware considerations of race, gender, and sexuality, and clear distinctions between what is considered ‘depraved’ and what is merely ‘alternative’ (distinctions which modern-day conservatives twenty-five years later seem to still be struggling with). The place where the hammer of judgment falls hardest is on any cop who allows personal prejudice to interfere with their work (average rating of 3.15).

General Season Quality:

Magnificent. To some fans, the first season is undoubtedly the best of the series, and it is certainly true that the show in that initial raw form achieved a beating heart of idiosyncratic realism that future seasons rarely - if ever - matched. That, really, is the highest praise one might levy; at its best, the show feels like reality. There have been many pale imitations of H:LOTS since its heyday, but no equals.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

I know, I didn’t do any individual episode posts. I didn’t accidentally publish this review without posting the other ones first: I decided not to write individual episode posts for this show. To be honest, I don’t love the decision, and if I ever do summary-posts-only for a show again, it’ll be under very special circumstances, because it’s really not ideal and there’s a good reason I chose the individual-episode-posts format for this blog in the first place. The only reason I’m pushing against my better judgment and doing summary-posts-only for this show is because, frankly, I think there are only maybe three people on tumblr who ever watched H:LOTS. This is possibly my favourite show in the world (top three, for sure), but it has been largely lost to the memory of history, and it’s also not generally in the habit of giving me a lot to talk about in the context of this blog, episode by episode. It has some good fodder - some fantastic fodder, even - but if I broke it down one episode at a time I fear I’d end up with a Hell of a lot of posts without a lot of content, and with even less of an interested audience. So, I’m gonna cut to the chase, and just do season summaries, touching on the good (and the bad) content in collective instead of stretched over 122 episode posts. My apologies to the three people who wish I would draw this out.

Also worth noting as we segue into actually discussing the show: I’ve combo’d seasons one and two here because they’re only nine and four episodes long, respectively, and they are frequently packaged together (my DVDs put them all in one box). Sometimes the two seasons are actually labelled and sold as ‘season one’, and season three is consequently labelled ‘season two’, and so on, but I have avoided that unnecessary act of confusing streamlining to refer to them as they were intended and presented when they aired. There are immediate differences to be noted between the first nine episodes and the four that comprise season two: the beige colour-grading of the first season (sometimes so desaturated it almost looks like it’s in black and white) has been lifted to a more vibrant look, and the cases are a little more sensational/unusual than season one’s primarily drab and simple murders. That drab simplicity was what made the first season arguably the best, the key to its realism: murder is rarely an art, rarely complicated, rarely cleverly committed or cleverly covered up. Most of the cases in the first season are lifted directly from real-life cases depicted in journalist David Simon’s non-fiction novel Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the exploration of the Baltimore Homicide Department upon which the show is based. Sensationalism or strangeness are not often part of the first season because they are not often part of reality, and the show is about the job, not the cases. It’s about the life, the people who have to dig into the ugliness of murder, and the way they deal with that, the world that their work shapes around them. I’m not normally a fan of cop shows for the way they wallow in gratuitously sick ideas, always searching for a ‘hook’ to make the crime they depict interesting by being more awful, more grisly, more voyeuristic than anything you’ve seen before. In a word, more sensational. I’ve also made no secret on this blog of my sincere disdain for so-called ‘gritty realism’, because it is commonly wildly unrealistic, and just an excuse to tell stories about horrible people being horrible to each other while the show tries to insist that that’s just how people are. Homicide’s avoidance of sensationalist narratives and its reliance on realism-for-realism’s-sake allow it to avoid the common pitfalls of both cop shows and try-hard ‘gritty realism’. It was a shake-up of the standard tv formula that almost had the show axed after one season, and which led to that ridiculously tiny second season as the network grappled with a critically-acclaimed, Emmy-winning series that was just never designed to be a big ratings winner. What made Homicide great was also what the network slowly squeezed out of it over time as they tried to shape a more traditional cop show, and it’s why no matter which season a fan chooses as their favourite, you can pretty much guarantee they won’t choose the last one. But, we’ll get to that. For now: seasons one and two.

The obvious thing we have to talk about (it is why we’re here, after all) is the ladies. Or, the lady, singular. This is not a female-heavy show, but there is at least one solid reason for that: the presence of only one female homicide detective is not a piece of token inclusion for the show, it’s an accurate reflection of the dynamics of the real-life Baltimore Homicide Department at the time. It’s an important reality here, because it’s something which significantly impacts that single female detective’s life: Kay Howard, as a character, is forced to interact with the conspicuousness of her womanhood on a regular basis. To its credit, the writing does not define Howard by her gender and she is able to have a personality and be a detective first and foremost instead of being ‘the woman, who does woman things, handles woman cases, and talks about being a woman all the time while the male characters feel compelled also to mention her femaleness whenever they notice what a woman she is, which is always’. That said, her gender is something that Howard cannot escape from in her context, something which inevitably sets her apart. This is brought up in particularly notable ways in ‘A Dog and Pony Show’, the only episode that passes the Bechdel (and does so more than once), in which Howard comes down hard on young female officer Schanne. Howard’s partner Felton calls her on it, suggesting that she hates other women, and Howard insists that the reason she is tougher on women than on men is because she expects more from them. As the only female homicide detective in town, Howard feels a strong pressure to represent her gender with conduct beyond reproach, and she takes it as a personal slight when she encounters other women whom she perceives as letting the team down, or of being appointed to their positions to satisfy quotas rather than earning them through merit. Later in the same episode, Howard and Felton have an awkward moment when Felton says he’s not even remotely attracted to her, and Howard pushes him to be honest - not because she wants him to be interested, but because she’s offended by the thought that he has stripped her of her gender in his own mind in order to perceive her as ‘just one of the guys’. Howard’s relationship with her womanhood is rife with contradictions; she is both proud of it, and dogged by internalised misogyny. She wants to be recognised as a woman with merits, but she also doesn’t want her gender to hold sway over her career or be treated as notable. She wants to represent a strong example for other women, but she also hates the expectation. And despite herself, she still wants to believe she’s attractive to men and retaining a traditional feminine appeal, at the same time as dressing in masculine attire and forgoing most of the trappings of traditional femininity. She is caught in the web of imposed societal expectations vs her identity as an individual who cannot be so plainly defined, and she doesn’t want to conform, but she does want to belong. In similar or different forms, it’s an impossible situation that is awfully familiar.

Though she only ekes some Bechdel action out of the one episode, Howard does interact with other women variously, though they all either have no name, or they talk about men the whole time - there were a lot of almost-passes, and some of them very strong gender-relevant interactions, too: Howard and the therapist Kerry Weston discuss Howard’s relationships with men in terms of dealing daily with crimes largely perpetrated by men and against men, and what that means for her in also trying to form romantic attachments to men (obviously, the conversation fails the Bechdel, but it is insightful observation of the position Howard is in as a heterosexual woman in a male-dominated field), and in ‘Night of the Dead Living’ (an all-around great episode for every character), Howard has a conversation with the (unfortunately nameless) cleaning lady about the lack of funding for medical research into women’s health issues and the relationship between that and the lack of women in congress (she also has multiple conversations with her sister Carrie over the phone in that episode, but those don’t pass the Bechdel either since we only hear Kay’s side). Being the only major female character around doesn’t completely define Howard’s character, nor does the show position her in complete isolation from other women in order to tell the story of her conspicuous womanhood; there’s a good balanced recognition of gender within the narrative, and though it doesn’t score well in the raw statistics, it does do nice things for the content rating and for the messages being communicated to the audience. The complexity of Howard’s relationship with her female identity has a sad, truthful ring about it, and it’s a reflection on society and its habit of treating women like they have to sink or swim on behalf of their entire gender. It’s good stuff.

As for the non-female portion of the show, i.e. the bulk of it: I’m still pretty impressed. I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t acknowledge the show’s honest and thorough representation of Baltimore as a predominantly black city, and the navigation of racial issues, tensions, and prejudices - both within and without the police force - factor significantly in the tapestry of the series (season two’s ‘See No Evil’ and ‘Black and Blue’ are prime examples). Another episode that I was particularly impressed with for its sensitive handling of content was ‘A Many Splendored Thing’, in which Bayliss and Pembleton investigate the erotic asphyxiation death of Angela Frandina, whose sexual habits are an affront to straight-laced Bayliss. Bayliss’ reactions to the particulars of Angela’s life - including working as a phone-sex operator, and frequenting a local BDSM club - range from hilarious oh-golly innocence to the decidedly un-funny taint of bigotry, as he implies that people who enjoy consensual but ‘dehumanising’ acts are sick in the head, and that Angela can’t have been a good person if she was a part of that lifestyle. Pembleton gives Bayliss a thorough wake-up call in a magnificent speech about virtues and vices, advising Bayliss to get his head out of his ass and stop pretending to live on some pure moral high-ground from which he cannot conceive of the natural variance in human behaviour. The only character who is really judged by the narrative is Bayliss, and his closed-mindedness is exposed as a dangerous precedent and declared unequivocally wrong. It’s a refreshing stance, especially for something which, in the early nineties, was even more of a poorly-represented fringe element than it is now. This episode and a few others also include measures of queer representation in an off-hand, judgment-free fashion, extremely notable in context since the AIDS epidemic was still in full-swing at the time. It’s pretty significant, for a show which is almost as old as I am.

Other good things: the episode ‘Three Men and Adena’ in season one, aka the episode that single-handedly saved the series from the chopping block by being an Emmy-winning triumph of every possible element of film-making, and, oh, maybe objectively one of the single best episodes of television ever made. No big. Likewise, ‘Bop Gun’ in season two, which utilised the late Robin Williams in a gut-wrenching dramatic performance and consequently saved the series from the chopping block a second time, allowing it to finally start running full-length seasons as of season three. Respect, for the somewhat bizarre decision to use Ned Beatty’s Bolander - this guy:

- as the romantic contender for the series, warts and all as he variously self-sabotages and talks himself out of testing the waters of the dating pool for the first time since 1970; any thoughts of including romantic subplots for titillation are banished when you’ve got ‘The Big Man’ Bolander raging around, and thus those forays into awkward relationships are strictly character pieces, and all the better for it. And points, also, for healthy acts of support between men, toxic masculinity be gone; most notably, Crosetti with his recently-injured and bedridden friend Thormann, who is struggling to adjust to the changed world of his disabilities. Thormann is angry and despairing, declaring himself ‘not a man anymore’ after he loses control of his bowels in his bed; “It’s a natural thing that’s happening here,” Crosetti reassures, soothing Thormann’s embarrassment as he steps in to help his friend clean up, holding his hand and rubbing his back with the gentle patience of a parent. Crosetti was my first favourite character on this show, outstripped by others in the end, but beloved in his time. This review is going live on the 2nd of September for me, but it’s still September 1st in the USA, and therefore, the second anniversary of the death of Jon Polito, our dear Crosetti. This one’s for you, Jon.

Of course, there are a few little quibbles I can raise with the show, and it would be pointless for me to bother with any of this if I didn’t go ahead and raise them. Howard having a prior romantic entanglement with Tyron feels like a needless cliche, and perhaps one of those season two concessions meant to make things seem ‘sexier’; the show is better than that. Kerry Weston uses the example of female seagulls observed to form lesbian bonding pairs as an analogy for why ‘birds of a feather shouldn’t always flock together’, and it doesn’t feel like it’s intentionally homophobic, but it sure does come across that way anyway. Munch is a primarily comic-relief character, and good at it, but his volatile relationship with his girlfriend Felicia (who never appears onscreen) has disturbing shades about it that are never quite clear enough to be soundly condemned, and the general comedic attitude surrounding Munch and his delivery of any and all information regarding Felicia rubs me the wrong way. All things considered, these are pretty small-fry complaints (and almost completely contained within season two, jus’ sayin’), and in that sense they’re pretty reaffirming of the quality of the show as a whole. The characters are realistically flawed - sometimes very deeply flawed - but not horrible people, just struggling, just trying their best, sometimes ignorant of their ignorance, sometimes pushing back or lashing out in the wrong directions. They are forgivably flawed because they are realistic, and it makes them easy to engage with even when you disagree with them; the core humanity is eminently recognisable. It doesn’t seem like it should be hard to achieve that realism, and yet, here we are. Watching Homicide: Life on the Street, a show without equal, even decades after it began.

#Homicide: Life on the Street #HLOTS #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review #Homicide: Life on the Street season one #Homicide: Life on the Street season two

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garywonghc · 6 years

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Why Can’t “I” Be Happy?

by Venerable Matthieu Ricard

An American friend of mine, a successful photography editor, once told me about a conversation she’d had with a group of friends after they’d finished their final college exams and were wondering what to do with their lives. When she’d said, “I want to be happy,” there was an embarrassed silence, and then one of her friends had asked: “How could someone as smart as you want nothing more than to be happy?” My friend answered: “I didn’t say how I want to be happy. There are so many ways to find happiness: start a family, have kids, build a career, seek adventure, help others, find inner peace. Whatever I end up doing, I want my life to be a truly happy one.”

The word happiness, writes Henri Bergson, “is commonly used to designate something intricate and ambiguous, one of those ideas which humanity has intentionally left vague, so that each individual might interpret it in his own way.” From a practical point of view, leaving the definition of happiness vague wouldn’t matter if we were talking about some inconsequential feeling. But the truth is altogether different, since we’re actually talking about a way of being that defines the quality of every moment of our lives. So what exactly is happiness?

Sociologists define happiness as “the degree to which a person evaluates the overall quality of his present life-as-a-whole positively. In other words, how much the person likes the life he or she leads.” This definition, however, does not distinguish between profound satisfaction and the mere appreciation of the outer conditions of our lives. For some, happiness is just “a momentary, fleeting impression, whose intensity and duration vary according to the availability of the resources that make it possible.” Such happiness must by nature be elusive and dependent on circumstances that are quite often beyond our control. For the philosopher Robert Misrahi, on the other hand, happiness is “the radiation of joy over one’s entire existence or over the most vibrant part of one’s active past, one’s actual present, and one’s conceivable future.” Maybe it is a more enduring condition. According to André Comte-Sponville, “By ‘happiness’ we mean any span of time in which joy would seem immediately possible.”

Is happiness a skill that, once acquired, endures through the ups and downs of life? There are a thousand ways of thinking about happiness, and countless philosophers have offered their own. For Saint Augustine, happiness is “a rejoicing in the truth.” For Immanuel Kant, happiness must be rational and devoid of any personal taint, while for Marx it is about growth through work. “What constitutes happiness is a matter of dispute,” Aristotle wrote, “and the popular account of it is not the same as that given by the philosophers.”

Has the word happiness itself been so overused that people have given up on it, turned off by the illusions and platitudes it evokes? For some people, talking about the search for happiness seems almost in bad taste. Protected by their armour of intellectual complacency, they sneer at it as they would at a sentimental novel.

How did such a devaluation come about? Is it a reflection of the artificial happiness offered by the media? Is it a result of the failed efforts we use to find genuine happiness? Are we supposed to come to terms with unhappiness rather than make a genuine and intelligent attempt to untangle happiness from suffering?

What about the simple happiness we get from a child’s smile or a nice cup of tea after a walk in the woods? As rich and comforting as such genuine glimpses of happiness might be, they are too circumstantial to shed light on our lives as a whole. Happiness can’t be limited to a few pleasant sensations, to some intense pleasure, to an eruption of joy or a fleeting sense of serenity, to a cheery day or a magic moment that sneaks up on us in the labyrinth of our existence. Such diverse facets are not enough in themselves to build an accurate image of the profound and lasting fulfilment that characterises true happiness.

By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.

Changing the way we see the world does not imply naive optimism or some artificial euphoria designed to counterbalance adversity. So long as we are slaves to the dissatisfaction and frustration that arise from the confusion that rules our minds, it will be just as futile to tell ourselves “I’m happy! I’m happy!” over and over again as it would be to repaint a wall in ruins. The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-coloured glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exultation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

REALITY AND INSIGHT

What do we mean by reality? In Buddhism the word connotes the true nature of things, unmodified by the mental constructs we superimpose upon them. Such concepts open up a gap between our perception and reality, and create a never-ending conflict with the world. “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore. We take for permanent that which is ephemeral and for happiness that which is but a source of suffering: the desire for wealth, for power, for fame, and for nagging pleasures.

By knowledge we mean not the mastery of masses of information and learning but an understanding of the true nature of things. Out of habit, we perceive the exterior world as a series of distinct, autonomous entities to which we attribute characteristics that we believe belong inherently to them. Our day-to-day experience tells us that things are “good” or “bad.” The “I” that perceives them seems to us to be equally concrete and real. This error, which Buddhism calls ignorance, gives rise to powerful reflexes of attachment and aversion that generally lead to suffering. As Etty Hillesum says so tersely: “That great obstacle is always the representation and never the reality.” The world of ignorance and suffering — called samsara in Sanskrit — is not a fundamental condition of existence but a mental universe based on our mistaken conception of reality.

The world of appearances is created by the coming together of an infinite number of ever-changing causes and conditions. Like a rainbow that forms when the sun shines across a curtain of rain and then vanishes when any factor contributing to its formation disappears, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no autonomous and enduring existence. Everything is relation; nothing exists in and of itself, immune to the forces of cause and effect. Once this essential concept is understood and internalised, the erroneous perception of the world gives way to a correct understanding of the nature of things and beings: this is insight. Insight is not a mere philosophical construct; it emerges from a basic approach that allows us gradually to shed our mental blindness and the disturbing emotions it produces and hence the principal causes of our suffering.

