Too late, too smart 1 & 2 (books)
By Gordon Livingston (kam's notes)

30 true things you need to know now

1. If the map doesn’t agree with the ground, the map is wrong
2. We are what we do
3. It is difficult to remove by logic an idea not placed there by logic in the first place
4. The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas
5. Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least
6. Feelings follow behaviour
7. Be bold, & mighty forces will come to your aid
8. The perfect is the enemy of the good
9. Life’s two most important questions are ‘why? & ‘why not? The trick is knowing which one to ask
10. Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses
11. The most secure prisons are those we construct for ourselves
12. The problems of the elderly are frequently serious but seldom interesting
13. Happiness is the ultimate risk
14. True love is the apple of Eden
15. Only bad things happen quickly
16. Not all who wander are lost
17. Unrequited love is painful but not romantic
18. There is nothing more pointless, or common, than doing the same things & expecting different results
19. We flee from the truth in vain
20. It’s a poor idea to lie to oneself
21. We are all prone to the myth of the perfect stranger
22. Love is never lost, not even in death
23. Nobody likes to be told what to do
24. The major advantage of illness is that it provides relief from responsibility
25. We are afraid of the wrong things
26. Parents have a limited ability to shape children’s behaviour, except for the worst
27. The only real paradises are those we have lost
28. Of all the forms of courage, the ability to laugh is the most profoundly therapeutic
29. Mental health requires freedom of choice
30. Forgiveness is a form of letting go, but they are not the same thing

More often, those whose parents are still together describe them as living a boring or conflicted coexistence that makes economic sense but lacks anything one could describe as excitement or emotional satisfaction.

Much of our difficulty in developing & sustaining personal relationships resides in our failure to recognise, in ourselves as well as in others, those personality characteristics that make someone a poor candidate for a committed relationship.

People often come to me asking for medication. They are tired of their sad mood, fatigue, & loss of interest in things that previously gave them pleasure. They are having trouble sleeping or they sleep all the time; their appetites are absent or excessive. They are irritable & their memories are shot. Often they wish they were dead. They have trouble remembering what it is to be happy. I listen to their stories. Each one is, of course, different, but there are certain recurring themes: Others in their families have lived similarly discouraged lives. The relationships in which they now find themselves are either full of conflict or “low temperature,” with little passion or intimacy. Their days are routine: unsatisfying jobs, few friends, lots of boredom. They feel cut off from the pleasures enjoyed by others.  (noble truth of suffering)

People also need to look at the way they are living with an eye to change. We are always talking about what we want, what we intent. These are dreams & wishes & are of little value in changing our mood. We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do. Conversely, in judging people we need to pay attention not to what they promise but how they behave. This simple rule could prevent much of the pain & misunderstanding that infect human relationships.

We are drowning in words, many of which turn out to be lies we tell ourselves or others. How many times do we have to feel betrayed & surprised at the disconnect between people’s words & their actions before we learn to pay more attention to the latter than the former? Most of the heartbreak that life contains is a result of ignoring the reality that past behaviour is the most reliable predictor of future behaviour.

Finally, we are entitled to receive only that which we are prepared to give. This is why there is truth to the adage that we all get the marriage partners we deserve, & why most of our dissatisfactions with others reflects limitations in ourselves.

In fact, we operate in the world mostly on autopilot, doing the same things today that didn’t work yesterday.

In fact, our children owe us nothing. It is our decision to bring them into the world.
If we loved them & provided for their needs it was our task as parents, not some selfless act. We knew from the beginning that we were raising them to leave us & it was always our obligation to help them do this unburdened by a sense of unending gratitude or perpetual debt.

No child escapes unscathed from parental abuse or neglect.

Therapy, properly done, is a combination of confessional, re-parenting & mentoring experiences.

What all of us hesitate to admit is that we tend to be more helpful to people who are like us. It is arrogant to assume that any of us can work equally with everyone.

What we are looking for is someone we imagine will complete us & affirm our worth, & whose love will warm us in our old age. It is a powerful fantasy, seldom realised. We seek the unconditional approval of the good parent, the ultimate in emotional security.

The line between romantic love & obsession is frequently blurred. The key difference is that an obsession can reside in one person alone. It is a close cousin to   delusion, a false belief that is a cardinal symptom of a disturbed mind.

