Love and Death

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Love is a reminder of our own mortality. When a friend or member of our family dies, we are vividly impressed by the fact that life is evanescent and irretrievable. But there is also a deeper sense of its meaningful possibilities and an impetus to risk ourselves in taking the leap. Some -perhaps most - human beings never know deep love until they experience, at someone's death, the preciousness of friendship, devotion, loyalty. Abraham Maslow is profoundly right when he wonders whether we could love passionately if we knew we'd never die

Rollo May, Love and Will

Casting Doubt

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A lot of people still think of propaganda as the art of making lies sound truthful, but...they want to make truthfulness an irrelevant category. It’s not about proving something, it’s about casting doubt. Most political ideologies have not been about casting doubt — they’ve claimed to be telling the truth about the way the world is or should be. But this new propaganda is different. Putin isn’t selling a wonderful communist future. He’s saying, we live in a dark world, the truth is unknowable, the truth is always subjective, you never know what it is, and you, the little guy, will never be able to make sense of it all — so you need to follow a strong leader.

Sean Illing & Peter Pomerantsev in a Vox  interview 

 

It's over

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Many people leap to the conclusion that “it is over” means that the life situation has to go. They get divorced. They walk out of the office, never to return. They leave the church. They abandon their education. They leave their country. They do these things, even though all that they were being called on to do was to leave the relation that they had had to these things. Even when the ending is literal, as it is in death, the most important relinquishment is not of the person but of the life.

William Bridges, The Way of Transitions

Finding God in the Next Person

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Gandhi—who did not have a good track record as a family man—is reported to have said, “If you don’t find God in the very next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.” I would add, ‘If you don’t find God in the person who forgets to put the toilet seat down or brings home a disastrous report card or violates the 11:00 p.m. curfew, it is a waste of time looking for God further.” Families are social entities, but more importantly they are spiritual communities.

Margaret Guenther, The Practice of Prayer

Why Toilet Paper?

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When people are told something dangerous is coming, but all you need to do is wash your hands, the action doesn't seem proportionate to the threat. The novel coronavirus is engendering a sort of survivalist psychology, where we must live as much as possible at home and thus must 'stock up' on essentials, and that certainly includes toilet paper. After all, if we run out of [toilet paper], what do we replace it with?

Stephen Taylor, The Psychology of Pandemics

Climb Down & Sit with Them

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The hardest habit for me to break was the instinct to turn the conversation round to the positive. It took a while for me to understand that if a friend is in a dark place, the most compassionate thing we can do is to climb down into that place and sit with them for a while. “If a person trusts you enough to talk about their distress, trying to cheer them up is like shutting them up – you are dismissing and trivialising their feelings. Give them the space to say how bad they feel and stay with it. Swerving away from it, talking about a silver lining, can signal you don’t want to hear it.” Focus on your friend and their words. Thinking too much about your responses can be detrimental. “I make a constant effort to calm my mind down and tune into what is being said.”

Moya Sarner writing in The Guardian