Every being has the potential for perfection, just as every sesame seed is permeated with oil. Ignorance, in this context, means being unaware of that potential, like the beggar who is unaware of the treasure buried beneath his shack. Actualising our true nature, coming into possession of that hidden wealth, allows us to live a life full of meaning. It is the surest way to find serenity and let genuine altruism flourish.

There exists a way of being that underlies and suffuses all emotional states, that embraces all the joys and sorrows that come to us. A happiness so deep that, as Georges Bernanos wrote, “Nothing can change it, like the vast reserve of calm water beneath a storm.” The Sanskrit word for this state of being is sukha.

Sukha is the state of lasting well-being that manifests itself when we have freed ourselves of mental blindness and afflictive emotions. It is also the wisdom that allows us to see the world as it is, without veils or distortions. It is, finally, the joy of moving toward inner freedom and the loving-kindness that radiates toward others.

First we conceive the “I” and grasp onto it. Then we conceive the “mine” and cling to the material world. Like water trapped on a waterwheel, we spin in circles, powerless. I praise the compassion that embraces all beings.

— Chandrakirti

Mental confusion is a veil that prevents us from seeing reality clearly and clouds our understanding of the true nature of things. Practically speaking, it is also the inability to identify the behaviour that would allow us to find happiness and avoid suffering. When we look outward, we solidify the world by projecting onto it attributes that are in no way inherent to it. Looking inward, we freeze the flow of consciousness when we conceive of an “I” enthroned between a past that no longer exists and a future that does not yet exist. We take it for granted that we see things as they are and rarely question that opinion. We spontaneously assign intrinsic qualities to things and people, thinking “this is beautiful, that is ugly,” without realising that our mind superimposes these attributes upon what we perceive. We divide the entire world between “desirable” and “undesirable,” we ascribe permanence to ephemera and see independent entities in what is actually a network of ceaselessly changing relations. We tend to isolate particular aspects of events, situations, and people, and to focus entirely upon these particularities. This is how we end up labelling others as “enemies,” “good,” “evil,” etc., and clinging strongly to those attributions. However, if we consider reality carefully, its complexity becomes obvious.

If one thing were truly beautiful and pleasant, if those qualities genuinely belonged to it, we could consider it desirable at all times and in all places. But is anything on earth universally and unanimously recognised as beautiful? As the canonical Buddhist verse has it: “For the lover, a beautiful woman is an object of desire; for the hermit, a distraction; for the wolf, a good meal.” Likewise, if an object were inherently repulsive, everyone would have good reason to avoid it. But it changes everything to recognise that we are merely attributing these qualities to things and people. There is no intrinsic quality in a beautiful object that makes it beneficial to the mind, and nothing in an ugly object to harm it.

In the same way, a person whom we consider today to be an enemy is most certainly somebody else’s object of affection, and we may one day forge bonds of friendship with that selfsame enemy. We react as if characteristics were inseparable from the object we assign them to. Thus we distance ourselves from reality and are dragged into the machinery of attraction and repulsion that is kept relentlessly in motion by our mental projections. Our concepts freeze things into artificial entities and we lose our inner freedom, just as water loses its fluidity when it turns to ice.

THE CRYSTALLISATION OF THE EGO

Among the many aspects of our confusion, the most radically disruptive is the insistence on the concept of a personal identity: the ego. Buddhism distinguishes between an innate, instinctive “I” — when we think, for instance, “I’m awake” or “I’m cold” — and a conceptual “self” shaped by the force of habit. We attribute various qualities to it and posit it as the core of our being, autonomous and enduring.

At every moment between birth and death, the body undergoes ceaseless transformations and the mind becomes the theatre of countless emotional and conceptual experiences. And yet we obstinately assign qualities of permanence, uniqueness, and autonomy to the self. Furthermore, as we begin to feel that this self is highly vulnerable and must be protected and satisfied, aversion and attraction soon come into play — aversion for anything that threatens the self, attraction to all that pleases it, comforts it, boosts its confidence, or puts it at ease. These two basic feelings, attraction and repulsion, are the fonts of a whole sea of conflicting emotions.

The ego, writes Buddhist philosopher Han de Wit, “is also an affective reaction to our field of experience, a mental withdrawal based on fear.” Out of fear of the world and of others, out of dread of suffering, out of anxiety about living and dying, we imagine that by hiding inside a bubble — the ego — we will be protected. We create the illusion of being separate from the world, hoping thereby to avert suffering. In fact, what happens is just the opposite, since ego-grasping and self-importance are the best magnets to attract suffering.

Genuine fearlessness arises with the confidence that we will be able to gather the inner resources necessary to deal with any situation that comes our way. This is altogether different from withdrawing into self-absorption, a fearful reaction that perpetuates deep feelings of insecurity.

Each of us is indeed a unique person, and it is fine to recognise and appreciate who we are. But in reinforcing the separate identity of the self, we fall out of sync with reality. The truth is, we are fundamentally interdependent with other people and our environment. Our experience is simply the content of the mental flow, the continuum of consciousness, and there is no justification for seeing the self as an entirely distinct entity within that flow. Imagine a spreading wave that affects its environment and is affected by it but is not the medium of transmission for any particular entity. We are so accustomed to affixing the “I” label to that mental flow, however, that we come to identify with it and to fear its disappearance. There follows a powerful attachment to the self and thus to the notion of “mine” — my body, my name, my mind, my possessions, my friends, and so on — which leads either to the desire to possess or to the feeling of repulsion for the “other.” This is how the concepts of the self and of the other crystallise in our minds. The erroneous sense of duality becomes inevitable, forming the basis of all mental affliction, be it alienating desire, hatred, jealousy, pride, or selfishness. From that point on, we see the world through the distorting mirror of our illusions. We find ourselves in disharmony with the true nature of things, which inevitably leads to frustration and suffering.

We can see this crystallisation of “I” and “mine” in many situations of daily life. You are napping peacefully in a boat in the middle of a lake. Another craft bumps into yours and wakes you with a start. Thinking that a clumsy or prankish boater has crashed into you, you leap up furious, ready to curse him out, only to find that the boat in question is empty. You laugh at your own mistake and return peaceably to your nap. The only difference between the two reactions is that in the first case, you’d thought yourself the target of someone’s malice, while in the second you realised that your “I” was not a target.

Here is another example to illustrate our attachment to the idea of “mine.” You are looking at a beautiful porcelain vase in a shop window when a clumsy salesman knocks it over. “What a shame! Such a lovely vase!” you sigh, and continue calmly on your way. On the other hand, if you had just bought that vase and had placed it proudly on the mantle, only to see it fall and smash to smithereens, you would cry out in horror, “My vase is broken!” and be deeply affected by the accident. The sole difference is the label “my” that you had stuck to the vase.

This erroneous sense of a real and independent self is of course based on egocentricity, which persuades us that our own fate is of greater value than that of others. If your boss scolds a colleague you hate, berates another you have no feelings about, or reprimands you bitterly, you will feel pleased or delighted in the first case, indifferent in the second, and deeply hurt in the third. But in reality, what could possibly make the well-being of any one of these three people more valuable than that of the others? The egocentricity that places the self at the centre of the world has an entirely relative point of view. Our mistake is in fixing our own point of view and hoping, or worse yet, insisting, that “our” world prevail over that of others.

THE DECEPTIVE EGO

In our day-to-day lives, we experience the self through its vulnerability. A simple smile gives it instant pleasure and a scowl achieves the contrary. The self is always “there,” ready to be wounded or gratified. Rather than seeing it as multiple and elusive, we make it a unitary, central, and permanent bastion. But let’s consider what it is we suppose contributes to our identity. Our body? An assemblage of bones and flesh. Our consciousness? A continuous stream of instants. Our history? The memory of what is no more. Our name? We attach all sorts of concepts to it — our heritage, our reputation, and our social status — but ultimately it’s nothing more than a grouping of letters. When we see the word JOHN, our spirits leap, we think, “That’s me!” But we only need to separate the letters, J-O-H-N, to lose all interest. The idea of “our” name is just a mental fabrication.

It is the deep sense of self lying at the heart of our being that we have to examine honestly. When we explore the body, the speech, and the mind, we come to see that this self is nothing but a word, a label, a convention, a designation. The problem is, this label thinks it’s the real deal. To unmask the ego’s deception, we have to pursue our inquiry to the very end. When you suspect the presence of a thief in your house, you have to inspect every room, every corner, every potential hiding place, just to make sure there’s really no one there. Only then can you rest easy. We need introspective investigation to find out what’s hiding behind the illusion of the self that we think defines our being.

Rigorous analysis leads us to conclude that the self does not reside in any part of the body, nor is it some diffuse entity permeating the entire body. We willingly believe that the self is associated with consciousness, but consciousness too is an elusive current: in terms of living experience, the past moment of consciousness is dead (only its impact remains), the future is not yet, and the present doesn’t last. How could a distinct self exist, suspended like a flower in the sky, between something that no longer exists and something that does not yet exist? It cannot be detected in either the body or the mind; it is neither a distinct entity in a combination of the two, nor one outside of them. No serious analysis or direct introspective experience can lead to a strong conviction that we possess a self. Someone may believe himself to be tall, young, and intelligent, but neither height nor youth nor intelligence is the self. Buddhism therefore concludes that the self is just a name we give to a continuum, just as we name a river the Ganges or the Mississippi. Such a continuum certainly exists, but only as a convention based upon the interdependence of the consciousness, the body, and the environment. It is entirely without autonomous existence.

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF

To get a better handle on this, let’s resume our analysis in greater detail. The concept of personal identity has three aspects: the “I,” the “person,” and the “self.” These three aspects are not fundamentally different from one another, but reflect the different ways we cling to our perception of personal identity.

The “I” lives in the present; it is the “I” that thinks “I’m hungry” or “I exist.” It is the locus of consciousness, thoughts, judgement, and will. It is the experience of our current state.

As the neuro psychiatrist David Galin clearly summarises, the notion of the “person” is broader. It is a dynamic continuum extending through time and incorporating various aspects of our corporeal, mental, and social existence. Its boundaries are more fluid. The person can refer to the body (“personal fitness”), intimate thoughts (“a very personal feeling”), character (“a nice person”), social relations (“separating one’s personal from one’s professional life”), or the human being in general (“respect for one’s person”). Its continuity through time allows us to link the representations of ourselves from the past to projections into the future. It denotes how each of us differs from others and reflects our unique qualities. The notion of the person is valid and healthy so long as we consider it simply as connoting the overall relationship between the consciousness, the body, and the environment. It becomes inappropriate and unhealthy when we consider it to be an autonomous entity.

As to the “self,” we’ve already seen how it is believed to be the very core of our being. We imagine it as an invisible and permanent thing that characterises us from birth to death. The self is not merely the sum of “my” limbs, “my” organs, “my” skin, “my” name, “my” consciousness, but their exclusive owner. We speak of “my arm” and not of an “elongated extension of my self.” If our arm is cut off, the self has simply lost an arm but remains intact. A person without limbs feels his physical integrity to be diminished, but clearly believes he has preserved his self. If the body is cut into cross sections, at what point does the self begin to vanish? We perceive a self so long as we retain the power of thought. This leads us to Descartes’ celebrated phrase underlying the entire Western concept of the self: “I think, therefore I am.” But the fact of thought proves absolutely nothing about the existence of the self, because the “I” is nothing more than the current contents of our mental flow, which changes from moment to moment. It is not enough for something to be perceived or conceived of for that thing to exist. We clearly see a mirage or an illusion, neither of which has any reality.

The idea that the self might be nothing but a concept runs counter to the intuition of most Western thinkers. Descartes, again, is categorical on the subject. “When I consider my mind — that is, myself, given that I am merely a thing that thinks — I can identify no distinct parts to it, but conceive of myself as a single and complete thing.” The neurologist Charles Scott Sherrington adds: “The self is a unity.… It regards itself as one, others treat it as one. It is addressed as one, by a name to which it answers.” Indisputably, we instinctively see the self as unitary, but as soon as we try to pin it down, we have a hard time coming to grips with it.

THE FRAGILE FACES OF IDENTITY

The notion of the “person” includes the image we keep of ourselves. The idea of our identity, our status in life, is deeply rooted in our mind and continuously influences our relations with others. The least word that threatens our image of ourselves is unbearable, although we have no trouble with the same qualifier applied to someone else in different circumstances. If you shout insults or flattery at a cliff and the words are echoed back to you, you remain unaffected. But if someone else shouts the very same insults at you, you feel deeply upset. If we have a strong image of ourselves, we will constantly be trying to assure ourselves that it is recognised and accepted. Nothing is more painful than to see it opened up to doubt.

But what is this identity worth? The word personality comes from the Latin persona, for an actor’s mask — the mask through which (per) the actor’s voice resounds (sonat). While the actor is aware of wearing a mask, we often forget to distinguish between the role we play in society and an honest appreciation of our state of being.

We are generally afraid to tackle the world without reference points and are seized with vertigo whenever masks and epithets come down. If I am no longer a musician, a writer, sophisticated, handsome, or strong, what am I? And yet flouting all labels is the best guarantee of freedom and the most flexible, lighthearted, and joyful way of moving through the world. Refusing to be deceived by the ego in no way prevents us from nurturing a firm resolve to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves and at every instant to relish the richness of our relations with the world and with others. The effect, in fact, is quite the contrary.

THROUGH THE INVISIBLE WALL

How can I expect this understanding of the illusory nature of the ego to change my relationships with my family and the world around me? Wouldn’t such a U-turn be unsettling? Experience shows that it will do you nothing but good. Indeed when the ego is predominant, the mind is like a bird constantly slamming into a glass wall — belief in the ego — that shrinks our world and encloses it within narrow confines. Perplexed and stunned by the wall, the mind cannot pass through it. But the wall is invisible because it does not really exist. It is an invention of the mind. Nevertheless, it functions as a wall by partitioning our inner world and damming the flow of our selflessness and joie de vivre. Our attachment to the ego is fundamentally linked to the suffering we feel and the suffering we inflict on others. Renouncing our fixation on our own intimate image and stripping the ego of all its importance is tantamount to winning incredible inner freedom. It allows us to approach every person and every situation with natural ease, benevolence, fortitude, and serenity. With no expectation of gain and no fear of loss, we are free to give and to receive. We no longer have the need to think, speak, or act in an affected and selfish way.

In clinging to the cramped universe of the ego, we have a tendency to be concerned exclusively with ourselves. The least setback upsets and discourages us. We are obsessed with our success, our failure, our hopes, and our anxieties, and thereby give happiness every opportunity to elude us. The narrow world of the self is like a glass of water into which a handful of salt is thrown — the water becomes undrinkable. If, on the other hand, we breach the barriers of the self and the mind becomes a vast lake, that same handful of salt will have no effect on its taste.

When the self ceases to be the most important thing in the world, we find it easier to focus our concern on others. The sight of their suffering bolsters our courage and resolve to work on their behalf, instead of crippling us with our own emotional distress.

If the ego were really our deepest essence, it would be easy to understand our apprehension about dropping it. But if it is merely an illusion, ridding ourselves of it is not ripping the heart out of our being, but simply opening our eyes.

So it’s worthwhile to devote a few moments of our life to letting the mind rest in inner calm and to understanding, through analysis and direct experience, the place of the ego in our lives. So long as the sense of the ego’s importance has control over our being, we will never know lasting peace.

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orangedodge · 6 years

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Instead of flooding my blog with a deluge KH posts, I figured I'd do just one in-depth one about the end reveal.

At least until the next trailer comes out, and my inner nine year old breaks out once again.

So despite Nomura's limitations as a writer, and his occasional technical naivete, I've always been a bit surprised that he's never really given his due as a director. He has good storytelling instincts, and can be skilled at framing information on screen to highlight what he wants, while making his audience ignore what he doesn't want them to pay attention to. His team can also cut a trailer very well. The 2.8 trailers were masterful at presenting actual spoilers, but framed within an artificial context that hid their meaning, and led to the audience anticipating story beats that did not actually exist. The respective natures of Aced and Gula as people, in particular, was something he was highly successful at concealing.

E3 trailer spoilers below the cut

The first E3 trailer drop, which I think we're calling the "Frozen" trailer, reminds me a lot of what he did last time, with those 2.8 trailers. The reveal at the end, and it's implication that Aqua is now evil, is driven by two lines,

SORA - "I wont let her fall to darkness"

and

AQUA - "You're too late"

The combination is framed to suggest that it's specifically too late for Aqua, but as these lines occur in two entirely different scenes, and this structure is unlikely to be preserved in the actual game, the thematic bridge they create is an artificial one. It's unknown what the full context of each scene actually is, particularly the latter scene with Mickey, Aqua, and Riku. Instead, Aqua's lines are being set up with by potentially false context by Sora.

What actually happens in that scene? I think the position of landmarks, and the continuity in way the scene is lit, is sufficient to establish that it most likely takes place within the same span of time as the previous trailer's Riku and Mickey scene, in which Riku's Way to Dawn Keyblade was broken.

By combining the two Riku scenes, I would posit that the chain of events is as follows: Riku and Mickey arrive at the Dark Margin > Aqua attacks them in her new shadow form > Mickey is disarmed, and Riku's Keyblade broken > Aqua stops fighting and reveals herself > Aqua picks up Mickey's Keyblade.

If the line "This Keyblade..." is native to that scene, and not something that was simply placed out of context in the trailer to create false context (a trick Nomura used with Phantom Aqua's dialogue in the 2.8 trailers), then it could be possible that she didn't recognize her opponents until she saw that Keyblade. Either way, I believe it's likely that she fought them until they were both disarmed, whereupon she stopped, and revealed herself to them.