The ways in which people come together & choose each other places great emphasis on the potent combination of sexual attraction & sort of enlightened self-interest that evaluates the other person on a series of qualifications & achievements: education, earning potential, shared interests, trustworthiness, & philosophy of life. Each person’s assessment of a prospective mate using these standards creates a certain set of expectations. It is the failure of these expectations over time that causes relationships to dissolve.

While it takes two people to create a relationship, it takes only one to end it.

You know that the chances of this marriage enduring are no better than fifty-fifty. What makes you think that you will win the coin flip?

Since we like to think of ourselves as rational people doing things for explainable reasons, it is disconcerting to acknowledge that much of our conduct is determined by needs, desires, & experiences of which we are only dimly aware & that are related to our past experiences, often from childhood.

Nearly every human action is in some way an expression of how we think about ourselves. There are few behaviours that are ‘self-esteem neutral.’

It is surprising how often the closest relationships in our lives come, over time, to resemble power struggles in which we become intimate enemies. Gone is the sense of shared fate, replaced by a daily battle in which the stakes appear to be a survival of self-respect that is somehow threatened by the person who knows us best.

For many people, the idea that much of what we do is a product of motives of which we may be unaware is frightening. Once we acknowledge that there exists below our consciousness a swamp of repressed desires, resentments & motivations that affect our day-to-day behaviour, we have made an important step toward self-understanding. Once again paradox reigns. If we deny the existence of such an inner life we will be surprised when our determined efforts at control collapse. Ignoring the existence of our subconscious tends to have troubling results. We notice first the consequences of such unawareness: destructive patterns of behaviour in which we find ourselves surprised that we repeatedly make the same mistakes.

But the more I saw of that war (Vietnam), the less proud I became of my participation in it. What we were doing there was so overwhelmingly destructive to that country & its people that it was absurd to pretend that we were fighting on their behalf.

The number of dead Americans eventually reached....83,000 before the last U.S. soldiers finally left Vietnam. (The communist North took over the South anyway regardless of all the death, destruction & propaganda) 

The perfect is the enemy of the good (beautiful example of social conditioning)

Most of us devote great amounts of time & energy to efforts to assert control over what happens to us in our uncertain progress through life. We are taught to pursue an elusive form of security, primarily through the acquisition of material goods & the means to obtain them. There is a kind of track that we are put on early in life with the implicit suggestion that, if we ‘succeed,’ we will be happy. The primary means to this end is education. The structured pursuit of schooling provides a systematic classification of social standing & potential for success, as well as a set of intermediate goals that satisfy our need to reassure ourselves of progress. Each graduation carries with it the promise of enhanced status & economic well-being. Finally, it is hoped, we will have amassed a set of specialized skills that people will pay for & we can accumulate those things that are necessary for full membership in a society that guarantees to its citizens the pursuit of happiness.
We are also taught it is important to form intimate relationships that satisfy important needs-access to sex, the establishment of a stable economic unit, the ability to parent-& to achieve other objectives involving self-regard & emotional security. The directions we are given by elders focus on economic success. We are left on our own to discover how to relate to others, particularly those of the opposite sex whose needs & desires, while theoretically complimentary to our own, remain frustratingly obscure.
A problem emerges with the concept that in order to control our own lives we must exert control over the lives of others. we are engaged in a zero-sum game in which we get what we want only at the expense of someone else. We live in a competitive society. We are forever dividing the world up into winners & losers: Republicans versus Democrats, good versus evil, our team versus their team. Our capitalist system is founded on competition; our legal system thrives on conflict & the pursuit of self-interest. Is it any wonder then that we often see the world through win/lose, two-alternative lens? Such a view is, of course, disastrous for the delicate process of achieving intimacy with another human being.
Control is a popular illusion closely related to the pursuit of perfection. In our dreams we could bend the world & the people in it to our will. Gone would be the need to negotiate differences, to endure the uncertainty of failure & rejection. Though we come to understand that such a world is impossible, sometimes we go to great lengths to achieve whatever control we can over those around us through the exercise of power or manipulation.

One of the common fantasies entertained by those seeking change in their lives is that it can be rapidly achieved. That these sudden transformations are rare is a source of puzzlement to many.

