Life and the World

The default for all of us, I feel, absent considerable inner work, is to assume “life” and “the world” are roughly equal to the dominant patterns and emotional temperature of our childhood homes.  This is, I suppose, a truism, but I think one worth pointing out nonetheless.

And when today’s kids speak of Socialism, what they intend is a world where “the world” gives them stuff like their parents did, where “the world” demands little of them, like their parents, and where “life” encourages them to be selfish and self absorbed little shits.

For me, “life” is a place where everything I have is always about to be taken from me, where people cannot be trusted, and which always feels confusing, like a mountain shrouded in fog, from which gravity has been removed.  I don’t know which way is up.

I will add, that quite often, people describing the most grotesque emotional experiences, if they are truly participating in the description, are often healing them.  Talk therapy is not useless, even if substantially everything Freud ever wrote might most benefit the world by being burned.

I state that as a theoretical, obviously: no book should ever been burned, because we need to remember and learn from mistakes.  We need to REMEMBER how bad things start.