Two things grabbed my attention,

Is breaking Way to Dawn, the Keyblade with one of Xehanort's creepy time-travel spy eyes (that we've been warned about), actually an inherently aggressive act? She appears to have been completely shrouded/cloaked in darkness, if not actually invisible (if that was a Red Eyes effect Mickey was under), when she arrived. Assuming that the two Riku clips are in fact one continuous scene, than it seems as though she didn't let them see her until that Keyblade was out of the way.

Why pick up Mickey's Keyblade? It was established ages ago that a Keyblade can't be stolen from its wielder, so unless that's being retconned, I don't see why she'd benefit from picking it up unless to demonstrate to them that she's still capable of doing so. And that's being done in a state where she's not just possessed by darkness, but seems to have been totally transformed into it. The only precedents I can think of for that are Anti-Sora and Ansem. Anti-Sora didn't have access to Keyblades, and Ansem could only wield one through Riku's body (and presumably Riku’s heart, since he lost his access to the Keyblade once he cast that away).

So is Aqua currently fallen to darkness? Almost definitely, unless this is just Phantom Aqua messing with Mickey, or a physical manifestation of an impression she left behind when she lived there, or the result of some unique circumstance like Aqua-removed-her-Heart-from-her-body or Aqua's-looking-for-Ven-in-the-realm-of-sleep that that would render her condition a temporary side effect.

Is she 'norted? It seems probable, but I'm not one-hundred per cent sure that it actually follows from what's been shown. Xehanort's never shown the ability to discorporate into dark fog or become invisible, I mean, and it seems like that would be a fairly useful ability to make use of if he had it. It seems not unreasonable to assume that it's therefore an ability newly unique to Aqua, and not something connected to a 'norting. I'm going to leave the changers to her hair aside because it's appeared that shade before (for example, in the daylight Wayfinder sequence at the start of the 0.2 trailer), and I'm not sure how much of the color change is being influenced by the lighting conditions, or even if the lighting is finished. The eyes seem like a big give away that she's 13th 'nort, as we've only ever seen glowing amber eyes in humans with Xehanort's vessels... but we don't actually know why he has those traits in the first place.

It could be nothing of consequence, just a unique aspect of his character design that made an easy shorthand for showing who he was possessing. Or it could be that amber eyes are actually meant to represent something in this setting (connection to Heartless?), and what specifically that is just hasn't come up yet, except as through the brothers and sisters 'nort. So it's possible that her eyes don't really mean what we assume they do, and it's just a fun way to use the trailer to mess with us.

(And because this series is so weird, it may also be worth remembering that incomplete beings have been shown to take physical forms influenced by the expectations of the people viewing them. Think Xion's magic flippy-floppy hood, or Aqua perceiving Ansem as Terra. So depending on what the meaning of Aqua's shadow form actually is, the way she appears to Mickey might not be what she actually looks like, as opposed to just the material consequence of how he expects her to look, reflected back upon his own reality. I... ugh. This series is something else.)

(There's also a possible exception to the only-'norts-have-glowing-eyes rule with Terra, who did have glowing amber eyes before he was 'norted, but portions of those cut scenes may now be apocryphal)

But even if Aqua is 'norted, does it automatically follow that she's now an evil puppet of the arch villain’s? I'm going to just throw this out there, and give a hard no. Could be! She could be evil now, she could even be a boss fight and a resulting fetch quest to fix her Wayfinder to bring her back to normal, or be a recurring super boss introduced to give the heroes someone more threatening to fight than Vexen and Marluxia, or anything else. But it's not absolutely necessary and it's a truly strange assumption to make, given past experiences with 'norts and people consumed by darkness.

Riku was 'norted for... really the entirety of the first three games in one way or another, and after a few initial close calls, he got his second wind, and was fine. Vanitas and Braig both seem to do whatever they want; it just so happens that they want to be evil, but I don't think Xehanort has ever shown any supernatural capacity—resorting instead to threats and possible torture—to modify their behavior if they wander off to undermine him. Terra is... well his body has been possessed for decades now, but also obviously is not being controlled in any meaningful way, unless Xehanort actually planned to choke himself and get whipped in the face by chains. Axel also didn't seem to have any problems with just throwing Xehanort out, when he was a heartless shell that theoretically had compromised means of resisting a takeover.

So Xehanort is clearly not always in complete control of his vessels, other than Young Xeno (himself), Ansem (his own literal heart), and maybe Xemnas (some proportion of his own heart in Terra’s empty body), who could all be unique exceptions. And even the vessels that have been with him the longest have habit of doing as they please. I should find it strange should Aqua be the absolute only exception in the series. And thinking on it, all that's really said of the final confrontation is that you have 13 seekers and 7 guardians... but there's not really a rule that they have to form two opposed teams and stick to them no matter what.

To just fly off into blind speculation though, what I'm personally leaning towards is the possibility that Aqua has just become a part of the realm of darkness. That Mickey is “too late” to reach her before a point of no return, and now she just cannot leave. She doesn't sound particularly angry, or upset to see him. It sounds like she's just stating a fact, or just speaking with resignation. Mickey and Riku, in the clip where Way to Dawn is shown broken, also do not seem as defeated as one might expect them to if they had experienced complete and total failure. They seem pretty sure of themselves, whatever has happened.

I'm hesitant to add this in, given my own bias, but it actually seems not unlike they're saying goodbye. Perhaps just letting go of something, if they've failed and are moving on, or if Riku is just saying goodbye to the chapter of his life represented within Way to Dawn. Or they could be getting ready to split up.

I've seen a lot of speculation, that I think rings true, that Disney would prefer for Mickey to not be involved in the final fight, whacking recognizable humans in the face with a sword-like weapon. The rumor's line of reasoning follows that he needs to be swapped out for someone else, and Aqua seems like the most fitting possibility. Maybe literally? One stays, so another can go? Thematically, she took on Terra's punishment for him, trapping her there in the first place. Mickey taking it on for her, so she can leave, would be a fitting continuation. And it seems to be what he wants. Edgy, traumatized, Mickey Mouse is a weird concept to introduce to a story, but it almost pulls it off where his trauma re: Aqua is concerned. This is clearly meant to be the great unhealed wound in his life, and to not just free his friend, but take her place in the underworld for a while is one way to help him patch it.

#video games #kingdom hearts #aqua #why do i do this to myself

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justadram · 7 years

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Words Written on Wings

Jaime x Sansa fic written for @storey1. Thank you for your donation to help fight Nazis!

Request: continuation of Words Written in Steam

The soft sweet sound of Sansa’s high harp echoes in the chill of the corridor. Sansa once told Jaime that the harp was one of her weapons, and while that might be the case, he has heard those who play with more skill. Lady Leonette, her first teacher, while proficient and pleasant enough, was not Prince Rhaegar returned. Knowing it is Sansa’s head bowed beside its golden frame, however, lends some enchantment to the playing that few could duplicate in Jaime’s estimation. The only thing that might improve upon the glissandos would be the accompaniment of her voice. She rarely sings, but the beauty of her sad voice can cut as keenly as any blade. That is her true weapon.

Listening to her fingers pluck the taut strings is a fleeting pleasure: when he makes his presence known, she’ll put her instrument away for the night. For she plays either in solitude or for company, and he is something else to her. She doesn’t think to entertain or win him over, as she does the others, but he is also not yet a fading piece of furniture adorning her chamber.

Slowing his steps, Jaime tries to recall the song without the benefit of the words sung over it, but as soon as he thinks he’s caught a thread, she misses a note, two, and the music stops. Without yet turning the corner, he can picture her elegant white hands pressed flat to the strings, dampening their ring. Her face will be pinched with annoyance, drawing her finely arched brows down. It isn’t like her to make a mistake. Not on the harp, nor on any other field she commands, and yet tonight, she was not herself long before her notes went astray.

Something disturbs her practiced calm, enough that Jaime wonders whether he should have bent his feet this way to stretch out before her hearth and stare into the flames as is their habit. Custom overcame hesitation. That and the fear of the emptiness he feels, when he is left to his own devices. Those long nights when she must see to those more important than him in this new world order reverberates with voices lost forever, the past washing over him as relentlessly as the tide.

His good hand wraps around the thick frame of the door, as he dips his head through its entrance, clearing his throat to announce his presence. She ought to have a guard posted. It is a well-worn argument between the two of them.

Why do I have need of constant guard, when a lion stands beside me?

To protect us from each other, a more honest man would admit.

She lifts her gaze to him, and he swallows at the pull of her lower lip through her teeth as she stands and lets the harp rest back flat on the floor. How long was it before vague attraction, a sort of detached appreciation turned into this clawing hunger?

“You’ve been listening long enough to know I’m in need of practice.”

“Are my footfalls that heavy?”

“Just a wager.”

Sansa’s intuition is honed sharply enough that she could make a real menace of herself at the gaming table, should she ever take it into her head to indulge the pursuit. Indulgence of any kind is not her practice. Ned Stark’s daughter indeed.

“But yes, I heard. A disastrous effort to be sure,” he says with a slow grin.

If she would give an inch, he would be lost. It is her caution that keeps him in check. He is half a man at best, and the loss of his hand was not the cause. Nature made him this week: strong in body, weak in character. He is at best the reflection of others. Choosing the right mirror is the real trick. Ser Arthur Dayne for a time, his sister, now Sansa Stark. His honor, the one he sought so desperately, is only hers reflected back.

She hums her assent, though she knows he teases, and gestures at the two chairs before the hearth. It is an invitation he scarcely requires, as he strides to take his place beside her, but she is nothing if not courteous. It gives them a script to follow, which he appreciates. Knowing one’s role is half the battle.

“You might wish you’d sought out better company tonight, ser. It’s not only my playing that suffers if that weren’t yet plain.”

Even on her worst day, Jaime has known worse company. Certainly less beautiful company. Less quick. Less gentle. It is she that is forbearing of his moods more often than not, so he can afford to be tolerant.

“Will you ask what is amiss?” she asks, as she sinks into her chair and rests her head against the side of its high back, turning her lash shadowed eyes on him.

Crossing his ankle over his knee, he watches the light play over her unlined face, tracing the slope of her nose, her cheekbones, the bow of her lips, consuming every detail to sate himself. This is how they wile the hours alone, trading verbal intimacies and looking. It is only in the attendance of others that he ever dares touch her, freed from constraint by the safeguard of their presence.

Kneeling at her feet, he could wipe away that careworn look she wears.

The silence between them beats with the pulse of the blood in his veins, not yet sluggish with enough wine, watered down as it often is, though spring has come. Thriving vineyards are not the most pressing need of a thawing Westeros.

Giving up on his ever prompting her, she lets her head roll towards the fire with a purse of her lips. “A raven brought word today. Jon has arranged a marriage. For himself.”

His gut twists.

Just as Sansa’s giving of Winterfell to Jon Snow as a poor substitute for herself brought Jaime no real joy, he feels no thrill in this announcement. If she’d gone with Jon to the North, he could have dispensed with this attempt to be someone he fears he’ll never quite manage to be. The mummer’s act could be dispensed with and there would be some relief in that, he suspects.

Though Sansa will never admit it, Jaime can’t even claim victory over the dour faced bastard. He knows he is not Sansa’s first choice anymore than she is his. It is circumstance—mostly unwanted circumstance—that has thrown the lion and the shewolf together and formed them into a two person pride or pack.

If anything, he feels trapped. Like a hare in a foot soldier’s snare.

He runs his hand over the plush fabric covering the left arm of his chair. The fibers give under his touch and spring back, as he asks flatly in what he hopes sounds like bored disinterest, “One of the Mormonts?”

“The daughter of that hedge knight Daenerys raised up in High Garden.”

Jaime snorts. The men elevated in these days aren’t fit to sit at the same table with the likes of Tywin Lannister, much less hold a great house. He supposes his brother thinks it helps his queen consolidate her power to surround herself with loyal upstarts.

“She’s a child, is she not?”

Her narrow shoulders lift and fall. “Older than I was when Daenerys made land.”

“A child and a Southroner.”

That is like to irk Sansa more than the girl’s age. She is wary of all Southroners, and with good reason given what she endured at their hands. His family’s hands. He does penance for that, keeping his hands to himself, when he would like to run them over her smooth skin.

“Yes. It’s not what I was expecting from Jon.”

“You’re... disappointed? In his choice?” he falsely clarifies for her benefit.

“No,” she says, her eyes narrowing as her lips curl into something approaching a smile. “It makes more political sense than I gave Jon credit for.”

“How astute. That hedge knight’s wife was a crofter. A finer match was never made.”

“That doesn’t matter now,” she says with a wave of her hand. “Daenerys favors these new families. She’ll be pleased. And Jon prefers a simpler woman, I think. It might suit him.”

He lifts his brows at her insincerity. “This message appears to have earned the old saying for you. Dark wings, dark words. What is the source of your upset then, if he has chosen so wisely, pray tell?”

She refuses to turn her attention on him, staring fixedly. Never will she admit what she really feels for her bastard brother, and while he taunts, the last thing he truly wants is an admission from her. Jaime seeks assurances of his place here. With her. If he is a rabbit, he’s sought the warmth of her lap. There were no need of snares.

“I own I am surprised in his choice. He demonstrated rather more refined preferences in women when last I saw him. More appreciation for those he’d call family too.”

That finally rouses her. Its an icy glance, as cold as any Northern winter she casts his way.

He’d rather she be full of wrath than sullen, so he presses further, as he extends a boot towards the fire. “Shall I arrange an assassination? Solve both your problems once and for all?”

“Don’t jest.”

“Was I?”

She exhales slowly as if in exacerbation. “Sometimes I don’t know with you, ser.” She reaches across the space and trails her fingertips over the linen of his shirt. His hairs respond, standing at attention in the wake of her touch. “But don’t you dare.”

He lowers his voice. “I’d do it for you, my lady.” Perhaps he would. He’s done worse or close to it. He’d feel some conflict, but not enough. “And then your honorable Jon Snow would come for my head.”

As surely as if he’d spoken of what he might do with his cock in the seclusion of her bedchamber, her cheeks color. She’s a bold thing, when she wants to be, however, and her hand finds his, slender fingers slipping between his sword calloused ones.

“No, I wish Jon and his bride all happiness.”

He would laugh at the absurdity of her statement if the tension in his chest permitted it.

He curls his fingers in, squeezing too hard in his rising desperation to hold tight to what feels like is slipping away from him even as obstacles are removed from his path. “Of course you do. Your concern for his happiness was most evident when you sent him away, trading him a kingdom for your love.”

She didn’t choose Jaime, but he would accept her claiming she did, plying him with some prettily worded lie here alone with her hand in his. He could live off that lie.

Her fingers dig half-moons into his palm. “Jon does not always know what is best for him.”

“And you do?” She normally does a better job of obscuring the fact that she believes she knows better than anyone else. Men do not like to be so blatantly managed. Most men. Jaime finds it easier to submit. Just a touch of artifice will do.

“His parentage doesn’t change what was. Ned Stark was his father. He needed to believe in the meaning of his Targaryen blood, but Jon and I are both Starks. Not Targaryens.”

“Nor Lannister.”

She nods. “We can’t always silence our hearts, but we can choose what’s right.”

It is not a romantic girl’s notion. She sounds like a septa. It would cool his ardor if he did not think stripping a septa’s veil from her coppery locks appealing. Jaime always appreciated playacting.

“Well, he lacks a sense of humor and fails in conversation, but I cannot fault him for his taste.” Neither in choosing Sansa nor a sister. “Best wishes to them both, I suppose.”

She gives her head a tired shake. “It’s all for the best.”

He turns his hand, letting her palm fit into his. “Sounds practically medicinal.”

“Not all tinctures are loathsome.”

Pulling their clasped hands from the arm of his chair, something dances in her eyes. Something other than the reflection of the flames. Something freed by a raven’s message.

“I can be plenty odious.”

She clicks her tongue and draws their hands to her breast. “I am aware of your questionable qualities, ser.”

Tilting her head down, she kisses each knuckle in turn, as his breath quickens.

“The songs never celebrate those who did what was best for them.” And while this Southron upstart might be just the thing for a lovesick bastard prince, Jaime wonders that Sansa’s skills at deception—even self-deception—can extend so far as to believe him a salve for what ails her.

“Imagine how dull it would be if they did. But they might sing of the wolf and the lion. Mightn’t they?”

They might.

#jaime x sansa #got fic #fanfic #fightingnaziswithfic #game of thrones

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quranrehab · 5 years

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How to stay inspired? - 4 Quranic ideas

BY HALIMAH EL KURGHALI

youtube

Inspiration is powerful! It brings a breath of fresh air into our lives; helping us think more creatively in order for us to give birth to great new ideas, it can help us generate a positive energy in order for us get things done, as well help create a shift in our mindset that can help us experience more breakthroughs and better solve our problems.

The truth about inspiration is that it isn’t something we have to simply wait around for or which we accidentally stumble upon finding one day. Neither is it something you are going to find in its full glory and power by simply scrolling through social media feeds looking at some pretty pictures.

This powerful force is actually something we can generate on a consistent basis when we consciously and consistently place things in our lives that can help us achieve it.

In this video I share 4 Quranic ideas on inspiration that are part of my life and that have positively transformed it as a result Alhamdullah, and I know they can do the same for you too inshAllah.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of The QuranLifestyle Show by Halimah Kurghali]

Asalamu Alaykum everyone, Halimah here- your Quran lifestyle coach.