If we believe in the sudden transformation, the big score, we are less likely to pursue the harder & less immediately satisfying work of becoming the people we wish to be.

As long as we measure others & ourselves by what we have & how we look, life is inevitably a discouraging experience, characterized by greed, envy & a desire to be someone else.

In a society based on consumption, the concept of instant gratification is pervasive. Advertising presents us constantly with images that suggest that happiness can be ours through ownership of material goods. Attractive people with lots of friends are shown enjoying themselves in a way that suggests that we might join them if we buy the correct car, the right house, the proper beer. One effect of these ads is to produce dissatisfaction with what we have & how we look. Another is to suggest the availability of a rapid antidote to our discontent: spending money. Is it any wonder that almost all of us are in debt?

What I came to realise & to be offended by is that killing is such a simple-minded undertaking compared with preserving life.

Every sneeze, every ache & pain is promised an easy cure through the taking of a pill.

Old age is commonly seen as a time of entitlement. After long years of working, the retiree is presumably entitled to leisure, social security & senior discounts. Yet all of these prerogatives are poor compensation for the devalued status of the elderly. The old are stigmatised as infirm in mind & body. Apart from continuing their role as consumers, the idea that old people have anything useful to contribute to society is seldom entertained. The effort to isolate the old in their own institutions & communities bespeaks a belief that they have little to teach the rest of us & reflects a desire to decrease our interactions with them. Our fight against the physical signs of advancing age fuels a $150-billion-a-year cosmetics industry that dwarfs in size other national priorities such as education, highway maintenance, or national-defence. The rise of plastic surgery, potentially disfiguring injections of botulinum toxin, & a national preoccupation with wrinkles & hair loss all suggest that the normal process of ageing evokes in most people a level of fear bordering on panic. What we fear is our own demise, & indications of ageing are simply unwanted reminders of our mortality. By rejecting old people & the signs of ageing in ourselves we are simply reacting to a natural fear of extinction that has preoccupied human beings forever. This is a cosmic joke. Fate or God or whoever is running this show appears to have said, ‘I will give you dominion over all other forms of life. BUT you will be the only species able to contemplate your death.’ And what is the response of old people to being marginalised & devalued by society? They are angry. It’s not enough that they must sustain the losses that come with age: diminished sexual attractiveness & enthusiasm, declining health, death of long-time friends, a gradual loss of metal acuity. They must also deal daily with the distain that society reserves for those without power or gainful employment. It is part of the symmetry of life that as we age we descend slowly back into infancy. This reassumption of a self-absorbed & dependent status in preparation for death is discouraging to all concerned.

If we are to bear the awful weight of time with grace or acceptance, we have to come to terms with the losses that life inevitably imposes upon us. Primary among these is the loss of our younger selves. If we feel gradually devalued by becoming older, then our lives become a discouraging process marked by desperate attempts to look & act younger while we disregard the compensations of knowledge & perspective that should result from our accumulated.

I believe that parenthood, a voluntary commitment, does not incur a reciprocal obligation in the young-either to conform to our parental preferences, or to listen endlessly to our protests about the ravages of time.

People want to alter the way they’re feeling: anxious, sad, disoriented, angry, empty, adrift. Our feelings depend mainly on our interpretation of what is happening to us & around us-our attitudes. It is not so much what occurs, but how we define events & respond that determines how we feel.

To the degree that one’s choices become constrained by a need for anxiety avoidance, one’s life shrinks. As this happens, the anxiety is reinforced & soon the sufferer becomes fearful, not of anything external, but of anxiety itself.

We all know people who are perfectionistic. They tend to be demanding of themselves & those around them & to manifest an obsessive orderliness that is, in the end, alienating. They do not trust feelings & prefer to occupy themselves with things they can count. In defence of perfectionism, it might be said that obsessive people make the world function for the rest of us. Who, after all, wants to be operated on by a relaxed surgeon, or fly on an airplane maintained by mechanics satisfied when their work is ‘good enough?’ If we excel at anything, it is because we are prepared to sweat the details (wherein resides either God or the devil, depending on your orientation).
The problem with perfectionists & their preoccupation with control is that the qualities that make them effective in their work can render them insufferable in their personal lives. I treat a lot of engineers & accountants & computer programmers. To be less controlling in their jobs would render them ineffective. The best one can hope for is to introduce them to the paradox of perfection: in some settings, notably in out relationships, we gain control only by relinquishing it.

