1. What do I want to create in this New Year?
2. And, perhaps even more importantly, What do I want to let go of?

– Patricia Digh, Life is a Verb

Below is Krista Tippett’s letter to the readers of The Pause. Lately I, too, have been thinking about how dependent our entire system is on the well-being of our bodies.  

But where will we land, ultimately?

Will we have grown-up a bit as a result of Covid?

Will we have more open hearts and minds?

Will we address gun violence at last?

Will we dig deep to find emotionally mature intelligent men and women to lead of country? 

Or will we continue to let our judgment slide because we’ve been emotionally scattered and shattered by the slap-in-the face realization we could die – soon.

How will we take that message forward?

Will we remain scared-silly about what we don’t control and turn inward, isolate and cling to cockamamie conspiracies to compensate for our newly realized lack of power…  or will we be “better” for the experience?

Could we learn from it? And act more responsibly than we ever have… in gratitude for being alive.

As Krista asks: can we and will we care?   

Therapy. Something to think about…

Why Do We Struggle So Much to Heal Ourselves?

By Ben Fishel

Last week I picked up the phone to talk to someone who was interested in getting therapy. The conversation went smoothly, until they asked the dreaded question.

It’s a question that is surprisingly common when people come to therapy for the first time.

The question that all therapists have to answer, yet would prefer not to (actually, I’ve never asked anyone else about this…I’m just being dramatic.)

“What can you do that can help me be happy again?”

Nick Cave answers his fans questions, beautifully, on a regular basis. Below is his Nov 2022 “The Red Hands Files” post. It reminds me of the Craig Ferguson quote I have posted in my kitchen: “Does this need to be said? Does this need to be said by me? Does this need to be said by me – right now? 

Enjoy.

Best, Vicki

The Red Hand Files

ISSUE #212 / NOVEMBER 2022

Is it better to keep quiet, or to speak one’s mind?
LAURA, RICHMOND, USA

I have heard you mention ‘good faith conversations’ several times now. What is a good faith conversation and how do you have one?
RAY, LEWES, UK

Dear Laura and Ray,
 
A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.

Hello All,

Today I’m featuring excerpt from Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist.

Best, Vicki P.

(…)

People have occasionally objected, in response to that 2014 blog post (“Everyone is just winging it, all of the time”), that “everyone is winging it” is something only a journalist could write about politicians, other journalists, and people in similarly mushy lines of work. Surely airline pilots, heart surgeons and deep-sea oil engineers are very much not making things up as they go along?

This objection helps clarify what “winging it” really means. Of course pilots and doctors and engineers – people highly skilled at navigating complex bodies of specialist knowledge – aren’t just bumbling randomly through life like idiots. But in another, arguably deeper sense, they’re totally winging it. Like anyone else, they can never grasp the whole of the situation in which they find themselves; and like anyone else, they can never be certain about what’ll happen in the very next moment, let alone a week or a month from now. Like all of us, they’re just crossing bridges as they come to them: they can’t depend in any absolute way on the bodies of knowledge in which they’re trained. Life is always bigger, and more unknowable, than any set of concepts we use to try to make sense of it.