It’s important we ask ourselves how we can get more inspired because when we human beings feel inspired it brings about this breath of fresh air into our lives- it can help us think more creatively in order for us to give birth to great new ideas, it helps us generate this positive energy to get things done, and can help create this mindset shift that helps us experience more breakthroughs and better solve our problems. And the truth about inspiration is that it isn’t something we have to simply wait around for or which we accidentally stumble upon finding one day. And neither is it something you are going to find in its full glory and power by simply scrolling through social media feeds looking at some pretty pictures either. This powerful force is actually something we can generate on a consistent basis when we consciously and consistently place things in our lives that can help us achieve it. I wanted to share with you 4 Quranic ideas on inspiration that are part of my life and that have that have positively transformed it as a result alhamdullah and I know they can do the same for you too inshAllah.

For those new to Quran Rehab its important I share with you the reason why I am sharing Quranic tips and advice on this subject, like I do in all my videos. And that’s because here at Quran rehab it’s our belief that just like the Quran when it was revealed revolutionised the world in ways that seemed impossible, every time you and I open the Quran Allah is providing you and I with the opportunity to revolutionise our personal lives in similarly unimaginable ways. There is no better way to have more, to do more and be more, than to turn to Him who created us and knows best how we can achieve everything we want and tells us how we can do so in the Quran. So when people ask me how I stay inspired to continue making videos, create online courses, to write and coach people from all around the world, how I stay inspired to home school my children and be the best mother I can to them, to be the best wife and leader I can, these are the four things I think of from the Quran for setting up my life for more inspiration:

1. Travel/ seek new experiences

As much as it’s great to have a routine and schedule for your life- to help you get things done, it’s equally important from time to time to break them and do something adventurous. When you travel somewhere new or have new experiences you change things like your physiology for example- so the way you move, you breathe, what your exposing your senses to etc. You also change your environment so you expose yourself to different languages, cultures, ideas and people. What all these things are essentially doing are opening up your brain to make new connections so that you gain new ideas, new perspectives, new learnings and thinking. And all these things help you draw new inspiration.

You know the arabic word ‘saiyr’ – which means to travel or move, it appears in the Quran in all its variations a total of 27 times. And many of its usages are in the forms of commands or questions like “Tell them to travel’, or ‘Do they not travel?’ Etc. Of the many benefits Allah mentions in the Quran for travelling is “so that he may show you some of his wonders, divine signs”.

إِنَّ فِي ذَلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِّكُلِّ صَبَّارٍ شَكُورٍ…

“..so that He might show you some of His wonders.. “(Quran 31:31)

What does a wonder or divine sign do exactly? - they inspire us right? By nature, a divine sign, a wonder, they are something that’s often beyond our ability of properly understanding or our ability to create. They are something attributed to god that move us at our very core and inspires us. And so, you will find the Quran on multiple occasions calling us to discover his ayaht that are around us everywhere by searching for new information and experience-based knowledge; one of the most obvious ways being through travel. So, I would suggest we schedule a short trip or even just a new and different experience for yourself ideally every 90 days or so, or at least every 6 months and you will see the major impact this has on your levels of inspiration inshallah.

2. Seek inspirational role models

Now when I speak about inspirational role models there are two aspects to this and there is some depth to it too which I will explain inshallah. When I said there are two aspects what I mean is that we should seek inspiring role models from both the past, from our history, as well as from the present, from people around us in the world today. You know having role models is a huge part of our human psyche and our genetic makeup, it’s something we need and desire because they inspire us to become better versions of ourselves. And this is why in Allah’s hikma and immense love for us you will find that when you look into the Quran you will discover that almost half of the entire Quran just consists of stories of the past, and they are primarily made up of stories about the lives of the greatest and most inspiring of all role models the prophets (peace be upon them). Allah says about their stories in the Quran that they are “..the best of stories”

….نَحْنُ نَقُصُّ عَلَيْكَ أَحْسَنَ الْقَصَصِ

“We relate to you, [O Muhammad], the best of stories…” (Quran 12:3)

and that’s because they deal with the ‘best’ of creation!

And you know we are even more blessed because it’s not like we have to whip a fat biography of the shelf and shift through all the information about their lives to distinguish what’s relevant and irrelevant to our lives, and find what is applicable to our own personal lives and what isn’t- Allah swt already did that for us! . Of the many prophets that graced this earth Allah selected 25 for us and selected for us a variety of specific incidents from their lives that we can all relate to in some way. So, I would suggest carving out some time in your weekly schedule to revisit history to study the lives of great and inspiring role models, starting with the stories of the prophets of Allah and righteous souls mentioned in the Quran too like Maryam, asiyah, and the mother of Musa for example. And of course, we have a rich Islamic history full of inspirational role models after the time of prophet Mohammed (pbuh) too, again men and women alike such as Hasan al Basri or Fatima Asumurqandiya for example.

Now when I said there was some depth to this point what I meant was that we should not restrict ourselves to seeking out inspiring role models only in our own particular areas of interest and expertise but that it should include people who are the best in different areas of life because getting around people who are great and passionate at what they do can help us access different areas of inspiration for ourselves. Because there are actually more ways for us to be inspired by people than just their knowledge and actions; so, for example we can be inspired by their way of thinking, their character, their mannerisms, their presence etc.

3. Journaling

It might sound basic but it’s actually transformational! We are not always traveling or spending time in the company of inspiring individuals where its often fairly easy to get inspired. Journaling is an action you can make into a daily habit, that you can do multiple times a day in fact, whenever you want to create an amazing source of inspiration for yourself. This is where you spend time with yourself- with your own thoughts, your feelings, your observations and aspirations. So you can journal things like what you really want to achieve in life, key lessons you can learn from daily experiences Allah swt gifted to you, realisations you have come to from your observations of the world around you, engaging with how you really feel about things and your personal thoughts about things- I promise when you make journaling a habit, you will start feeling way more inspired more often inshAllah. You know any time I have ever had a major breakthrough in my personal life, or had amazing ideas or felt high levels of clarity authenticity or inspiration it has always involved the practice of journaling in that process. By the will of Allah, the person I am today and lifestyle I have is inspired by specific incidents I have experienced in my life where I have sat down afterwards and journaled about it.

As Muslims we should know the power of the pen and of the actions directly associated with it; the acts of secluding oneself, the act of reflection, the internal dialogue we have with ourselves, and the act of writing itself etc -particularly when it comes to inspiration because we have been told within Islam about the circumstances that lead to the prophet (pbuh) first receiving the greatest of inspiration, the Quran. We are told that when the prophet pbuh first receiving wahi he would seclude himself in the cave of hira right?, he would consistently reflect on the things he saw around him, the way he truly felt inside and his own thoughts on things etc and subhanallah when the first ayaht of the noble Quran were revealed to the prophet what did Allah swt first say, what was the most important lessons to give us? it was “iqra”. Subhanallah there are so many profound lessons we can learn from these beautiful ayaht- but I will point out just a few basic things that relate to our discussion as food for thought that’s worth noting inshAllah:

When Allah introduces himself as our rub- He mentions only two specific things He created, perhaps the most important- and that was that he created man and he created the pen

The first commandment made by the Quran was not for man to pray or fast or give charity but to read- which tells us that the essence of transformation and inspirational development in life is through what we learn via the pen.

In the first few verses that were revealed When Allah tells us that He is the most dignified who taught by the pen, who taught man what he could not have known- it teaches us that the pen and all knowledge is sacred and is actually taught to us by Allah swt.

These verses also teach us that writing; to archive our speech and thoughts is actually a special privilege, a heavenly gift from Allah to be appreciated which he favoured the human being with.

So, let us utilise this heavenly gift of the pen and lets hold sacred the knowledge and insight we can gain through writing in order to inspire ourselves by scheduling into our daily lives at least just 5mins of journaling every morning and evening inshallah.

4. Quran study

Ok so far, I have shared with you 3 powerful ideas from the Quran to help set up your life for more inspiration inshAllah and now I want to end by sharing the last most important idea which actually relates to the Quran itself. And that is to set aside a small portion of your day to engage in the study of the Quran in whatever capacity best suits you. I’m sure this makes sense because the previous tips came from the Quran itself but there is actually another reason that makes this last suggestion the most important and powerful. Points 1-3 spoke of ways you can become more inspired via the creation. But there is a profound difference between the inspiration you gain through creation and that which comes directly from Allah swt himself- as the creator.

I want to share with you two Quran verses that show cases this difference and they are verse 52 of Surah Ali Imran and verse 111 of Surah maida. Although they essentially deal with the same subject were Isa’s disciples declare their faith in Allah- there are some subtle differences. In the first verse for example Isa was speaking to his disciples and their response was to the call of the messenger whereas in the second verse Allah swt himself intervened with the hearts of the disciples and their reaction was to what Allah swt had directly inspired inside of them, their hearts became overwhelmed them and they declared their faith as a result of that.

In Arabic there is a difference too. In the first verse it reads

فَلَمَّا أَحَسَّ عِيسَى مِنْهُمُ الْكُفْرَ قَالَ مَنْ أَنصَارِي إِلَى اللّهِ قَالَ الْحَوَارِيُّونَ نَحْنُ أَنصَارُ اللّهِ آمَنَّا بِاللّهِ وَاشْهَدْ بِأَنَّا مُسْلِمُونَ

“But when Jesus felt [persistence in] disbelief from them, he said, "Who are my supporters for [the cause of] Allah ?" The disciples said," We are supporters for Allah . We have believed in Allah and testify that we are Muslims [submitting to Him].” (Quran 3:52)

“bi ana muslimoon” and in the second ayah it reads: ‘bi annana muslimoon’.

وَإِذْ أَوْحَيْتُ إِلَى الْحَوَارِيِّينَ أَنْ آمِنُواْ بِي وَبِرَسُولِي قَالُوَاْ آمَنَّا وَاشْهَدْ بِأَنَّنَا مُسْلِمُونَ

“And [remember] when I inspired to the disciples, "Believe in Me and in My messenger Jesus." They said, "We have believed, so bear witness that indeed we are Muslims [in submission to Allah ]." (Quran 5:111)

Now when you translate them into English you don’t notice a difference -but there is actually an extra noon letter, and although the extra letter typically wouldn’t make any difference, rhetorically speaking the principle in Arabic is that if you use more verbiage, if your words are spelled with more letters, then your being more emphatic. So, when the disciples responded to the call of the messenger, they declared that they are Muslims, but when their hearts were directly inspired by Allah their declaration became even more emphatic. And that difference indicates that when Allah intervenes with His inspiration something happens that otherwise can’t. And the other amazing thing in these verses is that when isa called them they said ‘we believe in Allah' whereas when Allah inspired inside of them, they simply said 'we believe’. And that inclusively encapsulated their belief in every truth. So, what Allah highlights by this is that when Allah as oppose to creation inspires your heart, particularly in faith, every dimension of your being is inspired and empowered subhanAllah.

So, if we’re seeking inspiration in its most absolute and beautiful of forms then let us seek it from our creator. And the best way of achieving that is through His very words the Quran.

I hope you enjoyed and benefited from what I shared and it serves you well inshAllah!

#Quran #rehab #halimah #el-kurghali #islamic #inspiration #ideas #Allah #jesus #quranlifestyle #qurancoach #quranlifestylecoach

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incoherentham · 7 years

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Updates - Sep 2017

I have a deck of flashcards where I put all of the factoids or bits of advice I’ve changed my mind about. Every so often, I go through the deck and write a summary of what I've changed my mind about. This is that summary.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

"Rude", "Waste", "Deserving", "Responsibility", and "Goodness" are best categorized as Evaluation/Judgements.

"Stress", "Calm", "Confusion", "Hurt", and "Want" are best categorized as Emotions

I don't really endorse NVC in the same way I used to. How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk gives a more succinct and accurate summation of the kind of insights that NVC should give you. (I have also heard good things about Crucial Conversations.) These cards in particular exemplify my worst takeaway from NVC: Evaluating how meticulously my monologue separates information from implication instead of opening up and keeping up a dialogue.

Power struggles, hurt feelings, and wasted time are signs that you need to do better

Vague prompt with a vague passive-aggressive answer. In truth, not everything is about you.

Replace "I have to" with "I choose to"

Abusers can use this easily by creating false dichotomies. It's genuinely useful in a narrow window of circumstance, when the speaker is self-actualizing enough to create their own options but has rigid thinking around them that they aren't communicating clearly.

Red Flag: you might have trouble making your argument specific or concrete because judgments and evaluations just don't gloss to observations

Holding this belief in my head left me feeling guilty about everything, because when I get stressed I just want bad things to stop happening and don't have the spare mental space to carefully pull this impulse into its constituent pieces. A commitment to using NVC favors those who can consider their wording at leisure over those experiencing an active harm they need stopped. I consider this a major failing of the framework.

Negatively phrased requests offer no understanding of the right thing to do, and form ironic processes instead.

I feel very confused about what I need, I mostly request an ongoing conversation to figure it out because I don't have an active recommendation to give. Aiming to create a coherent plea before asking for help makes it so much harder; I call reserving the right to say "don't, at least for now" having a safe word.

If you find yourself approaching with the objective to change people and their behavior, pause. Go back to your needs, and ask for empathy and ideas to satisfy them.

There's some value in using this as a framework to draw out why others are trying to change me or my behavior. Trying to analyze myself in this way mostly made me avoid thinking about other people's behaviors as changeable.

A flat statement after feelings have been expressed leaves it unclear to others what we want them to do. Ask after underlying needs.

Sometimes making a flat statement is the only way I can get words out. It requires almost tricking myself into believing that what I say just reads into an obscure log file that no one ever looks at. Log files don't have opinions on what the admin should do, they only report what they detected. Expecting that any particular statement will invite a diaogue about root causes can throw me into enough panic that my mouth refuses to produce anything.

(I'm gonna stop adding NVC things now, even though that's not all of them. Suffice to say it was an excellent tool to beat myself up with.)

Other communication frames

Priming is the phenomenon in which exposure to one concept makes related concepts more easily accessible

Priming studies didn't replicate

When you expose people to info that changes their attitudes in a way they don't approve of, they may consciously cancel out the unwanted influence in the moment and shift beliefs later when their guard is down. (Sleeper effect)

I am more suspicious of this claim since the backfire effect failed to replicate. I think it points to a real pattern that exists, where people will stick to their rhetorical position while an argument is going and reexamine their beliefs based on evidence presented later; I doubt that it is basic or pervasive enough to be called out as a human bias.

Embodied cognition: increase persuasion with hand gestures, happiness with a smile, empathy by mimicry

I am slightly more suspicious of these kind of claims since the power poses failed to replicate. They check out intuitively - I use smiles as positive reification in meditation, hand gestures are very communicative, and incorporating emotion mirroring has had THE BIGGEST EFFECT SIZE on my casual social interaction by far - but on their own these ideas do not quite prescribe action.

A memorized Hook, Line, Sinker sequence to leave interesting first impressions on people

didn't drop into an introduction naturally, lacked confidence to force it out

Persuasive levers: Comfort, Acceptance, Greed, Ego, Drama

After careful consideration, I realized that coming at social skills from the angle of persuasian would backfire horrendously. People notice when you make decisions on more complicated considerations than "what would a good person do".

Spaced Repetition Technique

If I can give a partially right answer to a card, split it up into multiple cards.

My inability to tag consistently makes it hard to make connected groups of cards. It takes too much overhead to keep track of multiple cards for shaky concepts (i.e. ones I may want to change or correct later). Given that the majority of my cards are now secretly Implementation Intentions I find it more useful to change a card to be concrete & specific than to split it up.

Note: Upon reflection, I moved this card into my 'advice' deck. It's still a useful suggestion for people using spaced repetition like traditional flash cards.

If I think I made a bunch of cards with the same style before, pause and look them up.

It's useful to keep question phrasing consistent. If similar questions are phrased differently, you can start guessing the answer based on quirks of phrasing which are irrelevant to the question itself. But as I said above, it's too much overhead to track card by card. Instead, use card templates.

When designing the card answer, I need to understand what I need to understand what I need to know for this card.

So vague I have to explain the explanation, so it's useless for its original purpose. For my current SRS use case, it's flat out wrong — I have a couple decks that are designed to be a process involving spaced re-exposure, over which I expect my understanding to grow and change.

Elm and Elixir syntax

Programming syntax cards were useful to make: I had slow down and think about each piece of information. However, most of them were not very useful to review.

I should have cleared them out sooner. As long as I kept them, though, I could imagine myself as a Virtuous DoGooder who offered free basic syntax decks to any aspiring programmer who needed them.

That was way off. The correct thing to do as a beginner is not to solicit a premade deck, but to read the freaking docs and make your own reference cards. I won't send anyone my small hodge-podge of "stuff I don't want to look up on stackoverflow again" until they've done that first.

Habits

Habit knowledge is encoded in procedural memory

What is procedural memory exactly? The kind of memory that habit knowledge is encoded in, I guess. This is an isolated fact. I can say the words but I don't know anything significant about the world.

According to Wood and Neal's Habit Change manuscript, health interventions based on knowledge/intentions do not work to change long-term behavior. They don't consider how to supplant habits.

The framing of it rubs me the wrong way.

1) Aiming to change behavior: your body operates by a mostly-self-correcting system that shouldn't be trivially override-able every time you are convinced of a brilliant scheme to muck with it. If all it takes is a persuasive argument for you to overturn your lifestyle, then I have a church membership to sell to you.

2) I think there do exist people who will reliably change their long-term behavior based on knowledge/intentions (and who are not gullible yuppies). At least if you know what interventions work, you can maybe intervene on yourself. I think there's a deeper skill involved, though, based on combining your abstract reasoning and other systems cleanly into a greater system. The pieces are all there, but they're often just a little too broken to work. You need a trustworthy filter for good ideas, reliable translation from abstract to instinctual terms, a functional reinforcement system at all, a way to reason well about blackbox algorithms, explicit data collection AND lots of up-close exposure to the real world. we need more of it.