The longing & loves of our youth, so ardently pursued, often lead us toward some combination of amusement & regret in our later lives. Where is that girl we so desired in high school? Even if we are married to her, the person we fell in love with is a memory, as are, all too often, the feelings she inspired. The things we are sure will make us happy seldom do. Fate it seems, has a sense of humour. The list of paradoxes is endless: The relentless pursuit of pleasure brings pain; the greatest risk is not taking any. My personal favourite is the truth that everything in life is a good news/bad news story. The long-sought promotion brings more money & more headaches; our dream vacation puts us in debt; experience has taught us well, but now we are too old to use the knowledge; youth is wasted on the young. Impermanence mocks us. Our efforts-to learn, to acquire, to hold on to what we have-all eventually come to naught. This is the final & controlling paradox: only by embracing our mortality can we be happy in the time we have. The intensity of our connections to those we love is a function of our knowledge that everything & everything is evanescent. Our ability to experience any pleasure requires either a healthy denial or courageous acceptance of the weight of the time & the prospect of ultimate defeat.

The fear that we might try & not succeed can produce a crippling inertia. Keeping our expectations low protects us from disappointment.
 
We become used to the idea that much of what we don’t like about ourselves & our lives can be quickly overcome with little effort on our part. The marketing of medications that favourably affect our mood, changing our appearance through plastic surgery, & self-improvement through consumption all play into the fantasy that happiness is for sale. 

We attach excessive importance to promises. Whenever, as happens frequently, I point out to people the discrepancy between what they say they want & what they actually do, the response is surprise & sometimes outrage that I will not take their expressions of intent at face value but prefer to focus on the only communication that can be trusted: behaviour. Probably the single most confusing thing that people tell each other is ‘I love you.’ We long to hear this powerful & reassuring message. Taken alone, however, unsupported by consistently loving behaviour, this is frequently a lie-or, more charitably, a promise unlikely to be fulfilled.

The walls of our constructed prisons are made up in equal parts of our fear of risk & our dream that the world & the people in it will conform to our fondest wishes. It is hard to let go of a comforting illusion, but harder still to construct a happy life out of perceptions & beliefs that do not correspond to the world around us.
 
When confronted with a suicidal person I seldom try to talk them out of it. instead I ask them to examine what it is that has so far dissuaded them from killing themselves. Usually this involves finding out what the connections are that tether that person to life in the face of nearly unbearable psychic pain. There is simply no denying the anger embedded in any decision to kill oneself.

People in despair are, naturally, intensely self-absorbed. Suicide is the ultimate expression of this preoccupation with self. Instead of just expressing the sympathy & fear that suicidal people evoke in those around them, therapists included, I think it is reasonable to confront them with the selfishness & anger implied in any act of self-destruction.

In some ways, the normal course of human development represents a prolonged version of the story of the fall of Adam & Eve from grace. Childhood is a series of disillusionments in which we progress from innocent belief to a harsher reality. One by one we leave behind our conceptions of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the perfection of our parents, & our own immortality. As we relinquish the comfort & certainty of these childish ideas, they are replaced with a sense that life is a struggle, full of pain & loss, ending badly.  

So, like most of life, the important task of choosing whom to fall in love with becomes another example of trial & error learning. If only the trials weren’t so costly. I could envision a curriculum constructed around the general topic ‘The pursuit of happiness.’ Instruction would begin with a discussion of the definition of love. Next would come some guidance on the subject of personality disorders, which would cover the characteristics of those most likely to break one’s heart. There would follow a section called ‘attributes of a successful marriage partner.’ Kindness & empathy & how to recognise the presence of these virtues would be discussed. Finally, we would invite as guest lecturers people going through bitter divorces as well as those in successful long-term relationships. The latter would have to be chosen carefully. When I listen to comments from elderly people who have been married fifty, sixty or more years answering the inevitable question about ‘the secret to a successful marriage,’ it seems to me that a high tolerance for boredom often heads the list.

Where, one wonders, is the idea of endless, renewable love?

To lose that which means the most to us is a lesson in helplessness & humility & survival. After being stripped of any illusion of control I might have harboured I had to decide what questions were still worth asking.

