早上無事，看了幾頁林生的“快樂有限”，繼續感受到他大腦奇思異想。故事短而骨骼精奇。中午到中大做義工，skip lunch 地跟南亞小朋友“通山跑” （其實是因為時間預算太差所以沒飯吃），野生捕獲沈校長。有一，兩刻感覺到自己心跳，有點擔憂，幸而最終無事。滿開心的，不過超級累。爾後到荃灣跟朋快速晚餐，然後看劇。
又聽到自由受查受限的真人故事。現實有時跟故事一樣荒誕。
2016年3月14日星期一
彷彿發生很多事
最近彷彿發生很多事，又其實沒甚麼大事。也可能是之前太宅的關係，大腦一時不適應。
星期五晚與友吃飯，收到遲來的生日禮物。知道她有伴了，就泛起滿滿的寂寞。縱然偶爾覺得一個人也很好，但總是不能免俗的隨著年歲漸增開始擔心。不過提醒自己還是努力 upgrade為上。能自愛自強的女子有多吸引。
星期六早上萬分不情願地張眼，拖拉著起床，慢吞吞吃早餐，再死死氣把工作做完。下午去看中醫，耀目的人兒配上精緻耳環。跟友團契，接續晚餐。是日金句是避免以錯誤理由做對的事。(雖然這樣還是比以錯誤理由做錯的事強) (那如果以對的理由做錯事？)(媽，好暈啊 = =”)
星期天早餐，崇拜，其後去訂傢俱，晚上看劇聽故事期間就睡著了。
今天上班很忙，同時又覺很奄悶。
2016年3月11日星期五
(thebookoflife) On Being Unintentionally Hurt
One of the most fundamental paths to calm is the power to hold on, even in very challenging situations, to a distinction between what someone does – and what they meant to do.
In law, the difference is enshrined in the contrasting concepts of murder and manslaughter. The result may be the same; the body is inert in a pool of blood. But we collectively feel it makes a huge difference what the perpetrator’s intentions were.
We care about intentions for a very good reason: because if it was deliberate, then the perpetrator will be an ongoing and renewable source of danger from whom the community must be protected. But if it was accidental, then the perpetrator will be inclined to deep apology and restitution, which renders punishment and rage far less necessary. Picture yourself in a restaurant where the waiter has spilt a glass of wine on your (new) laptop. The damage is severe and your rage starts to mount. But whether this was an accident or a willing strategy is key to an appropriate response. A concerted desire to spill signals that the waiter needs to be confronted head on. You may have to take radical defensive steps: like shouting at them or calling for help. But if it was an accident, then the person isn’t your enemy. There’s no need to swear at them. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to be forgiving and kindly, because benevolence will imminently be heading your way.
Motives are, therefore, crucial. But unfortunately, we’re seldom very good at perceiving what motives happen to be involved in the incidents that hurt us. We are easily and wildly mistaken. We see intention where there was none and escalate and confront when no strenuous or agitated responses are warranted.
Part of the reason why we jump so readily to dark conclusions and see plots to insult and harm us is a rather poignant psychological phenomenon: self-hatred. The less we like ourselves, the more we appear in our own eyes as really rather plausible targets for mockery and harm. Why would a drill have started up outside, just as we were settling down to work? Why is the room service breakfast not arriving, even though we will have to be in a meeting very soon? Why would the phone operator be taking so long to find our details? Because there is – logically enough – a plot against us. Because we are appropriate targets for these kinds of things, because we are the sort of people against whom disruptive drilling is legitimately likely to be directed: it’s what we deserve.
When we carry an excess of self-disgust around with us, operating just below the radar of conscious awareness, we’ll constantly seek confirmation from the wider world that we really are the worthless people we take ourselves to be. The expectation is almost always set in childhood, where someone close to us is likely to have left us feeling dirty and culpable – and as a result, we now travel through society assuming the worst, not because it is necessarily true (or pleasant) to do so, but because it feels familiar; and because we are the prisoners of past patterns we haven’t yet understood.
