Imagine all the worries you can think of as like wild horses running off into the future. Get on the back of one of those and you’ll be in trouble. These wild horses are a big reason that people get stuck in life. They can’t decide what to do, or they become so scared of the future with all of its impending trouble that they miss life’s true opportunities. (more…)
Does your mind turn angrily to things you wish you could forget? It’s as if someone’s turned the heat up too high; a kind of friction with the past. These things seem to hang around waiting for an opportunity to get noticed. Maybe a small thing occurs and suddenly you’re back with them, all over again. (more…)
I’ve written about being at the centre of your own solar system somewhere else, but a talk I listened to at the weekend made me think about it again. Think about the relationships in your life and how intensely you’d cling on to whatever they contain. That clinging involves the stuff of Panksepp’s emotional instincts. Life, it seems, depends on how we respond affectively, our emotions guiding our thoughts towards ‘what supports out survival and detracts from our survival’. (more…)
MONOTONY / SEEKING
Every event in your life, that is every moment of your life, will feel significant or insignificant. The ones that feel insignificant are the ones you are unlikely to notice, and vice versa. You have very little control over which events you regard as significant or insignificant: it’s an instinctual thing. Notice that we are thinking about feeling here, not knowing.
If you think about your life in terms of momentum you can change this relationship. New things can become significant. Events will seem more or less important than they used to. Life will take on different proportions*.
When you emerge from an event let it play out like a film for you, let it really move you like a film does, and see whether that event takes you to other ones in your past. don’t think about it, just get into it like you would a really emotional film.
This happened to me recently when I watched a film called All of Us Strangers. It took me to scenes from my childhood. I didn’t take myself to them, I just found myself there, in memories. In my memories I saw myself doing things in ways that I have often done throughout my life. Most of these I was aware of, but watching that film at that time allowed me to notice something new. Freud writes about this effect all of the time.
I noticed a way in which I tolerate things and could see how that way of doing life had been necessary, and often will be in the future (a lot of the time it’s a great asset), but that now I need to do some things differently. My life now demands it.
That felt super-intense. My momentum changed. Going with this my life may have a different trajectory, hopefully one best for me and those close to me.
Try it. Find a good film and let it move you. Don’t ask what the film means. That’s like saying you want it to explain itself … and its a film. Just let it do its thing and affect you. Go with the effect. Go with the affect. If you want to know why then that will most likely occur to you later
FRUSTRATION / CARE
Life becomes a process of gathering momentum out of difficult events (broadly speaking, and unscientifically, entropic ones), the ones that elicit disagreement, distraction, aggravation, loss, unhappiness and disorder as much as those things that seem to maintain the status quo (loosely, homeostatic ones). The more momentum you gather the less likely you are to become stuck.