bureaucracy...........................

 

I have always had, no matter the regime (I make no exceptions), a repugnance for bureaucracy. . . . I noticed that, to get ahead, one needed to be pliable and obsequious to those who gave you orders, and duplicitous or violent towards those who take orders from you.  In France, the administrative state does not conduct itself with the general welfare in mind, but only in the interests of those who govern.  And no one can hope to rise in the ranks without subordinating his interests to those of others. . . . And though many things I encountered in my judicial career displeased me, I embraced what seemed to me the only career in civil service that gave me any independence from the transient groups that cycle through power in our country, the only one where one can both be civil servant and oneself.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, from a letter to his nephew Hubert, 1854

Willingness..................

 

So it's not about whether we feel depressed or happy; rather, it's about our willingness and ability to participate fully in any and all of our feelings.  The experience of freedom arises not from acquiring our preferred lifestyle and our preferred state of mind but from a willingness to stay with ourselves—to be completely committed to experiencing our lives—regardless of circumstance.

-Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation

enmeshed...........................

 

We do ourselves a disservice when we think of human beings as exclusively logic—or knowledge—driven,  and fail to pay attention to the role of emotions.  The two systems are enmeshed because that is the way our brain and our organism have been put together by evolution. . . .

Emotions and feelings are not a luxury; they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others.  But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions.  Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.

-Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

feeling...........................

 

Crucially, aliveness isn’t the same as happiness. As the Zen teacher Christian Dillo explains in his engrossing book The Path of Aliveness, you can absolutely feel alive in the midst of intense sadness. Aliveness, he writes, “isn’t about feeling better; it’s about feeling better.” When I feel aliveness in my work, it’s not because every task is an unadulterated pleasure; and when I feel it in my close relationships, it’s not because I’ve transcended the capacity to get annoyed by other people – because believe me, I haven’t.

-Oliver Burkeman

feel..................

 

To feel deeply is dangerous.

To do anything else is a tragedy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

deeply..................

      To feel deeply is dangerous.

      To do anything else is a tragedy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

agreeable.............................

 History is not always a very good guide to the way people felt about things when they happened.  Nothing today would seem more expressive of health and well-being than such great Impressionist paintings as Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere or Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party or Monet's Terrace of Sainte-Adresse.  Simply to look at these paintings makes one think of how agreeable life must have been at that time.  But, in fact, when they were first exhibited, most people regarded them as immoral daubs—flashy, inept and practically incomprehensible—while those most qualified to judge regarded them, at best, as a repudiation of everything that mattered.  To academicians art was a matter of trade secrets, and nature was manipulated according to fixed laws.  The Impressionists, on the contrary , staked everything on the actual and previously unrecorded look of things.  As the name suggests, they saw the world in terms of instantaneous impressions that were to be set down as truthfully as possible.

-John Russell, Time-Life Library, The World of Matisse 1869-1954

Édouard Manet      oil on canvas          1882
Un bar aux Folies Bergère

Pierre-Auguste Renoir       Oil on Canvas      1881 
 Le Déjeuner des canotiers

Claude Monet      Oil on Canvas        1867 
Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse

About those incandescent........................

 ......................................light bulbs:

The transition to more sustainable products should feel like an upgrade for consumers, not a sacrifice.

feel.........................

 We cannot prove by theoretical reasoning that there is a God; nor can we grasp the idea of God, except by a via negativa that forbids us to apply it.  Nevertheless, we have intimations of the transcendental.  In the sentiment of beauty we feel the purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us, while in the sentiment of the sublime we seem to see beyond the world, to something overwhelming and inexpressible in which it is somehow grounded.  Neither sentiment can be translated into a reasoned argument—for such an argument would be natural theology, and natural theology is a thing of the past, believable only in an age of unquestioning faith.  All we know is that we can know nothing of the transcendental.  But that is not what we feel—and it is in our feeling for beauty that the content, and even the truth, of religious doctrine is strangely and untranslatably intimated to us.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

Claude Monet     1896-97     Early Morning on the Seine 
oil on canvas

Trust........................

       Trust does not emerge simply because a seller made a rational case why the customer should buy a product or service, or because an executive promises change. Trust is not a checklist.  Fulfilling all your responsibilities does not create trust.  Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience.  We trust some people and companies even when things go wrong, and we don't trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it should have.  A completed checklist does not guarantee trust.  Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own gain.