I was led by my fellow sufferers, those I loved & who had also endured irredeemable losses, to find reasons to go on. Like all who mourn I learned an abiding hatred for the word ‘closure,’ with its comforting implications that grief is a time-limited process from which we all recover.

What I learned is that there is no way around it; you just have to go through it. in the journey I experienced hopelessness, contemplated suicide & learned that I was not alone. Certain that there could be no comfort in words, I came to realise that words, my own & those of other people, were all I had to frame  my experience, first my despair & finally a fragile belief that my life still had meaning.

How are we inclined to react when told what to do? For most of us, resentment progressing to obstinacy is the most common response. Whether our refusal is overt (Not going to do it) or passive-aggressive (I forgot), the result is commonly frustration all around. We are not obedient people.

Passive resistance is the last refuge of the powerless.

Not infrequently, those who are preoccupied with issues of control with their children have similar difficulties in their interactions with their spouses. The marital climate is typically characterised by bickering, power struggles & the sense on both sides of not being heard.

Since judgmental people were generally raised in judgmental families, they find it hard to envision another way of interacting with those they live with.

It is always easier to keep doing what we’re used to, even when it is evidently not working for us.

We do those things repetitively that produce some reward.

People endure numbing routines, jobs they hate, unsatisfying relationships, all in order to fulfil the expectations they have of themselves. When no other relief is available to us, some form of illness or disability is one of the ways of relinquishing the weight of responsibility, if only for a little while.

The translation of good intentions into behavioural change remains the province of the extended educational process that is therapy. The essential message of such an undertaking- that each person is responsible for the choices he or she makes in our never-ending quest for happiness-retains its power as an instrument of transformation.
 
We live in a fear-promoting society. It is the business of advertisers to stoke our anxieties about what we have, what we look like & whether we are sexually adequate. A dissatisfied consumer is more apt to buy.

Fear & desire are two opposite sides of the same coin. Much of what we do is driven by fear of failure.

The sum of our fears is the knowledge of our vulnerability to random misfortune & the certainty of our eventual mortality.

As their own people, our children succeed or fail primarily because of the decisions, good & bad, that THEY make about how they will live their lives.

It is imperative not to hit kids since fear & violence are the primary lessons taught by corporal punishment.

What is important is that children feel loved & respected. It is essential for parents to establish limits, especially around questions of safety & aggression.

Our primary task as parents beyond attending to the day-to-day physical &emotional welfare of our children, is to convey to them a sense of the world as an imperfect place in which it is possible, nevertheless, to be happy. We can only do this by example.

In our memories, things were less expensive, crime less common, people more friendly & trustworthy, relationships more enduring, families closer, children more respectful, music better.

Humans have not been, more virtuous for any extended period of history.

What happens as we try to come to terms with our pasts is that we see our lives as a process of continual disenchantment. We long for the security provided by the comforting illusions of youth. We remember the breathless infatuations of first love; we regret the complications imposed by our mistakes, the compromises of our integrity, the roads not taken. The cumulative burdens of our imperfect lives are harder to bear as we weaken in body & spirit. Our yearning for the past is fuelled by a selective memory of our younger selves.

Whenever I go to the funeral of someone I have known well, I marvel at the image of that person that is portrayed in the eulogy. Seldom does their imperfect humanity survive the idealised descriptions that, while meant to comfort, succeed only in sanitising the life of the deceased. To know someone fully & love them in spite of, even because of, their imperfections is an act that requires us to recognise & forgive, two very important indicators of emotional maturity. More important is the fact that, if we can do this for other people, we may be able to do it for ourselves.
 
 Memory is not, as many of us think, an accurate transcription of past experience. Rather it is a story we tell ourselves about the past, full of distortions, wishful thinking & unfulfilled dreams. We are reluctant to revise our personal mythology.

It is common for people to have someone in their pasts whom they recall with longing & regret, someone to whom they adversely compare a subsequent relationships. This person can be a parent, a first love, or a friend no longer here. Their perfection, like that of a funeral eulogy, is a function of a selective memory that can no longer be tested by daily contact. They exist in a sort of distracting dream with which the people now in our lives cannot compete. The problem with our longing for the paradises of the past is that it distracts us from our efforts to extract pleasure & meaning from the present.

