The weather here is glorious, sunny, breezy, and warm. Unusually warm... a forecast full of warmth, suns splashed all across the next five days and a heat warning. So while this weather has me feeling unproductive (my senses tell me it's summer), the prodigality of the rays feels like a false thing... a stranger with candy. Soon, the warmth will be scorching, the forests will dry out and blue skies will turn orange with smoke, no? This back-of-mind climate-change anxiety is real. Still, it's Friday, and writing a small dispatch to remember the week is a cheering exercise. Let's reverse the order of things a little, shall we? We'll start with yesterday's activity, which was:
1. A soup delivery
Soup and hot temperatures seem contradictory, but not for my mother-in-law who's sequestered herself in her air-conditioned condo for the duration of her cold. I insisted on making her Ottolenghi's Magical Chicken Soup. It's a good recipe! And the advantage of a soup delivery during summer temperatures is that, if you have to run an errand, the soup will stay warm in the car!
2. Antidotes
Being kind to a mildly sick person isn't hard and one could even feel especially virtuous. It's harder to feel good in different circumstances, say, when the solution isn't soup, but patience. Listening to the 10 Percent Happier podcast recently, I was intrigued by the Buddhist idea of a list of strategies for "Abandoning unwholesome states" of which "finding the antidote" is one Joseph Goldstein took time to illustrate with examples, like empathetic or sympathetic joy when feeling envious, or:
...again, some of these things are so simple! (...) If we're really feeling greed, the antidote is renunciation, and it doesn't have to be some super big renunciation, just, you know, moments of, there's a desire to do something that maybe is not that important or necessary, or whatever, and just for the practice of it, say “no, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to let it go.” (...) Just a simple example: I may be doing a walking meditation and the thought comes, “ah, a cup of tea would be nice.” And then, “no, no.” And then the thought may come again and again and again and again. But those times when I can say “I don't need it, I don't need to do it...” It's not that there's anything wrong with having a cup of tea. It's just a very simple thing, but it's a chance to practice the move of renunciation, you know when we have some desire, even a very small one like that and we have a wise “no, I don't need this.” For myself I feel that, first I feel that it is a great victory over my mind, but also, more important than that it's energizing, you know because it's like the conservation of energy, instead of our energy going out to the fulfillment of all our desires, saying “no, I don't need to do that,” it feels so strengthening. So again, this is just a way of applying an antidote.
3. Mental health
I appreciated the two episodes the Ezra Klein Show dedicated to teen mental health... In his part 2 interview with Lisa Damour, she talks about mental distress and how, in her field (psychology), there's a (pretty clear) way of assessing mental health:
We’re looking for two things — do the feelings fit the situation, even if they are negative, unwanted, unpleasant? And then, second, and perhaps more important, are they managed effectively? Are they managed in a way that brings relief and does no harm, or are they managed in a way that does bring relief but is going to come at a cost?
Then, perhaps more interestingly, Klein asks Damour if our way of reacting to "negative emotional experiences" isn't creating "a kind of aversion to things that people, at another point, might have just understood to be part of life." To which Damour answers (in part):
I think that’s a worry. I think that if we, consciously or not, operate with this idea that you’re supposed to feel good, and then if you come up against something that doesn’t feel good, you should be very wary of it. I think it can have unintended consequences.
And one of the arguments that threads through my book is actually about the value of psychological distress. And this is something that seems strange to say at this moment in time, that there’s value in psychological distress because we are so set against it as a culture, but I can tell you from the side of psychology and certainly the side of development, this has not really been something that is controversial or that we’ve questioned.
And what I mean by that is emotions — there’s a lot of value in the negative ones across a lot of different domains, like one is they’re informational. If you notice that you’ve got a particularly uncomfortable feeling every time you’re in somebody’s presence, there’s value in figuring out what that’s about. It helps us make decisions. It helps us guide our thinking. They’re also growth-giving. (...)
Damour goes on to explain the kinds of emotional maturation she's observed in her practice and I think its thought-provoking.
4. A quote from Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries:
The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals. (p 293)
5. The scenery here
I like it when my current read has a description that matches real life. This line from Lolita came back to me on this week’s walks; “Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.” (p 73)