A reason why others may unintentionally harm us is that we often look rather strong from the outside. We may not even be aware of how skilled we have become at putting up a cheerful, robust facade around others. It’s something we perhaps learnt in our early adolescence, at about the time we started at the new school. While often an advantage, it can lead people to say tough and hurtful things – without really meaning to. They just don’t know how bruised and fragile we already are. They don’t grasp just how big an impact on us their words or actions can have, because they don’t know – and can’t really know – how vulnerable we already are in our psyches.
Someone might come up to you at work and give a pretty unflattering assessment of a presentation you made. They mean to make some sort of impact. They want you to notice a bit. But from your side it feels very different. It’s deeply, catastrophically upsetting. You’d been nervous beforehand; now this! In another role last year you’d had some problems here and had seen a life coach. In this new job, you’d been determined to lift your game. Your self-respect was already bruised. And your father was especially critical of the way you spoke, mocking the slight lisp you had before the age of eight. But others can’t tell all this. You don’t look especially at risk. You’re like a vase with tiny cracks you can hardly distinguish. Yet even a minor jolt will make the whole thing fall apart.
Ideally we would be able to give other people early warning of our areas of fragility, so that they could take this into account when dealing with us. We’re pretty ready to do this around physical bruises and injuries. If you have a bandaged hand, people know not to grab it. And, in theory, the same could happen with tender psychological areas.
Yet, it can feel too shameful and convoluted to explain to others just how many cracks we are already carrying. There’s no time. And in any case the reasons may not reflect well on us. We’re perhaps fragile because we wasted a lot of money; because we’re having an affair and feel deeply guilty and terrified we’re going to get found out; because we’ve been watching so much online pornography we feel disgusted at ourselves. We feel we’re burdened and can only just keep going: and yet we can’t often really let other people know why. And so we are faced with a tortuous dilemma: people will cause us a lot more distress than they ever meant to, given who they thought we were.
Secret fragility – the cracks that have been accumulating over days, weeks and years – explains our occasionally extraordinary outbursts which can be so puzzling to onlookers. An apparently tiny remark unleashes a furious response from us. Imagine we are paying at the local corner shop and the total is a bit more than we’d been assuming it would be. Instantly, we feel that the person at the till is trying to cheat us. We hand them a note and they take a bit longer counting out the change and we suddenly say furiously ‘Just keep it’, and make a grim and storm out, crashing painfully into large tub of new potatoes as we do so.
Small children sometimes behave in stunningly unfair ways: they scream at the person who is looking after them, angrily push away a bowl of animal pasta, throw away something you have just fetched for them. But we rarely feel personally agitated or wounded by their behaviour. And the reason is that we don’t assign a negative motive or mean intention to a small person. We reach around for the most benevolent interpretations. We don’t think they are doing it in order to upset us. We probably think that they are getting a bit tired, or their gums are sore or they are upset by the arrival of a younger sibling. We’ve got a large repertoire of alternative explanations ready in our heads – and none of these lead us to panic or get terribly agitated.
This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults. Here we imagine that people have deliberately got us in their sights. If someone edges in front of us in the airport queue, it’s natural to suppose they have sized us up and reasoned that they can safely take advantage of us. They probably relish the thought of causing us a little distress. But if we employed the infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different: maybe they didn’t sleep well last night and are too exhausted to think straight; maybe they’ve got a sore knee; maybe they are doing the equivalent of testing the boundaries of parental tolerance: is jumping in front of someone in the queue playing the same role as peeing in the garden? Seen from such a point of view, the adult’s behaviour doesn’t magically become nice or acceptable. But the level of agitation is kept safely low. It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learnt to be so kind to children: it would be even nicer if we learnt to be a little more generous towards the childlike parts of one another.