It is this state of innocent optimism that we long to regain even as the limitations of time & chance weigh us down.
 
We are haunted by paths not taken, especially our missed opportunities for perfect love.

All humour is in some way directed at the human condition. To laugh at ourselves is to acknowledge the ultimate futility of our efforts to stave off the depredations of time.

Somewhere between ignoring the past & wallowing in it there is a place where we can learn from what has happened to us, including the inevitable mistakes we have made, & integrate this knowledge into our plans for the future.

If every misfortune can be blamed on someone else, we are relieved of the difficult task of examining our own contributory behaviour or just accepting the reality that life is & always has been full of adversity.

Coming to terms with our past is inevitably a process of forgiveness, of letting go, the simplest & most difficult of all human endeavours. It is simultaneously an act of will & of surrender. And it seems impossible until the moment you do it.

 
Gordon Livingston from The book-Too soon old, too late smart  

Paradox governs our lives
My dreams of earning bread from the sweat of my brow were realised, but my health suffered.

One author has defined happiness as a ratio between accomplishment & expectation. Both components of the ratio are self-defined.

Much of what we think we know is untrue.

Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. Forgiveness is an art of letting go.

Only the bereaved can understand what it is like to live in a world that does not notice their permanently unhealed wounds.

Marriage ruins a lot of good relationships.

The fact that not much is learned in this whole painful process is clear from the fact that second marriages have a higher failure rate than first marriages.

Many of us are seduced by the romantic idea that marriage represents: We have found the person who will complete us. Since few among us feel complete, it’s not surprising that we’re looking for help. The trouble is that at the point in our young adulthoods when we’re searching for someone to take on this ambitious task, we are still-how to put this delicately?-Stupid. Or at least inexperienced in how the world works & what we can reasonably expect from other people.

One of the rules of life is that, in general, we have to pay for our mistakes. What you’re feeling at the moment is your payment.

It is easier to be angry than sad.

Fact: anger begets anger
Fact: kindness begets kindness
So I ask them: What would your lives be like if neither of you criticized or gave orders to the other person?

What is eliminated are the passive-aggressive behaviours that represent the defence response of people who feel powerless & aggrieved.

What I see in relationships that are not working is a mutual sadness. This person whom we expected to love forever now annoys us.

So behind the power struggles & hostility that are the most evident signs of our discontent lies a profound sadness of failed expectations. This is not what we thought we were signing up for.

If we can find a target, we can indulge our outrage & assign responsibility for our misery to someone else. Now we are a victim.

People at every age are dying every day, most with a lot of unfinished business.

Our fondest ideals, strongest passions & coveted dreams are all eventually dust.

Depression is a ‘safe’ position that many people, miserable as they may feel, are afraid to relinquish.

Perhaps our most destructive interpersonal anxiety is our fear of intimacy.

You know, we met each other & fell in love, then we married, then had children, then fell out of love & got divorced, then I remarried, now your getting remarried. I feel like we’re drifting apart.

It’s much easier & emotionally safer to be angry at a step-parent than either of one’s real parents.

The step-parent strategy that works in most cases is to try to establish a friendly, non-disciplinary relationship in which one is emotionally available but declines to get caught up in typical parent/child conflict.

The marital wreckage that flows from infidelity, the unwillingness to give another person the affection we would like to receive from them, the general disparity between what we say & what we do, all contribute predicably to the demise of our closest relationships.

The disparity between word & action is on its most egregious display in families, where it is most difficult to disguise what it is that we truly believe. The stories of parental alcoholism; verbal, physical & sexual abuse; neglect; & selfishness are heartbreaking in their frequency in the life stories of people who are struggling to do better with their own children than their parents did with them. Is it too much to ask of ourselves to move through this life inflicting as little damage on others as possible?

The passing of the years strips us of many of the pretences with which we disguise our true selves.

As we age, our physical world shrinks, & often so does our range of enthusiasms.

If you go to the doctor more than ten times per year & don’t have a life threatening illness, get a new hobby.

Don’t worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.

We carry around fantasies of endless excitement & are displeased when that too proves elusive.

The most persistent fantasy is the search for perfect love.

It is only when we are too obtuse, frightened or distracted to ask the important questions that we are truly lost.