People with high self-control traits attain goals by forming habits that allow them to achieve goals without experiencing unwanted temptations (Wendy Wood's Psychology of Habit)

This is a very incomplete model. You cannot engineer your environment to do all your agency for you, though I certainly tried. It will not work for people who are just missing, or maybe misapplying, a certain kind of forward drive.

This is a fundamental issue I have with CFAR. It really helps some people to be told that their brain has internal mechanics that can be altered in such and such ways if they're giving you problems. Being told how to tinker does not teach me how to build a working system from spare, half-functioning parts. They're assuming a crucial centerpiece of the system without teaching it, so it's confusing when all the pieces check out but the engine still doesn't run.

Stimulus reinforcement a good way to control our behavior because automatic systems run effortlessly (unlike willpower, which breaks down)

Man I don't even remember what specific thing 'stimulus reinforcement' means here. As for my best guess, I think any attempt at naive reinforcement on yourself will have either be too narrow or have lots of weird side effects. This is because most people are way smarter than their model of themselves. You will hit goodhart's law sooner than you think.

Trainees put on a continuous reinforcement schedule for along time are likely to quit upon their first failure, so training trials should contain many successes mixed with occasional failures.

This is probably a good first approximation of what works to tell someone, such that if they try to implement it they will probably get much closer to the ideal than they otherwise would have. I don't think it's strictly true though... You get the most out of training at the edge of the learner's ability, and one of the things you expect to see at the correct level is that the learner neither succeeds effortlessly nor fails all the time. I suspect there's a thing about the kinds of distributions of reward in the real world that makes quitting at the first failure in a long range of successes a fairly rational tactic. You may actually not want to train people out of this tendency if you could.

Training trials should contain many successes mixed with occasional failures to increase resistance to extinction. (trainees on continuous reinforcement schedules are likely to quit upon the first failure.)

I think intentionally mixing in failures is wrong in principle, but "occasional failures" as typically measured is a proxy for something that matters. It's important to train variations, multiple contexts; if you are setting thing up precisely enough to prevent all failures then you may be training something much narrower than you think you are, and it will not continue outside of the narrow context. You stay more motivated as well when you train at the edge of your ability, which appears from the outside as having many successes mixed with occasional failures.

You halt a positive feedback loop by matching its most common/powerful triggers to actions that cut off its source material. You halt a negative feedback loop by matching the most common/powerful triggers to actions with neutral or positive feedback.

A masterfully crafted technically correct answer. All the confusing concrete details have been abstracted away, and as such I have no idea how to apply it to real world situations. How do I recognize what kind of loop some phenomena is? How I determine its common or powerful triggers? How do I identify its source material, and what kind of feedback a certain action gives? lol i dunno

Yearly/Weekly task list to check off

Weeks don't map to anything in my brain, so actions never become habitual. I find it hard not to find weekly lists arbitrary and resent the imposition from my past self. Some tasks sincerely need my attention at regular intervals to accomplish, and I'm trying to find other ways to create consistency on those. Yearly only listed prescriptive measures while not actually having a comprehensive enough spread to plan my year around.

Personal Habits

Habit: When I am bursting with irritation, locate the nearest person to complain at them.

It seemed an important to do something to acknowledge that screaming silently hurts me and prove to myself that I am worth defending. I hoped that triggering this action with the initial frustration instead of the later despair would catch problems before they snowballed. However, trust in others needs to be built incrementally. By the time I'm irritated enough to have a rant I know I'm angry enough to do real damage in suddenly letting it out at someone.

Frames that have worked better for me lately include complaining into a list (so I can deal with one piece at a time) and seeking reassurance.

You can cement appropriate response protocols in people's heads by having them come up with scenarios individually, solve the scenarios in pairs, and talk about the solutions as a group.

I decided this entirely on the apparent success of it being used on a group of EA Global 2016 volunteers. That's not nearly enough data, I know. I think this strategy approximates correct training technique better than a lecture does, but is probably not ideal. It certainly depends too much on the appropriate thing to do being transparently recognizable as such.

Morning routine: get dressed, take pills, eat cereal

My actual routine tends to be more adaptable than the cards I make about it.

Also right now I'm doing a thing where I don't do routines, I do what I want.

"every time i've gone for a walk in the sun on a quiet street, i've felt a little better, even when i was depressed, and i would bet money on that happening again if i did it now despite System 1's insistence otherwise."

Many things have slight improvements on mood while depressed, but I get sick very quickly of trying to fill the grand canyon one penny at a time.

if my empathy is failing me take 5-htp

need a more well-rounded theory of drugs, as I don't trust throwing contextless TAPs at problems to form effective solutions when there's interactions and tolerance in the picture.

Use one or more hard trigger for positive thinking: context switch, access to food, make more tools in-reach, be heard out by people, exercise, sleep, sunlight

Need to want to feel better or I will avoid these things anyways. Conflicts with several other cards attempting to enumerate exactly the same things.

Track in phone when I use happy songs, loving-kindness meditation, 5-htp, or naps to deal with feeling awful

Writing down in phone marks these as deliberate interventions, which requires me to, before doing things that might help, a) notice that I'm feeling awful, b) admit to myself that I'm feeling awful, c) admit I don't want to be feeling awful, and d) believe it (I'm?) worth the effort to try.

Keep count of movement and happies vs. flinches to break helpless spirals

tends to make me think too short-term to solve systemic problems

Keep count of noticing detail vs. shutting down, or positive bids vs. disengagement while socializing

I kind of need my attention spare when socializing. Also too short-term to help me solve underlying causes.

Keep count of sensory details vs. noticed confusions vs. hypotheses while debugging or PCK-seeking

Definitely had to write them down when considering people's complex problems and worried it made me look distracted or judgmental.

Keep count of intuitions vs. outcomes when finding The Most Important Thing

Continually trying to figure out the Most Important Thing to do tired me out quickly.

Computers

Your data type design is not done until it has a function template giving the core structure needed to interact with it.

I have not created an ordering to how I do data type design, meaning there's not really anywhere in the process I can stick an "after this, write a function template". I'm sorry, but you really can't make effective 'before' trigger action plans. At best you can do 'when I think about starting , run through this list of prerequisites', and the pain of extra overhead often causes me to avoid thinking about .

Cmd [ or ] to move between tabs

Doesn't work in any Mac program I've tried.

Good Machine Learning Scaling: Get every feature in approximately a -1 to 1 range

For what kind of machine learning is an important question, before I'm pretty sure some kinds actually require 0 to 1 scaling. This is also the most vanilla(1) kind of standardization I can think of; it's got nothing on batch norm. -(1) actually no, vanilla is a fine, upstanding flavor. this is more like, sparkling water flavored soda or cream-flavored ice cream.

Why did I bother, seriously why?

Thucydides said 'It is a habit of mankind to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy'

Why did I think I would ever need to know this quote. Even if it sounds nice to put in a paper or article, I should probably stick to quotes I know the context of.

Starbucks customer service method is to Listen, Acknowledge the complaint, Take action to solve it, Thank them, and Explain why it occured (LATTE)

This is a cute acronym for customer service protocol. There are TONS of cutesy acronyms for customer service protocols; this does not seem particularly notable.

cryptomnesia: when a memory returns and it appears to be a new thought

Obscure vocabulary for something I rarely observe. I guess it is kinda cool to know it's a thing in case it ever happens and someone's like "is this normal"? Except I don't actually know if it's common or a symptom of anything.

Memory encoding is linking new info to info structures already memory

which this card utterly failed to do

E.T. Jaynes says randomness is not a property of the world

Another out of context quote! I really do not know enough about Jayne's general philosophy that I should be confident quoting him as an authority.

For a CRDT to be safe, updates must be Commutative, Associative, and Idempotent.

Isolated factoid. I need a better idea of what a CRDT is, what it's used for, and/or when it would come up. Would also like a better grip on how to determine that updates satisfy the three properties. (I bet it's easy as pie to verify in Haskell.)

Grueling Level Grinding Attempts I Quickly Became Averse To

tensorflow and cuda everything

reading the code for my partner's startup

haskell everything

Kotlin

Other

The first step to rooting a phone is to install TWRP

Useless without the other steps, such that I'm not even sure I don't need to look up stuff first.

Is (X) safe for dogs?

I started this because I keep winding up in houses with dogs, and it seemed prudent to know some common food rules offhand. It wasn't very efficient to memorize foods when the dog was too well trained to steal food, I was too apathetic to feed it scraps, and the list was always too adhoc to generalize. I'll just google it if I'm concerned in the future.

Do Core Transformation technique all the time

For some reason I really resist diving into the depths of my deepest insecurities on a regular basis.

Maybe I should try core transformation on that resistance... Oh that's right, personal growth is useless work in that it doesn't give the tribe a reason to not kick me out.

Everyday math is a crucial skill, a la Eliezer's post "The Simple Math of Everything"

Trying to force math concepts and fast computation tricks into my head in the hopes that I caught something that happened to be applicable was a recipe for exhaustion. The very basics are critical for later learning efficacy, but how you get eager learners is by creating opportunities to see what math is useful and why, and what prerequisite concepts you need to grasp in order to use the math to its full extent. How you get mastery is use, and with only the flimsiest of toy examples to suggest where to apply skills of course I'm not going to use them.

Using the rote practice in a limited context way as the Default Way to learn math skills is ridiculous--you do targeted practice to address deficiencies that are holding you back. Maaybe you do multiple, varied step-throughs of the process in order to assess your ability. Ugh.

According to Haidt, we might be blind to our own selfishness because this helps us project a positive self-image

This is not a straight forward fact about humans. This is one of those corrections that gets taken most seriously by exactly the people who don't need it or need the exact opposite correction. It needs to include a concrete way to estimate its applicability.

When I notice I'm missing important information, that is NOT the time to push to extract feedback. My current mechanisms won't often find what they missed just by looking harder.

I've this unfortunate habit of panicking at the messenger, whenever I notice big holes in my understanding. This was an attempt to prevent making things worse in that way. Now, instead of supressing the instinct to "interrogate everyone"/"solve everything now", I've moved to integrating an understanding that the quick solution IS making a small update to longer term strategies.

Identify your Signature Strengths and take steps to use them more often

My self-image contradicts itself in ways I don't know how to resolve. I feel scared and confused when I try to sort out which beliefs reflect my real abilities, which ideas manifested out of depression or internalized verbal abuse, and which characterized myself in specific circumstances that don't apply to me anymore (or rarely).

Keep major decisions in LADR format

Not lightweight enough for me to use consistently, need a way of classifying which decisions merit recording this way. I might reconsider using them in my strategic reviews.

Lines of a general 101 introduction speech to memorize

I imagined I would give a lot of 101 talks which this might have been helpful to have pinned down. I have little reason to expect it works, having never tested it. It feels silly to fiddle around optimizing a hook when poor vocal projection and scattered thinking put much tighter bottlenecks on how good I get at giving talks.

Software development: For the next time I have a problem, I try to think of a few words that will quickly focus my thinking.

Vague

Someone operating on a delicate live system must know if there are any "points of no return" in the procedure, and stop to re-check the system.

Many things are delicate live systems, having this in my head encouraged me to obsess over decisions until deadlines even more.

As evidenced by people predicting music competition winners better with no sound, only visuals, style is more important than content.

Could it be that being voted a pop-star is better predicted by style than content? No reason to expect this generalizes to every part of life.

The difference between sensitivity and accuracy: sensitivity is % correct of positive examples, accuracy is % correct of all predictions.

The difference between sensitivity and precision: sensitivity is out of all real positives, precision is out of predicted positives

terms used too loosely or interchangeable in every day examples to be worth attaching precise data wrangling definitions

Anki checklist:

☐ I know why I want to make tis card. ☐ I understand what I need to know for this card ☐ I know how to recognize when/where I need this ☐ There are no almost or partially right answers to this card ☐ There are no technically correct answers which comically miss the point ☐ There is no way to cheat to the right answer ☐ I cannot get marked wrong for being smarter than the question writer

How I'm using anki cards changes often, and have subtler common qualities than this checklist

#update #anki

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homunculuscolossus-blog · 7 years

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Fortunately, people aren't responsible for who their parents are

“Disappointed people, clinging on to bottles

When it comes it’s so, so, disappointing.”

“Your dad liked them,” my mum once told me after I asked her -with some twelve-year old snottiness- if she knew who Radiohead were. It was one of the first concretely factual, ‘positivist’ statements I could pin on the person: Dad liked Radiohead. Quite certainly the EMI years, everything up until the release until ‘Kid A’ I could be sure he liked, because my parents were still together then.

There are certain songs (and this is true of books too) one remembers through the material circumstances of listening: the time of the year, the visuals of the cover, maybe how you came by it. Often the material circumstances plays some guiding role back to the memory. Sometimes it has been the other way around.

I’m fairly sure that the memory of listening to ‘Let Down’ for the first time - on the grayest afternoon, streaks of rain on the windows, the depressing flat with its thousands of micro-blemishes and few serious structural problems - is also due to the insistent, painful quality of Thom’s wailing.

It was nice to know that I could share something besides his malevolent laugh, which according to mother was “100% him.” Where was this jerk? What was he doing? Why did I feel that I needed him to ‘rescue’ me?

In the great cherry-picking of quotes I thought were pertinent, Adam Philips writes things like: “If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us we always believe they can satisfy us. And who frustrates us more than ourselves?” Alain de Botton might add that we need to find the partner that has the familiarity of such childhood suffering. He also says other things in the same lecture which might not have any great deal of empirical weight or valid meta-analysis to them. But anyway, I’ll go on using him because I haven’t read much Philips, Klein, Winnicott et al. (or had a therapist). “If we manage to turn rage into grief,” he says quite early on, “we will have made psychological progress.”

“What lies behind rage very often is an unusual quality because we tend to think that very angry people are dark and pessimistic characters. Absolutely not. Scratch the surface of any regularly angry person and you will find a wild optimist. It is, in fact, hope that drives rage. Think of the person who screams every time they can’t find their house keys or every time they get stuck in traffic. These curious but unfortunate characters are evincing a reckless faith in a world in which keys never go astray, the roads mysteriously traffic-free. It is hope that is turbo-charging their rage.”

I was angry, it was true, but it became less and likely as the years went by without contact that I had forgotten ever been begotten by a man that looked like me: it felt like I was an all-female androgynous creation, a feminino, a sissy. Even if at bottom de Botton’s calculation leans towards a murky calculus which doesn’t account for great variation in human reaction, it has the great advantage of convincing angry people that they can exist in an otherwise different range of emotional habits. Thanks too, to CBT. Moreover, it is certainly the case that the cynical are reactive in that way because they have taken some distance from the risky, familiar calumnies which produce distrust and disappointment. Cynicism with a human face instead then? A modification which wears genial reactions, personable smile, yet the person who is inwardly cautious and reserving of their time and energy may still have the small victory of inviolability; yet more obviously, might have the obvious disadvantage of doing little with their life that is not deemed low-risk. Notably, love.

One of the saddest, and almost certainly relieving, dues of dying is not having to not having to want anymore: Just as is written on Kazantzakis’ resting stone, there is no imperative “to want nothing, to fear nothing,” Instead, “to be free.”

The impetus to begin this post began as I left a train from Norwich, defeated, that I hadn’t learned anything about to how to handle myself in social situations.The story of why I was in Norwich is a different story. I didn’t have an eye for narrative, except that I knew it had something to do with zero-ing in upon details and the subterranean connections between things which can form that factitious thing called a narrative. I couldn’t do narrative but I could maybe I could find the salient details, the most memorable vignettes. “There so nice people” a woman a few rows in the train carriage said, on the phone. I had to urge to correct her grammar. I was not so nice people. I was not smart people. I was not good people. Move along, whiner. Whose fault is that? My own, and nobody but my own.

Like the weight of all childless yet somehow successful sons of the past, that yawning, yet restless energy which should be more properly considered as sublimated or misplaced anger, impels me forward: “Why are you such a jerk? Where are you?” Power, propriety, property, authority, knowledge: all those things I’m not happy with myself for admiring and you have none of them. If most disadvantages come from inability, not knowing or not adapting to the ways of the world, I think I can understand something of his beginnings: at 15, school ends, doing waitering jobs for the next 10-15 in Cyprus and the UK. Now, peasant class in the dawning glory-time of mass unemployment.

Right now, almost a week later after Norwich, I write this from a bench in a walled garden of a former aristocratic country house (never mind which) now in the local authority’s hands. The specific name is irrelevant. It’s August. A man with a bald head obscured by a low shrubbed tree, sits on a bench. To relatively locate him, he’s about ten metres north-northwest of me, sat on the benches of the inner circle (I’m on the outer bench of the bottom right corner). At first, I didn’t notice him until I had looked around to explain the source of a forceful waft of marijuana. A cloud crept over from behind the gaps of the small tree. If wasn’t for the two small boys with a ball running to the bald man with a football, my blitheness may have never registered him. “Daddy, daddy, I need your help. Be on my team,” one said. “No, no,” the impetuous other of the two blonde-haired dwarves says. I can’t hear the father’s response if he responds meaningfully at all. His arm points and extends outwards. The two little offspring, after in all likelihood imbibing his recreational aromas, run back to another part of the grounds.

I’m in the garden because I have nothing better but summer reading to do. I feel tyrannised by leisure, because all my friends are scattered across the world, quite literally. In the book I hold, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, there’s a conversation in which her then-grad-student self and another student, Matej discuss his “current object of study: something called ‘the problem of the person’”:

“The problem, was that personhood is revealed and constituted by action, such that the whole person is always present in every action - and yet the person isn’t ‘exhausted’ by any single action, or even by the sum of all her actions.” (p. 76)

Although what seems to me defined as an Arendtian, action-centred philosophy of personhood reads as something possibly esoteric, it bears mulling. In their objects, in the things that they like, and in an overall loose relationship to factual accuracy of stories told and retold about them we ask, “What is he?” Describe. On balance, I happen to still like Radiohead and maintain an ambivalent relationship to l'herb but I would like to think, moralising aside, I would do better than these two (no offspring if so, not negligence). There are many problems with the person.

