Somebody else must have written about this.
I think people do bad things when they have bad feelings.
Maybe not only when they have bad feelings - but that’s certainly one time when they do bad things.
And one of the bad things that they do is that they abandon their quests. Which is what I’ve been thinking about a lot.
I broke my phone today.
And so instantly I bought another.
I couldn’t stand to be without one.
One way that I want to think about this is “sitting in your own piss.”
You wet the bed. That’s extremely embarrassing. So you want to wash yourself and change the sheets and make things right immediately.
You want to make the bad feelings stop.
Thus is totally understandable.
Also, if something has made you feel bad in the past, you’ll try to avoid that.
This is also perfectly reasonable.
But what if you sit in the bad feeling?
What if you sit in the fear.
And by ‘you’ here, I wasn’t meaning you.
I was meaning me.
I think all my life I’ve avoided situations where I feel bad. And it’s made me abandon quests.
I have an example from the last week.
I was speaking Greek to my wife. Earlier in the evening she’d asked me to turn off the heater in the living room. We were going to bed and when I go to bed I have a lot of “nighttime admin” that I needed to do. Clean teeth. Take pills. Shower. It doesn’t seem like a lot. But I am one of those people who doesn’t really like to have more than one or two things on my to do list.
So we’d been talking in Greek and I was in the bathroom.and I heard her shouting something from the next room in Greek. I didn’t understand, and said so in Greek. She repeated it again and just as I started to understand she said it in English, with an accusatory tone. “You didn’t turn off the heater.”
I know this might seem like an over reaction. But it felt like someone had stuck a needle me. There was something beyond a sharpness, like a white hotness to the pain that was delivered by understanding that I was being told off in Greek.
And here’s the thing. Talking to my wife in Greek in something that I’d decided I was going to do more often, if not all of the time.
But I haven’t done it again since that painful experience.
And thinking about it now, I’m if sitting in it - that won’t be pleasant.