Death is our greatest enemy because it mocks our illusions of control as it routinely renders us powerless.

Grief is unavoidable; it cannot be overcome, only experienced. The only ‘treatment’ is to teach people to tolerate some extremely distressing emotions, including anxiety, confusion & a wish to be dead. Commonly, those in the early stages of grief believe that they are ‘going crazy.’

The zero point........ from which every future event would be dated, the eye blink during which crushing loss reset your internal gauges to zero. It was the moment at which your shabby box of hopes & wants, which had once seemed to be such a fabulous chest of bright dreams, turned on its end & emptied into an abyss, leaving you with zero expectations.

Loss is an inevitable consequence of the human condition. If we survive long enough we encounter many losses.

It is much more difficult to create & preserve than it is to destroy.

Most of the threats to human existence derive from a desire to bend the world to satisfy our need for rapid gratification.

Still, a chronic sense of dissatisfaction pursues us, & it is hard to live in a world in which we imagine that most other people are happier than we are. What this creates is a kind of disposable society that elevates a desire for the ‘new & improved’ version of everything to a level of desirability that can never be satisfied. This state of mind encompasses both greed & envy; they are called deadly sins for a reason.

We cannot consume & waste & pollute without paying a price. Similarly, we cannot bomb & torture & trample on the rights of others without compromising our sense of ourselves.

It is a sense of meaning that nourishes the soul.

There is a certain emptiness to the simple equation of work & consumption.

None of us are young enough or rich enough to live up to the icons we create to stoke the engines of commerce. No one is immune to these influences, but all of us are in danger of endorsing the superficiality they purvey.

In daily lives, questions of personal worth are recurrent, if seldom articulated.

We are so defined by our work that our identities without it are in question.

Deprived of a clear sense of purpose or satisfaction, apprehension about the significance of our lives, fearful of the apparent finality of death, we are desperate for an explanation for our existence & eager for some reassurance that there is a guiding purpose behind our daily struggles.

Based as it is on our animal instinct to reproduce, satisfaction of long-term intimacy with another human being transcends all others not related to physical survival. Even at points in our lives when reproduction is no longer desired or even possible, the psychological need for intimate companionship retains its power.

Few of us can be happy alone for extended periods.

What we seek (& seldom find) is unconditional love.

Most intimate relationships, especially those of long standing, have a contractual quality & appear to be more or less friendly, unwritten agreements between people who consent to perform reciprocal services.

The primary difference between intelligence & stupidity is that there are limits to intelligence.

Most human conflict is full of uncertainty & ambiguity. To resolve differences, therefore, requires an ability to acknowledge this, to see things from the other person’s point of view, & give up the satisfaction of being ‘right.’ Not everyone can do this, which is why so many find it hard to sustain relationships.

So we pay attention to movie stars, buy lottery tickets, sue each other, & grow impatient with our partner- all expressions of discontent with what we have & what we are.

If we cannot learn, we become little more than a collection of unexamined habits, subject to the mindless repetition of past mistakes. Does this sound like a prescription for happiness?

Still, it often requires a long period of emotional discomfort before someone is ready to come for help.

No one ever died of insomnia.

Insomnia is a frequent symptom of both anxiety & depression.

Here’s the paradox of sleep: you can’t have it until it’s not important to you. Since it is an involuntary activity, it can’t be forced. In fact, the harder you try to sleep, the more elusive it is.

 Long experience has shown that when new information conflicts with our established preconceptions it is either ignored, denied or interpreted in such a way that our world view remains intact.

It turns out that most of what passes for knowledge is simply ossified prejudice in which facts are used to justify our core beliefs.

We wish wisdom were an inevitable consequence of age, but the behaviour of most of the elderly makes it clear that it is not.

Happiness requires the ability to tolerate uncertainty.

The problem with inflexible moral verities & absolute codes of conduct is that they are unattainable in the long run & therefore productive of guilt & a sense of having been compromised when we fail to meet their demands. They are, in short, invitations to hypocrisy.

A marriage proposal has been compared to stepping off a cliff in the dark in the expectation that a soft landing awaits.

We cannot defeat evil by employing evil actions in the name of laudable goals.

It turns out that few of us are living the lives we imagined for ourselves when we were young.

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