A day later, still under the sway of a Batuman’s The Possessed, I remember some sentences registering her relative dissatisfaction at having, more or less, studied Russian for two years without being unable to simply pick up a book and just read it (in The Possessed). Ditto, my own inability to watch a Greek feature without the subtitles. Under this spell of this disappointing reflection from someone who more people should consider an intellectual hero, later that night I told myself I should watch Kynodontas (Dogtooth). There’s some kind some of the initial grim irony in using this film to learn Greek, since, at least in the opening scene, audiotapes narrated by the mother insidiously redefine the Greek language. In the bathroom, down to underwear the three (siblings? How would the viewer know?) listen to a tape player: “The new words of the day are ‘Sea’, ‘Highway’, and ‘Roadtrip’ and ‘Shotgun.’” ‘Roadtrip’ is an unimpeachable floor material. This film probably offers a cipher for the conservatism of the Greek nuclear family and the patriarchs therein, but I can’t unpack it now. Of course, in this scene, each definition is wrong and subtitles don’t require you to expend any great epistemic work to strike you of their wrongness. We never learn the exact reason why the teenagers of the fenced compound are prohibited from the outside world: the onus is on the industrialist father who confines them to explain himself. In any case, they must wait for their (adult) Dogtooth to be let loose, an event which, of course, never comes. That is, without a pummelling to the jaw. Defanged, having just that at, the end of this treacly black satire sees the eldest hide in the trunk of her father’s car, unknown to him, awaiting a brave new world she has never known.

Analogous in certain ways, then, to the eldest daughter of Dogtooth, I knew of the world through a specific media consumption and socialisation. If Dad had stayed beyond my second birthday, I may have actually been fluent in Greek (Cypriot and not Demotic, but let’s not open this). I might have liked football, been less solitary. I knew Dad from the few sub-Kray crime paperbacks, spined and yellowed like a true victim, that had been carried perhaps unknowingly in each move of the several, early flats we lived in. We all wonder, at one time, perhaps not in our twenties of the nascent, secret selves that were not immediately obvious to us.

These unknown, unrealised selves take us into a sort of widening gyre of counterfactual selves. Some years ago, when I was perhaps a tweenager, I found out that Dad had fathered another family – and perhaps again, not without the semantic uncertainty of what a ‘family’ meant. I had heard about the story, that Dad had become consummate with an American woman in Cyprus, several ears down: first my dad had spoken, casually and confidentially perhaps, on the phone to my Uncle Michael, the droll, serious-minded hunter of rabbits, who had then drip-fed reticent morsels, tongue-in-cheek to my auntie. My auntie Androula, less reticent, had then jawed on with the news to my mother. This unknown woman, this American, had been cast by someone, as not unlike the role of temptress to my all-too virile Daddy. She was a temptress, according to Dad, for what happens after. She was working for the American government on the Island (an agency with one of those infamous three-letter acronyms) and as the vague motions of the story went and here perhaps, in Papa’s cheeky eagerness to flirt and seduce during his service-industry dealings as a waiter, had sparked up something. After, there is something of an ellipsis since, when Dad does respond in person, with few sentences, a few years later, he mentions how he spent some time in New Jersey. He makes the leap across continents, after how long of knowing this woman exactly? The visits themselves are perhaps worth writing some paragraphs on, but hold on: he doesn’t say how long and in what capacity he lived (and perhaps loved) in The Garden State. I don’t think to ask. I’m not incurious, I think, but I am quiet. I am not alone in the room as he tells us this. We’re at my auntie’s house. My mum doesn’t allow him to know where we live now, although he keeps asking and has some vague indication.

Anyway, my Dad tends to twins with this woman eventually births (conceived where, it is not important). Does he drive an inconspicuous suburban vehicle through the interstate highways, through the old colonial buildings of Newark, ice piled on the corners, rocking a baby carrier on the front seat? Does the deeply-riven status anxiety dynamic, she a government professional, he less so, eventually break them apart? Does he get the finger flipped to him by a balding man who could -yes!- from the rear, actually be Phillip Roth! Wrong on both accounts. The story goes that, apparently, this government worker couldn’t get the indefinite leave she needed from the federal agency she worked for, being apparently childless and unmarried. My dad’s sperm fulfills this, again apparently, and she is able to exit for good. It sounds far-fetched. Which federal employees cannot just leave their agency? Perhaps she knew secrets. Perhaps children makes them, in the eyes of the ruthless male-headed agency chiefs, vulnerable or else, redundant. This account also overlooks any semblance of any actual real love they may have actually sparked up.

As for getting flipped off while in the driver’s seat, in the one or two times I drove with him in his black Toyota Yaris, in the UK, one of his signature driving styles was the lane shift without ‘indicators’ (not a metaphor). Perhaps he thought indications were reserved for hard, right-angle turns only. With a CD of Bob Marley’s Greatest Hits playing I remember him uttering laconically: “It’s black man’s time,” before quickly adding “after slavery”. “That was two hundred years ago,” I said (I was a teenager, I was more ignorant). “Doesn’t matter. It’s their time,” he said in his idiosyncratic, accented Gringlish. More to the point, however, as I remember the feeling of this memory, why was the paterfamilias telling me this? He never said it was my time, he only ever asked me how school was going once. Sure, race and identity categories could further liberation, but they could be, as I learnt later, or at least I think I did, a technology of census-taking and governance. The ex-colonials, Jamaicans, and Cypriots are joined by this, but I doubt my Dad affiliated himself with anyone other than the fellow Islanders at the many restaurants he moved for in the nineties. What had he been reading?

Dad, for all his animus to the Turkish government, as a boy who had lived through that fateful day in 1974, bearing nothing but the clothes on his back, ditto Nikos and Maria my paternal grandparents, had remarkably little chauvinism to share with me. He seemed like anti-racist but neither did he casually wax on with anti-colonial or communist nostrums. In the inter-war years (1919-1938), it was perceived by the Metropolitan Police that the few Cypriots who were residing in London were more likely given to this sort of politics, though not without a sizeable conservative religious minority too. (This little-known story of Cypriots being surveilled by the police in the twenties and thirties London is an interesting story in itself). Let’s move on. Everything tells me that Dad is fairly apolitical, if not in the past, then probably now, grown quiet by age. I don’t know the conversations he had with friends then or now. I hardly know anything. Are the New Jersey twins thinking too, of the problem of the person? They are about to enter their AP classes or perhaps freshman classes soon.

We do know that he gambled away paychecks at the Casino. Perhaps he was feeling lucky. He wears the throw of aleatory possibility, if moving to New Jersey and gambling away mortgage money is any indication like he wears his dark five o’ clock shadow: up-front and lightly.

#that dad had another family #dads #family #short essay #diary

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thirteenthanda · 7 years

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I spent years discovering the simple tactics gurus like Oprah, Einstein, and Buffett used to become successful—here they are

One question has fascinated me my entire adult life: what causes some people to become world-class leaders, performers, and change-makers, while most others plateau?

I’ve explored the answer to this question by reading thousands of biographies, academic studies, and books across dozens of disciplines. Over time, I’ve noticed a deeper practice of top performers, one so counterintuitive that it’s often overlooked.

Despite having way more responsibility than anyone else, top performers in the business world often find time to step away from their urgent work, slow down, and invest in activities that have a long-term payoff in greater knowledge, creativity, and energy. As a result, they may achieve less in a day at first, but drastically more over the course of their lives.

I call this compound time because, like compound interest, a small investment now yields surprisingly large returns over time.Warren Buffett, for example, despite owning companies with hundreds of thousands of employees, isn’t as busy as you are. By his own estimate, he has spent 80% of his career reading and thinking.

At the 2016 Daily Journal annual meeting, Charlie Munger, Buffett’s 40-year business partner, shared that the only scheduled item on his calendar one week was getting his haircut and that most of his weeks were similar. This is the opposite of most people who are overwhelmed with short-term deadlines, meetings, and minutiae.

Ben Franklin once wisely said: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Perhaps the source of Buffett’s true wealth is not just the compounding of his money, but the compounding of his knowledge, which has allowed him to make better decisions. Or as billionaire entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist Paul Tudor Jones has eloquently said, “Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.”

To build your own intellectual capital, here are six compound time activities that you can start incorporating into your life immediately:

Hack #1: Keep a journal. It could change your life

Many top performers go beyond open-ended reflection: They often combine specific prompts with a physical journal.

Each morning, Benjamin Franklin asked himself, “What good shall I do this day?” and each evening, “What good have I done today?” Steve Jobsstood at the mirror each day and asked, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do?” Both billionaire Jean Paul DeJoria and media maven Arianna Huffington takes a few minutes each morning to count their blessings. Oprah Winfrey does the same: She starts each day with her gratitude journal, noting five things for which she’s thankful.

Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman asks himself questions about his thinking before bed: What are the kind of key things that might be constraints on a solution, or might be the attributes of a solution? What are the tools or assets I might have? What are the key things that I want to think about? What do I want to solve creatively? Grandmaster chess player and world champion martial artist Josh Waitzkin has a similar process; he explains, “My journaling system is based around studying complexity. Reducing the complexity down to what is the most important question. Sleeping on it, and then waking up in the morning first thing and pre-input brainstorming on it. So I’m feeding my unconscious material to work on, releasing it completely, and then opening my mind and riffing on it.”

Whenever legendary management consultant Peter Drucker made a decision, he wrote down what he expected to happen; several months later, he’d compare the results with his expectations. Leonardo da Vincifilled tens of thousands of pages with sketches and musings on his art, inventions, observations, and ideas. Albert Einstein amassed more than 80,000 pages of notes in his lifetime. Former President John Adams kept over 51 journals throughout his life.

Ever notice that after writing about your thoughts, plans, and experiences, you feel clearer and more focused? Researchers call this “writing to learn.” It helps us bring order and meaning to our experiences and becomes a potent tool for knowledge and discovery. It also augments our ability to think about complex topics that have dozens of interrelated parts, while our brain, by itself, can only manage three in any given moment. A review of hundreds of studies on writing to learn showed that it also helps with what’s called metacognitive thinking, which is our awareness of our own thoughts. Metacognition is a key element in performance.

Hack #2: Naps can dramatically increase learning, memory, awareness, creativity, and productivity

Pulling from the results of more than a decade of experiments, nap researcher Sara Mednick of the University of California, San Diego, boldly states: “With naps of an hour to an hour and a half… you get close to the same benefits in learning consolidation that you would from a full eight hour night’s sleep.” People who study in the morning do about 30% better on an evening test if they’ve had an hour-long nap than if they haven’t.

Albert Einstein broke up his day by returning home from his Princeton office at 1:30 pm, having lunch, taking a nap, and then waking with a cup of tea to start the afternoon. Thomas Edison napped for up to three hours per day. Winston Churchill considered his late afternoon nap non-negotiable. John F. Kennedy ate his lunch in bed before drawing the curtains for a one- to two-hour nap. Others who swore by daily naps include Leonardo Da Vinci (up to a dozen 10-minute naps a day), Napoleon Bonaparte (before battles), Ronald Reagan (every afternoon), Lyndon B. Johnson (30 minutes a day), John D. Rockefeller (every day after lunch), Margaret Thatcher (one hour a day), Arnold Schwarzenegger (every afternoon), and Bill Clinton (15–60 minutes a day).

Modern science confirms that napping makes us not only more productive, but also more creative. Maybe that’s why greats such as Salvador Dali, chess grandmaster Josh Waitzkin, and Edgar Allen Poe used naps to induce hypnagogia, a state of awareness between sleep and wakefulness that helped them access a deeper level of creativity.

Hack #3: Only 15 minutes of walking per day can work wonders

Top performers also build exercise into their daily routine. The most common form is walking.

Charles Darwin went on two walks daily: one at noon and one at 4 pm. After a midday meal, Beethoven embarked on a long, vigorous walk,carrying a pencil and sheets of music paper to record chance musical thoughts. Charles Dickens walked a dozen miles a day and found writing so mentally agitating that he once wrote, “If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche concluded, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”

Others who made a habit of walking include Gandhi (took a long walk every day), Jack Dorsey (takes a five-mile walk each morning), Steve Jobs (took a long walk when he had a serious talk), Tory Burch (45 minutes a day), Howard Schultz (walks every morning), Aristotle (gave lectures while walking), neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (walked after lunch), and Winston Churchill (walked every morning upon waking).

Now we have scientific data proving what these geniuses intuited: Taking a walk refreshes the mind and body, and increases creativity. It can even extend your life. In one 12-year study of adults over 65, walking for 15 minutes a day reduced mortality by 22%.

Hack #4: Reading is one of the most beneficial activities we can invest in

Here’s an amazing truth: No matter our circumstances, we all have equal access to the favorite learning medium of Bill Gates, the richest person in the world: books.

Top performers in all areas take advantage of this high-powered, low-cost way to learn.

Winston Churchill spent several hours a day reading biographies, history, philosophy, and economics. Likewise, the list of US presidents who loved books is long: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and JFK were all voracious readers. Theodore Roosevelt read one book a day when busy, and two to three a day when he had a free evening.

Other lumineer readers include billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban(three-plus hours a day), billionaire entrepreneur Arthur Blank (two-plus hours a day), billionaire investor David Rubenstein (six books a week), billionaire entrepreneur Dan Gilbert (one to two hours a day), Oprah Winfrey (credits reading for much of her success), Elon Musk(read two books a day when he was younger), Mark Zuckerberg (a book every two weeks), Jeff Bezos (read hundreds of science fiction novels by the time he was 13), and CEO of Disney Bob Iger (gets up every morning at 4:30 am to read).

Reading books improves memory, increases empathy, and de-stresses us, all of which can help us achieve our goals. Books compress a lifetime’s worth of someone’s most impactful knowledge into a format that demands just a few hours of our time. They provide the ultimate ROI.

Hack #5: Conversation partners lead to surprising breakthroughs

In Powers Of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, author and essayist Joshua Shenk makes the case that the foundation of creativity is social, not individual. The book reviews the academic research on innovation, highlighting creative duos from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

During long daily walks, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky developed a new theory of behavioral economics that won Kahneman the Nobel Prize. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis shared their work with each other and set aside Mondays to meet at a pub. Francis Crick and James Watson, the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, batted ideas back and forth relentlessly, both in their shared office and during daily lunches in Cambridge. Crick recalled that if he presented a flawed idea, “Watson would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice-versa.” Artists Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett took two hours each morning to “do the diary” together: recounting the previous day’s activities in detail.

Many greats made a habit of conversing in large, ritualized groups. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Tennis Cabinet” included friends and diplomats who exercised together daily and debated the issues facing the country. Benjamin Franklin created a “mutual improvement society” called the Junto that gathered each Friday evening to learn from each other. The Vagabonds were a group of four famous friends — Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs — who took road trips each summer: camping, climbing, and “sitting around the campfire discussing their various scientific and business ventures and debating the pressing issues of the day.”

Hack #6: Success is a direct result of the number of experiments you perform

There’s a reason that Jeff Bezos says, “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day….”

One big winner pays for all of the losing experiments. In a recent SEC filing, he explains why:

“Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in awhile, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”

No matter how much you read and discuss, you’re still going to have to spend some time making your own mistakes. If that discourages you, just remember Thomas Edison. It took him more than 50,000 botched experiments to invent the alkaline storage cell battery, and 9,000 to perfect the light bulb. But at his death, he held nearly 1,100 US patents.

Experiments don’t just happen in the “real” world. Our brain has an incredible ability to simulate reality and explore possibilities at a much faster rate and lower cost. Einstein used thought experiments (imagining himself chasing a light beam through space, for instance) to help construct breakthrough scientific theories; you can use them to set your imagination free on slightly smaller conundrums. The journals of Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and other luminaries aren’t just filled with writing, they’re also filled with sketches and mind maps.

Standup comedy is a far cry from inventing, but experimentation is just as key in the arts as it is in science. Take a star comedian like Chris Rock, for instance. Rock prepares for huge shows in venues such as Madison Square Garden by piecing his routine together in small clubs for months on end, trying out new material and getting instant feedback from audiences (they either laugh or they don’t).

Others use experiments to force them to take on new habits or break unhealthy ones. Iconic producer and writer Shonda Rhimes decided to take on her workaholism and extreme introversion and say yes to everything that scared her in an experiment she called the Year of Yes. Jia Jang confronted the universal fear of rejection with his 100 Days of Rejection project, which he then catalogued on YouTube. College grad Megan Gebhart spent the first year of her career taking one person a week out for coffee; she compiled the lessons she learned in a book called 52 Cups of Coffee. Filmmaker Sheena Matheiken wore the same black dress every day for a year as an exercise in sustainability.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”

Go ahead, take that hour now

In a world where everyone is speeding up and cramming their schedule to get ahead, the modern knowledge worker should do the opposite: slow down, work less, learn more, and think long-term.

In a world where frantic work is the focus, top performers should focus deliberately on learning and rest. In a world where artificial intelligence is automating more and more of our work, we should unleash our creativity. Creativity is not unleashed by working more, but by working less.