-Simon Sinek, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action

a test..................

      No one else "makes us angry."  We make ourselves angry when we surrender control of our attitude.  What someone else may have done is irrelevant.  We choose, not they.  They merely put our attitude to a test.  If we select a volatile attitude by becoming hostile, angry, jealous or suspicious, then we have failed the test.  If we condemn ourselves by believing that we are unworthy, then again, we have failed the test.

    If we care at all about ourselves, then we must accept full responsibility for our own feelings.  We must learn to guard against those feelings that have the capacity to lead our attitude down the wrong path and to strengthen those feelings that can lead us confidently into a better future.

-Jim Rohn, The Five Major Pieces To The Life Puzzle

Here's an idea.........................

 The best way to live life is to combine a constant appreciation of the present moment, with a general program of consistent improvement. That way, you get to feel good about both the present and the future. 

-as cut-and-pasted from this blog post

that makes sense....................

 A Kiowa child's learning "is begun only after becoming aware of the mystery of all that is around him, strictly from a feeling point of view", says Kiowa spokesperson Allen Quetone.  This is common to all children: to learn feelingly, the mind and body walking hand in hand.  We say "it makes sense," meaning that a thought is coherent, as language itself remembers that mind is inheld in the body, skeined into an intricate kinship with the body which is itself catscradled in nature.  Thoughts are interlinked in feeling.  For feeling is not only a sense of touch but a form of knowing, the psyche dispersed, sensitive in skin, muscle and gut, perceiving the messages of a speaking world: the mind sensitive as the strings of a harp struck softly by an unlying wind, an Aeolian harp with a quality of ceaseless potential music sung into sound with breath, the lightest inspiration of a million, million messages.

-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World

Seeking........................

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

-Joseph Campbell

Feelings.....................................

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.” 


-Gustave Flaubert

But tell us how you really feel............

Deep down inside, I nurse a hot ember of anger, which requires the slightest of breezes to send me into paroxysm of furiously loud clacking on this old-style mechanical text entry device. “The keyboard of fury,” the missus calls it, and it is audible for miles around.


-Barry Ritholtz,  borrowed from here

Facilitate..................................

     The way to facilitate satisfaction in relationships is lovingly to picture the best outcome.  Make sure it is mutually beneficial:  a win-win situation.   Let go of all the negative feelings and merely hold the picture in mind.  We can tell if we are really surrendered when we feel okay either way;  it's okay with us if it happens, and it's okay with us if it doesn't.  Therefore, to be surrendered does not mean to be passive.  It is being active in a positive way.
     When we are surrendered, there is no longer the pressure of time.  Frustration comes from wanting a thing now instead of letting it happen naturally in its own time.  Patience is an automatic side effect of letting go,  and we know how easy it is to get along with patient people.  Notice that patient people usually gt what they want in the end. . . .

     We think that our happiness depends on controlling events, and that facts are what upset us.  Actually, it is our feelings and thoughts about these facts that are the real cause of our upset.  Facts in and of themselves are neutral things.  The power we give them is due to our attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance and our overall feeling state.  If we get stuck in a feeling, it is because we still secretly believe that it will accomplish something for us.

-David Hawkins,  Letting Go:  The Pathway of Surrender

Trifecta........................

Go here for further instructions.

Here is a question......................

.......................I never would have thought to ask:

Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold doing battle in one of the Sagas of the Icelanders, written in about 1230. The first sentence bristles with purposeful action: “King Harold proclaimed a general levy, and gathered a fleet, summoning his forces far and wide through the land.” By the end of the third paragraph, the king has launched his fleet against a rebel army, fought numerous battles involving “much slaughter in either host,” bound up the wounds of his men, dispensed rewards to the loyal, and “was supreme over all Norway.” What the saga doesn’t tell us is how Harold felt about any of this, whether his drive to conquer was fueled by a tyrannical father’s barely concealed contempt, or whether his legacy ultimately surpassed or fell short of his deepest hopes. ... I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?

If such questions interest you, you may want to read this essay from Julie Sedivy

via Arts & Letters Daily