It’s easy to say to yourself, “Sure! Warren Buffett can do it because… well…. he’s Warren Buffett.” But don’t forget that Warren Buffett has had his learning ritual for his entire career, way before he was the Warren Buffett we know today. He could have easily fallen into the trap of the constant “busy-ness,” but instead, he made three crucial decisions:

Ruthlessly remove the busy work in order to rise above incessant urgent deadlines, meetings, and minutiae

Spend almost all of his time on compound time, things that create the most long-term value

Tap dance the work because he leverages his unique strengths and passions

This lifestyle may not happen for you overnight, but in order to leverage compound time, you first need to believe that a lifestyle where you work less but accomplish more is possible and beneficial; that a lifestyle where you ruthlessly focus on your strengths and passions is not only feasible, but necessary.

To get started, follow the 5-hour rule: For an hour a day, invest in compound time: Take that nap, enjoy that walk, read that book, have that conversation. You may doubt yourself, feel guilty or even worry you’re “wasting” time… You’re not! Step away from your to-do list, just for an hour, and invest in your future. This approach has worked for some of the world’s greatest minds. It can work for you, too.

by Michael Simmons

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readbookywooks · 8 years

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Recollections of Father Zossima's Youth before he became a Monk. The Duel

I SPENT a long time, almost eight years, in the military cadet school at Petersburg, and in the novelty of my surroundings there, many of my childish impressions grew dimmer, though I forgot nothing. I picked up so many new habits and opinions that I was transformed into a cruel, absurd, almost savage creature. A surface polish of courtesy and society manners I did acquire together with the French language. But we all, myself included, looked upon the soldiers in our service as cattle. I was perhaps worse than the rest in that respect, for I was so much more impressionable than my companions. By the time we left the school as officers, we were ready to lay down our lives for the honour of the regiment, but no one of us had any knowledge of the real meaning of honour, and if anyone had known it, he would have been the first to ridicule it. Drunkenness, debauchery and devilry were what we almost prided ourselves on. I don't say that we were bad by nature, all these young men were good fellows, but they behaved badly, and I worst of all. What made it worse for me was that I had come into my own money, and so I flung myself into a life of pleasure, and plunged headlong into all the recklessness of youth. I was fond of reading, yet strange to say, the Bible was the one book I never opened at that time, though I always carried it about with me, and I was never separated from it; in very truth I was keeping that book "for the day and the hour, for the month and the year," though I knew it not. After four years of this life, I chanced to be in the town of K. where our regiment was stationed at the time. We found the people of the town hospitable, rich, and fond of entertainments. I met with a cordial reception everywhere, as I was of a lively temperament and was known to be well off, which always goes a long way in the world. And then a circumstance happened which was the beginning of it all. I formed an attachment to a beautiful and intelligent young girl of noble and lofty character, the daughter of people much respected. They were well-to-do people of influence and position. They always gave me a cordial and friendly reception. I fancied that the young lady looked on me with favour and my heart was aflame at such an idea. Later on I saw and fully realised that I perhaps was not so passionately in love with her at all, but only recognised the elevation of her mind and character, which I could not indeed have helped doing. I was prevented, however, from making her an offer at the time by my selfishness; I was loath to part with the allurements of my free and licentious bachelor life in the heyday of my youth, and with my pockets full of money. I did drop some hint as to my feelings however, though I put off taking any decisive step for a time. Then, all of a sudden, we were ordered off for two months to another district. On my return two months later, I found the young lady already married to a rich neighbouring landowner, a very amiable man, still young though older than I was, connected with the best Petersburg society, which I was not, and of excellent education, which I also was not. I was so overwhelmed at this unexpected circumstance that my mind was positively clouded. The worst of it all was that, as I learned then, the young landowner had been a long while betrothed to her, and I had met him indeed many times in her house, but blinded by my conceit I had noticed nothing. And this particularly mortified me; almost everybody had known all about it, while I knew nothing. I was filled with sudden irrepressible fury. With flushed face I began recalling how often I had been on the point of declaring my love to her, and as she had not attempted to stop me or to warn me, she must, I concluded, have been laughing at me all the time. Later on, of course, I reflected and remembered that she had been very far from laughing at me; on the contrary, she used to turn off any love-making on my part with a jest and begin talking of other subjects; but at that moment I was incapable of reflecting and was all eagerness for revenge. I am surprised to remember that my wrath and revengeful feelings were extremely repugnant to my own nature, for being of an easy temper, I found it difficult to be angry with anyone for long, and so I had to work myself up artificially and became at last revolting and absurd. I waited for an opportunity and succeeded in insulting my "rival" in the presence of a large company. I insulted him on a perfectly extraneous pretext, jeering at his opinion upon an important public event - it was in the year 1826 - my jeer was, so people said, clever and effective. Then I forced him to ask for an explanation, and behaved so rudely that he accepted my challenge in spite of the vast inequality between us, as I was younger, a person of no consequence, and of inferior rank. I learned afterwards for a fact that it was from a jealous feeling on his side also that my challenge was accepted; he had been rather jealous of me on his wife's account before their marriage; he fancied now that if he submitted to be insulted by me and refused to accept my challenge, and if she heard of it, she might begin to despise him and waver in her love for him. I soon found a second in a comrade, an ensign of our regiment. In those days though duels were severely punished, yet duelling was a kind of fashion among the officers - so strong and deeply rooted will a brutal prejudice sometimes be. It was the end of June, and our meeting was to take place at seven o'clock the next day on the outskirts of the town - and then something happened that in very truth was the turning point of my life. In the evening, returning home in a savage and brutal humour, I flew into a rage with my orderly Afanasy, and gave him two blows in the face with all my might, so that it was covered with blood. He had not long been in my service and I had struck him before, but never with such ferocious cruelty. And, believe me, though it's forty years ago, I recall it now with shame and pain. I went to bed and slept for about three hours; when I waked up the day was breaking. I got up - I did not want to sleep any more - I went to the window - opened it, it looked out upon the garden; I saw the sun rising; it was warm and beautiful, the birds were singing. "What's the meaning of it?" I thought. "I feel in my heart as it were something vile and shameful. Is it because I am going to shed blood? No," I thought, "I feel it's not that. Can it be that I am afraid of death, afraid of being killed? No, that's not it, that's not it at all."... And all at once I knew what it was: it was because I had beaten Afanasy the evening before! It all rose before my mind, it all was, as it were, repeated over again; he stood before me and I was beating him straight on the face and he was holding his arms stiffly down, his head erect, his eyes fixed upon me as though on parade. He staggered at every blow and did not even dare to raise his hands to protect himself. That is what a man has been brought to, and that was a man beating a fellow creature! What a crime! It was as though a sharp dagger had pierced me right through. I stood as if I were struck dumb, while the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing and the birds were trilling the praise of God.... I hid my face in my hands, fell on my bed and broke into a storm of tears. And then I remembered by brother Markel and what he said on his death-bed to his servants: "My dear ones, why do you wait on me, why do you love me, am I worth your waiting on me?" "Yes, am I worth it?" flashed through my mind. "After all what am I worth, that another man, a fellow creature, made in the likeness and image of God, should serve me?" For the first time in my life this question forced itself upon me. He had said, "Mother, my little heart, in truth we are each responsible to all for all, it's only that men don't know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once." "God, can that too be false?" I thought as I wept. "In truth, perhaps, I am more than all others responsible for all, a greater sinner than all men in the world." And all at once the whole truth in its full light appeared to me: what was I going to do? I was going to kill a good, clever, noble man, who had done me no wrong, and by depriving his wife of happiness for the rest of her life, I should be torturing and killing her too. I lay thus in my bed with my face in the pillow, heedless how the time was passing. Suddenly my second, the ensign, came in with the pistols to fetch me. "Ah," said he, "it's a good thing you are up already, it's time we were off, come along!" I did not know what to do and hurried to and fro undecided; we went out to the carriage, however. "Wait here a minute," I said to him. "I'll be back directly, I have forgotten my purse." And I ran back alone, to Afanasy's little room. "Afanasy," I said, "I gave you two blows on the face yesterday, forgive me," I said. He started as though he were frightened, and looked at me; and I saw that it was not enough, and on the spot, in my full officer's uniform, I dropped at his feet and bowed my head to the ground. "Forgive me," I said. Then he was completely aghast. "Your honour... sir, what are you doing? Am I worth it?" And he burst out crying as I had done before, hid his face in his hands, turned to the window and shook all over with his sobs. I flew out to my comrade and jumped into the carriage. "Ready," I cried. "Have you ever seen a conqueror?" I asked him. "Here is one before you." I was in ecstasy, laughing and talking all the way, I don't remember what about. He looked at me. "Well, brother, you are a plucky fellow, you'll keep up the honour of the uniform, I can see." So we reached the place and found them there, waiting us. We were placed twelve paces apart; he had the first shot. I stood gaily, looking him full in the face; I did not twitch an eyelash, I looked lovingly at him, for I knew what I would do. His shot just grazed my cheek and ear. "Thank God," I cried, "no man has been killed," and I seized my pistol, turned back and flung it far away into the wood. "That's the place for you," I cried. I turned to my adversary. "Forgive me, young fool that I am, sir," I said, "for my unprovoked insult to you and for forcing you to fire at me. I am ten times worse than you and more, maybe. Tell that to the person whom you hold dearest in the world." I had no sooner said this than they all three shouted at me. "Upon my word," cried my adversary, annoyed, "if you did not want to fight, why did not you let me alone?" "Yesterday I was a fool, to-day I know better," I answered him gaily. "As to yesterday, I believe you, but as for to-day, it is difficult to agree with your opinion," said he. "Bravo," I cried, clapping my hands. "I agree with you there too, I have deserved it!" "Will you shoot, sir, or not?" "No, I won't," I said; "if you like, fire at me again, but it would be better for you not to fire." The seconds, especially mine, were shouting too: "Can you disgrace the regiment like this, facing your antagonist and begging his forgiveness! If I'd only known this!" I stood facing them all, not laughing now. "Gentlemen," I said, "is it really so wonderful in these days to find a man who can repent of his stupidity and publicly confess his wrongdoing?" "But not in a duel," cried my second again. "That's what's so strange," I said. "For I ought to have owned my fault as soon as I got here, before he had fired a shot, before leading him into a great and deadly sin; but we have made our life so grotesque, that to act in that way would have been almost impossible, for only after I had faced his shot at the distance of twelve paces could my words have any significance for him, and if I had spoken before, he would have said, 'He is a coward, the sight of the pistols has frightened him, no use to listen to him.' Gentlemen," I cried suddenly, speaking straight from my heart, "look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don't understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep." I would have said more but I could not; my voice broke with the sweetness and youthful gladness of it, and there was such bliss in my heart as I had never known before in my life. "All this is rational and edifying," said my antagonist, "and in any case you are an original person." "You may laugh," I said to him, laughing too, "but afterwards you will approve of me." "Oh, I am ready to approve of you now," said he; "will you shake hands? for I believe you are genuinely sincere." "No," I said, "not now, later on when I have grown worthier and deserve your esteem, then shake hands and you will do well." We went home, my second upbraiding me all the way, while I kissed him. All my comrades heard of the affair at once and gathered together to pass judgment on me the same day. "He has disgraced the uniform," they said; "Let him resign his commission." Some stood up for me: "He faced the shot," they said. "Yes, but he was afraid of his other shot and begged for forgiveness." "If he had been afraid of being shot, he would have shot his own pistol first before asking forgiveness, while he flung it loaded into the forest. No, there's something else in this, something original." I enjoyed listening and looking at them. "My dear friends and comrades," said I, "don't worry about my resigning my commission, for I have done so already. I have sent in my papers this morning and as soon as I get my discharge I shall go into a monastery - it's with that object I am leaving the regiment." When I had said this every one of them burst out laughing. "You should have told us of that first, that explains everything, we can't judge a monk." They laughed and could not stop themselves, and not scornfully, but kindly and merrily. They all felt friendly to me at once, even those who had been sternest in their censure, and all the following month, before my discharge came, they could not make enough of me. "Ah, you monk," they would say. And everyone said something kind to me, they began trying to dissuade me, even to pity me: "What are you doing to yourself?" "No," they would say, "he is a brave fellow, he faced fire and could have fired his own pistol too, but he had a dream the night before that he should become a monk, that's why he did it." It was the same thing with the society of the town. Till then I had been kindly received, but had not been the object of special attention, and now all came to know me at once and invited me; they laughed at me, but they loved me. I may mention that although everybody talked openly of our duel, the authorities took no notice of it, because my antagonist was a near relation of our general, and as there had been no bloodshed and no serious consequences, and as I resigned my commission, they took it as a joke. And I began then to speak aloud and fearlessly, regardless of their laughter, for it was always kindly and not spiteful laughter. These conversations mostly took place in the evenings, in the company of ladies; women particularly liked listening to me then and they made the men listen. "But how can I possibly be responsible for all?" everyone would laugh in my face. "Can I, for instance, be responsible for you?" "You may well not know it," I would answer, "since the whole world has long been going on a different line, since we consider the veriest lies as truth and demand the same lies from others. Here I have for once in my life acted sincerely and, well, you all look upon me as a madman. Though you are friendly to me, yet, you see, you all laugh at me." "But how can we help being friendly to you?" said my hostess, laughing. The room was full of people. All of a sudden the young lady rose, on whose account the duel had been fought and whom only lately I had intended to be my future wife. I had not noticed her coming into the room. She got up, came to me and held out her hand. "Let me tell you," she said, "that I am the first not to laugh at you, but on the contrary I thank you with tears and express my respect for you for your action then." Her husband, too, came up and then they all approached me and almost kissed me. My heart was filled with joy, but my attention was especially caught by a middle-aged man who came up to me with the others. I knew him by name already, but had never made his acquaintance nor exchanged a word with him till that evening. #(d) The Mysterious Visitor. He had long been an official in the town; he was in a prominent position, respected by all, rich and had a reputation for benevolence. He subscribed considerable sums to the almshouse and the orphan asylum; he was very charitable, too, in secret, a fact which only became known after his death. He was a man of about fifty, almost stern in appearance and not much given to conversation. He had been married about ten years and his wife, who was still young, had borne him three children. Well, I was sitting alone in my room the following evening, when my door suddenly opened and this gentleman walked in. I must mention, by the way, that I was no longer living in my former quarters. As soon as I resigned my commission, I took rooms with an old lady, the widow of a government clerk. My landlady's servant waited upon me, for I had moved into her rooms simply because on my return from the duel I had sent Afanasy back to the regiment, as I felt ashamed to look him in the face after my last interview with him. So prone is the man of the world to be ashamed of any righteous action. "I have," said my visitor, "with great interest listened to you speaking in different houses the last few days and I wanted at last to make your personal acquaintance, so as to talk to you more intimately. Can you, dear sir, grant me this favour?" "I can, with the greatest pleasure, and I shall look upon it as an honour." I said this, though I felt almost dismayed, so greatly was I impressed from the first moment by the appearance of this man. For though other people had listened to me with interest and attention, no one had come to me before with such a serious, stern, and concentrated expression. And now he had come to see me in my own rooms. He sat down. "You are, I see, a man of great strength of character" he said; "as you have dared to serve the truth, even when by doing so you risked incurring the contempt of all." "Your praise is, perhaps, excessive," I replied. "No, it's not excessive," he answered; "believe me, such a course of action is far more difficult than you think. It is that which has impressed me, and it is only on that account that I have come to you," he continued. "Tell me, please, that is if you are not annoyed by my perhaps unseemly curiosity, what were your exact sensations, if you can recall them, at the moment when you made up your mind to ask forgiveness at the duel. Do not think my question frivolous; on the contrary, I have in asking the question a secret motive of my own, which I will perhaps explain to you later on, if it is God's will that we should become more intimately acquainted." All the while he was speaking, I was looking at him straight into the face and I felt all at once a complete trust in him and great curiosity on my side also, for I felt that there was some strange secret in his soul. "You ask what were my exact sensations at the moment when I asked my opponent's forgiveness," I answered; "but I had better tell you from the beginning what I have not yet told anyone else." And I described all that had passed between Afanasy and me, and how I had bowed down to the ground at his feet. "From that you can see for yourself," I concluded, "that at the time of the duel it was easier for me, for I had made a beginning already at home, and when once I had started on that road, to go farther along it was far from being difficult, but became a source of joy and happiness." I liked the way he looked at me as he listened. "All that," he said, "is exceedingly interesting. I will come to see you again and again." And from that time forth he came to see me nearly every evening. And we should have become greater friends, if only he had ever talked of himself. But about himself he scarcely ever said a word, yet continually asked me about myself. In spite of that I became very fond of him and spoke with perfect frankness to him about all my feelings; "for," thought I, "what need have I to know his secrets, since I can see without that that is a good man? Moreover, though he is such a serious man and my senior, he comes to see a youngster like me and treats me as his equal." And I learned a great deal that was profitable from him, for he was a man of lofty mind. "That life is heaven," he said to me suddenly, "that I have long been thinking about"; and all at once he added, "I think of nothing else indeed." He looked at me and smiled. "I am more convinced of it than you are, I will tell you later why." I listened to him and thought that he evidently wanted to tell me something. "Heaven," he went on, "lies hidden within all of us - here it lies hidden in me now, and if I will it, it will be revealed to me to-morrow and for all time." I looked at him; he was speaking with great emotion and gazing mysteriously at me, as if he were questioning me. "And that we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins, you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a dream, but a living reality." "And when," I cried out to him bitterly, "when will that come to pass? and will it ever come to pass? Is not it simply a dream of ours?" "What then, you don't believe it," he said. "You preach it and don't believe it yourself. Believe me, this dream, as you call it, will come to pass without doubt; it will come, but not now, for every process has its law. It's a spiritual, psychological process. To transform the world, to recreate it afresh, men must turn into another path psychologically. Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all. Everyone will think his share too small and they will be always envying, complaining and attacking one another. You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have to go though the period of isolation." "What do you mean by isolation?" I asked him. "Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age -it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For everyone strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, 'How strong I am now and how secure,' and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have sat so long in darkness without seeing the light. And then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in the heavens.... But, until then, we must keep the banner flying. Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men's souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die." Our evenings, one after another, were spent in such stirring and fervent talk. I gave up society and visited my neighbours much less frequently. Besides, my vogue was somewhat over. I say this, not as blame, for they still loved me and treated me good-humouredly, but there's no denying that fashion is a great power in society. I began to regard my mysterious visitor with admiration, for besides enjoying his intelligence, I began to perceive that he was brooding over some plan in his heart, and was preparing himself perhaps for a great deed. Perhaps he liked my not showing curiosity about his secret, not seeking to discover it by direct question nor by insinuation. But I noticed at last, that he seemed to show signs of wanting to tell me something. This had become quite evident, indeed, about a month after he first began to visit me. "Do you know," he said to me once, "that people are very inquisitive about us in the town and wonder why I come to see you so often. But let them wonder, for soon all will be explained." Sometimes an extraordinary agitation would come over him, and almost always on such occasions he would get up and go away. Sometimes he would fix a long piercing look upon me, and I thought, "He will say something directly now." But he would suddenly begin talking of something ordinary and familiar. He often complained of headache too. One day, quite unexpectedly indeed, after he had been talking with great fervour a long time, I saw him suddenly turn pale, and his face worked convulsively, while he stared persistently at me. "What's the matter?" I said; "do you feel ill?" - he had just been complaining of headache. "I... do you know... I murdered someone." He said this and smiled with a face as white as chalk. "Why is it he is smiling?" The thought flashed through my mind before I realised anything else. I too turned pale. "What are you saying?" I cried. "You see," he said, with a pale smile, "how much it has cost me to say the first word. Now I have said it, I feel I've taken the first step and shall go on." For a long while I could not believe him, and I did not believe him at that time, but only after he had been to see me three days running and told me all about it. I thought he was mad, but ended by being convinced, to my great grief and amazement. His crime was a great and terrible one. Fourteen years before, he had murdered the widow of a landowner, a wealthy and handsome young woman who had a house in our town. He fell passionately in love with her, declared his feeling and tried to persuade her to marry him. But she had already given her heart to another man, an officer of noble birth and high rank in the service, who was at that time away at the front, though she was expecting him soon to return. She refused his offer and begged him not to come and see her. After he had ceased to visit her, he took advantage of his knowledge of the house to enter at night through the garden by the roof, at great risk of discovery. But, as often happens, a crime committed with extraordinary audacity is more successful than others. Entering the garret through the skylight, he went down the ladder, knowing that the door at the bottom of it was sometimes, through the negligence of the servants, left unlocked. He hoped to find it so, and so it was. He made his way in the dark to her bedroom, where a light was burning. As though on purpose, both her maids had gone off to a birthday party in the same street, without asking leave. The other servants slept in the servants' quarters or in the kitchen on the ground floor. His passion flamed up at the sight of her asleep, and then vindictive, jealous anger took possession of his heart, and like a drunken man, beside himself, he thrust a knife into her heart, so that she did not even cry out. Then with devilish and criminal cunning he contrived that suspicion should fall on the servants. He was so base as to take her purse, to open her chest with keys from under her pillow, and to take some things from it, doing it all as it might have been done by an ignorant servant, leaving valuable papers and taking only money. He took some of the larger gold things, but left smaller articles that were ten times as valuable. He took with him, too, some things for himself as remembrances, but of that later. Having done this awful deed. he returned by the way he had come. Neither the next day, when the alarm was raised, nor at any time after in his life, did anyone dream of suspecting that he was the criminal. No one indeed knew of his love for her, for he was always reserved and silent and had no friend to whom he would have opened his heart. He was looked upon simply as an acquaintance, and not a very intimate one, of the murdered woman, as for the previous fortnight he had not even visited her. A serf of hers called Pyotr was at once suspected, and every circumstance confirmed the suspicion. The man knew - indeed his mistress did not conceal the fact - that having to send one of her serfs as a recruit she had decided to send him, as he had no relations and his conduct was unsatisfactory. People had heard him angrily threatening to murder her when he was drunk in a tavern. Two days before her death, he had run away, staying no one knew where in the town. The day after the murder, he was found on the road leading out of the town, dead drunk, with a knife in his pocket, and his right hand happened to be stained with blood. He declared that his nose had been bleeding, but no one believed him. The maids confessed that they had gone to a party and that the street door had been left open till they returned. And a number of similar details came to light, throwing suspicion on the innocent servant. They arrested him, and he was tried for the murder; but a week after the arrest, the prisoner fell sick of a fever and died unconscious in the hospital. There the matter ended and the judges and the authorities and everyone in the town remained convinced that the crime had been committed by no one but the servant who had died in the hospital. And after that the punishment began. My mysterious visitor, now my friend, told me that at first he was not in the least troubled by pangs of conscience. He was miserable a long time, but not for that reason; only from regret that he had killed the woman he loved, that she was no more, that in killing her he had killed his love, while the fire of passion was still in his veins. But of the innocent blood he had shed, of the murder of a fellow creature, he scarcely thought. The thought that his victim might have become the wife of another man was insupportable to him, and so, for a long time, he was convinced in his conscience that he could not have acted otherwise. At first he was worried at the arrest of the servant, but his illness and death soon set his mind at rest, for the man's death was apparently (so he reflected at the time) not owing to his arrest or his fright, but a chill he had taken on the day he ran away, when he had lain all night dead drunk on the damp ground. The theft of the money and other things troubled him little, for he argued that the theft had not been committed for gain but to avert suspicion. The sum stolen was small, and he shortly afterwards subscribed the whole of it, and much more, towards the funds for maintaining an almshouse in the town. He did this on purpose to set his conscience at rest about the theft, and it's a remarkable fact that for a long time he really was at peace - he told me this himself. He entered then upon a career of great activity in the service, volunteered for a difficult and laborious duty, which occupied him two years, and being a man of strong will almost forgot the past. Whenever he recalled it, he tried not to think of it at all. He became active in philanthropy too, founded and helped to maintain many institutions in the town, did a good deal in the two capitals, and in both Moscow and Petersburg was elected a member of philanthropic societies. At last, however, he began brooding over the past, and the strain of it was too much for him. Then he was attracted by a fine and intelligent girl and soon after married her, hoping that marriage would dispel his lonely depression, and that by entering on a new life and scrupulously doing his duty to his wife and children, he would escape from old memories altogether. But the very opposite of what he expected happened. He began, even in the first month of his marriage, to be continually fretted by the thought, "My wife loves me- but what if she knew?" When she first told him that she would soon bear him a child, he was troubled. "I am giving life, but I have taken life." Children came. "How dare I love them, teach and educate them, how can I talk to them of virtue? I have shed blood." They were splendid children, he longed to caress them; "and I can't look at their innocent candid faces, I am unworthy." At last he began to be bitterly and ominously haunted by the blood of his murdered victim, by the young life he had destroyed, by the blood that cried out for vengeance. He had begun to have awful dreams. But, being a man of fortitude, he bore his suffering a long time, thinking: "I shall expiate everything by this secret agony." But that hope, too, was vain; the longer it went on, the more intense was his suffering. He was respected in society for his active benevolence, though everyone was overawed by his stern and gloomy character. But the more he was respected, the more intolerable it was for him. He confessed to me that he had thoughts of killing himself. But he began to be haunted by another idea - an idea which he had at first regarded as impossible and unthinkable, though at last it got such a hold on his heart that he could not shake it off. He dreamed of rising up, going out and confessing in the face of all men that he had committed murder. For three years this dream had pursued him, haunting him in different forms. At last he believed with his whole heart that if he confessed his crime, he would heal his soul and would be at peace for ever. But this belief filled his heart with terror, for how could he carry it out? And then came what happened at my duel. "Looking at you, I have made up my mind." I looked at him. "Is it possible," I cried, clasping my hands, "that such a trivial incident could give rise to a resolution in you?" "My resolution has been growing for the last three years," he answered, "and your story only gave the last touch to it. Looking at you, I reproached myself and envied you." He said this to me almost sullenly. "But you won't be believed," I observed; "it's fourteen years ago." "I have proofs, great proofs. I shall show them." Then I cried and kissed him. "Tell me one thing, one thing," he said (as though it all depended upon me), "my wife, my children! My wife may die of grief, and though my children won't lose their rank and property, they'll be a convict's children and for ever! And what a memory, what a memory of me I shall leave in their hearts!" I said nothing. "And to part from them, to leave them for ever? It's for ever, you know, for ever!" I sat still and repeated a silent prayer. I got up at last, I felt afraid. "Well?" He looked at me. "Go!" said I, "confess. Everything passes, only the truth remains. Your children will understand, when they grow up, the nobility of your resolution." He left me that time as though he had made up his mind. Yet for more than a fortnight afterwards, he came to me every evening, still preparing himself, still unable to bring himself to the point. He made my heart ache. One day he would come determined and say fervently: "I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess. Fourteen years I've been in hell. I want to suffer. I will take my punishment and begin to live. You can pass through the world doing wrong, but there's no turning back. Now I dare not love my neighbour nor even my own children. Good God, my children will understand, perhaps, what my punishment has cost me and will not condemn me! God is not in strength but in truth." "All will understand your sacrifice," I said to him, "if not at once, they will understand later; for you have served truth, the higher truth, not of the earth." And he would go away seeming comforted, but next day he would come again, bitter, pale, sarcastic. "Every time I come to you, you look at me so inquisitively as though to say, 'He has still not confessed!' Wait a bit, don't despise me too much. It's not such an easy thing to do as you would think. Perhaps I shall not do it at all. You won't go and inform against me then, will you?" And far from looking at him with indiscreet curiosity, I was afraid to look at him at all. I was quite ill from anxiety, and my heart was full of tears. I could not sleep at night. "I have just come from my wife," he went on. "Do you understand what the word 'wife' means? When I went out, the children called to me, 'Good-bye, father, make haste back to read The Children's Magazine with us.' No, you don't understand that! No one is wise from another man's woe." His eyes were glittering, his lips were twitching. Suddenly he struck the table with his fist so that everything on it danced - it was the first time he had done such a thing, he was such a mild man. "But need I?" he exclaimed, "must I? No one has been condemned, no one has been sent to Siberia in my place, the man died of fever. And I've been punished by my sufferings for the blood I shed. And I shan't be believed, they won't believe my proofs. Need I confess, need I? I am ready to go on suffering all my life for the blood I have shed, if only my wife and children may be spared. Will it be just to ruin them with me? Aren't we making a mistake? What is right in this case? And will people recognise it, will they appreciate it, will they respect it?" "Good Lord!" I thought to myself, "he is thinking of other people's respect at such a moment!" And I felt so sorry for him then, that I believe I would have shared his fate if it could have comforted him. I saw he was beside himself. I was aghast, realising with my heart as well as my mind what such a resolution meant. "Decide my fate!" he exclaimed again. "Go and confess," I whispered to him. My voice failed me, but I whispered it firmly. I took up the New Testament from the table, the Russian translation, and showed him the Gospel of St. John, chapter 12, verse 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." I had just been reading that verse when he came in. He read it. "That's true," he said, he smiled bitterly. "It's terrible the things you find in those books," he said, after a pause. "It's easy enough to thrust them upon one. And who wrote them? Can they have been written by men?" "The Holy Spirit wrote them," said I. "It's easy for you to prate," he smiled again, this time almost with hatred. I took the book again, opened it in another place and showed him the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 31. He read: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." He read it and simply flung down the book. He was trembling all over. "An awful text," he said. "There's no denying you've picked out fitting ones." He rose from the chair. "Well!" he said, "good-bye, perhaps I shan't come again... we shall meet in heaven. So I have been for fourteen years 'in the hands of the living God,' that's how one must think of those fourteen years. To-morrow I will beseech those hands to let me go." I wanted to take him in my arms and kiss him, but I did not dare - his face was contorted add sombre. He went away. "Good God," I thought, "what has he gone to face!" I fell on my knees before the ikon and wept for him before the Holy Mother of God, our swift defender and helper. I was half an hour praying in tears, and it was late, about midnight. Suddenly I saw the door open and he came in again. I was surprised. Where have you been?" I asked him. "I think," he said, "I've forgotten something... my handkerchief, I think.... Well, even if I've not forgotten anything, let me stay a little." He sat down. I stood over him. "You sit down, too," said he. I sat down. We sat still for two minutes; he looked intently at me and suddenly smiled. I remembered that - then he got up, embraced me warmly and kissed me. "Remember," he said, "how I came to you a second time. Do you hear, remember it!" And he went out. "To-morrow," I thought. And so it was. I did not know that evening that the next day was his birthday. I had not been out for the last few days, so I had no chance of hearing it from anyone. On that day he always had a great gathering, everyone in the town went to it. It was the same this time. After dinner he walked into the middle of the room, with a paper in his hand - a formal declaration to the chief of his department who was present. This declaration he read aloud to the whole assembly. It contained a full account of the crime, in every detail. "I cut myself off from men as a monster. God has visited me," he said in conclusion. "I want to suffer for my sin!" Then he brought out and laid on the table all the things he had been keeping for fourteen years, that he thought would prove his crime, the jewels belonging to the murdered woman which he had stolen to divert suspicion, a cross and a locket taken from her neck with a portrait of her betrothed in the locket, her notebook and two letters; one from her betrothed, telling her that he would soon be with her, and her unfinished answer left on the table to be sent off next day. He carried off these two letters - what for? Why had he kept them for fourteen years afterwards instead of destroying them as evidence against him? And this is what happened: everyone was amazed and horrified, everyone refused to believe it and thought that he was deranged, though all listened with intense curiosity. A few days later it was fully decided and agreed in every house that the unhappy man was mad. The legal authorities could not refuse to take the case up, but they too dropped it. Though the trinkets and letters made them ponder, they decided that even if they did turn out to be authentic, no charge could be based on those alone. Besides, she might have given him those things as a friend, or asked him to take care of them for her. I heard afterwards, however, that the genuineness of the things was proved by the friends and relations of the murdered woman, and that there was no doubt about them. Yet nothing was destined to come of it, after all. Five days later, all had heard that he was ill and that his life was in danger. The nature of his illness I can't explain; they said it was an affection of the heart. But it became known that the doctors had been induced by his wife to investigate his mental condition also, and had come to the conclusion that it was a case of insanity. I betrayed nothing, though people ran to question me. But when I wanted to visit him, I was for a long while forbidden to do so, above all by his wife. "It's you who have caused his illness," she said to me; "he was always gloomy, but for the last year people noticed that he was peculiarly excited and did strange things, and now you have been the ruin of him. Your preaching has brought him to this; for the last month he was always with you." Indeed, not only his wife but the whole town were down upon me and blamed me. "It's all your doing," they said. I was silent and indeed rejoiced at heart, for I saw plainly God's mercy to the man who had turned against himself and punished himself. I could not believe in his insanity. They let me see him at last. he insisted upon saying good-bye to me. I went in to him and saw at once, that not only his days, but his hours were numbered. He was weak, yellow, his hands trembled, he gasped for breath, but his face was full of tender and happy feeling. "It is done!" he said. "I've long been yearning to see you. Why didn't you come?" I did not tell him that they would not let me see him. "God has had pity on me and is calling me to Himself. I know I am dying, but I feel joy and peace for the first time after so many years. There was heaven in my heart from the moment I had done what I had to do. Now I dare to love my children and to kiss them. Neither my wife nor the judges, nor anyone has believed it. My children will never believe it either. I see in that God's mercy to them. I shall die, and my name will be without a stain for them. And now I feel God near, my heart rejoices as in Heaven... I have done my duty." He could not speak, he gasped for breath, he pressed my hand warmly, looking fervently at me. We did not talk for long, his wife kept peeping in at us. But he had time to whisper to me: "Do you remember how I came back to you that second time, at midnight? I told you to remember it. You know what I came back for? I came to kill you!" I started. "I went out from you then into the darkness, I wandered about the streets, struggling with myself. And suddenly I hated you so that I could hardly bear it. Now, I thought, he is all that binds me, and he is my judge. I can't refuse to face my punishment to-morrow, for he knows all. It was not that I was afraid you would betray me (I never even thought of that), but I thought, 'How can I look him in the face if I don't confess?' And if you had been at the other end of the earth, but alive, it would have been all the same, the thought was unendurable that you were alive knowing everything and condemning me. I hated you as though you were the cause, as though you were to blame for everything. I came back to you then, remembering that you had a dagger lying on your table. I sat down and asked you to sit down, and for a whole minute I pondered. If I had killed you, I should have been ruined by that murder even if I had not confessed the other. But I didn't think about that at all, and I didn't want to think of it at that moment. I only hated you and longed to revenge myself on you for everything. The Lord vanquished the devil in my heart. But let me tell you, you were never nearer death." A week later he died. The whole town followed him to the grave. The chief priest made a speech full of feeling. All lamented the terrible illness that had cut short his days. But all the town was up in arms against me after the funeral, and people even refused to see me. Some, at first a few and afterwards more, began indeed to believe in the truth of his story, and they visited me and questioned me with great interest and eagerness, for man loves to see the downfall and disgrace of the righteous. But I held my tongue, and very shortly after, I left the town, and five months later by God's grace I entered the safe and blessed path, praising the unseen finger which had guided me so clearly to it. But I remember in my prayer to this day, the servant of God, Mihail, who suffered so greatly.

#BrothersKaramazov

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