The French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier (know as Alain), was said to be the finest teacher in France in the first half of the 20th century. And he developed a formula for calming himself and his pupils down in the face of irritating people. ‘Never say that people are evil,’ he wrote, ‘You just need to look for the pin.’ What he meant was: look for the source of the agony that drives a person to behave in appalling ways. The calming thought is to imagine that they are suffering off-stage, in some area we cannot see. To be mature is to learn to imagine this zone of pain, in spite of the lack of much available evidence. They may not look as if they were maddened by an inner psychological ailment: they may look chirpy and full of themselves. But the ‘pin’ simply must be there – or they would not be causing us harm.
Alain was drawing on one of the great techniques of literary fiction: the ability to take us into the mind of a character, perhaps a very unglamorous or initially off-putting figure, and show us the powerful – but unexpected – things that are going on in their mind. It was a move novelists like Dostoevsky was deeply excited by: he’d take the kinds of characters that his readers would normally dismiss with a shudder – an outcast, a criminal, a gambler – and describe the complex depths of their inner lives, their capacity for remorse, their hopes, their powers of sensitive perception.
This move – the accurate, corrective, reimagining of the inner lives of others – is relevant far outside the realm of literary fiction. It’s a piece of empathetic reflection we constantly need to perform with ourselves and with others. We need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry and sadness in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive. We need to aim compassion in an unexpected place: at those who annoy us most. To grow calmer, we must move from fear to pity.
In law, the difference is enshrined in the contrasting concepts of murder and manslaughter. The result may be the same; the body is inert in a pool of blood. But we collectively feel it makes a huge difference what the perpetrator’s intentions were.
We care about intentions for a very good reason: because if it was deliberate, then the perpetrator will be an ongoing and renewable source of danger from whom the community must be protected. But if it was accidental, then the perpetrator will be inclined to deep apology and restitution, which renders punishment and rage far less necessary. Picture yourself in a restaurant where the waiter has spilt a glass of wine on your (new) laptop. The damage is severe and your rage starts to mount. But whether this was an accident or a willing strategy is key to an appropriate response. A concerted desire to spill signals that the waiter needs to be confronted head on. You may have to take radical defensive steps: like shouting at them or calling for help. But if it was an accident, then the person isn’t your enemy. There’s no need to swear at them. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to be forgiving and kindly, because benevolence will imminently be heading your way.
Motives are, therefore, crucial. But unfortunately, we’re seldom very good at perceiving what motives happen to be involved in the incidents that hurt us. We are easily and wildly mistaken. We see intention where there was none and escalate and confront when no strenuous or agitated responses are warranted.
Part of the reason why we jump so readily to dark conclusions and see plots to insult and harm us is a rather poignant psychological phenomenon: self-hatred. The less we like ourselves, the more we appear in our own eyes as really rather plausible targets for mockery and harm. Why would a drill have started up outside, just as we were settling down to work? Why is the room service breakfast not arriving, even though we will have to be in a meeting very soon? Why would the phone operator be taking so long to find our details? Because there is – logically enough – a plot against us. Because we are appropriate targets for these kinds of things, because we are the sort of people against whom disruptive drilling is legitimately likely to be directed: it’s what we deserve.
When we carry an excess of self-disgust around with us, operating just below the radar of conscious awareness, we’ll constantly seek confirmation from the wider world that we really are the worthless people we take ourselves to be. The expectation is almost always set in childhood, where someone close to us is likely to have left us feeling dirty and culpable – and as a result, we now travel through society assuming the worst, not because it is necessarily true (or pleasant) to do so, but because it feels familiar; and because we are the prisoners of past patterns we haven’t yet understood.
A reason why others may unintentionally harm us is that we often look rather strong from the outside. We may not even be aware of how skilled we have become at putting up a cheerful, robust facade around others. It’s something we perhaps learnt in our early adolescence, at about the time we started at the new school. While often an advantage, it can lead people to say tough and hurtful things – without really meaning to. They just don’t know how bruised and fragile we already are. They don’t grasp just how big an impact on us their words or actions can have, because they don’t know – and can’t really know – how vulnerable we already are in our psyches.
Someone might come up to you at work and give a pretty unflattering assessment of a presentation you made. They mean to make some sort of impact. They want you to notice a bit. But from your side it feels very different. It’s deeply, catastrophically upsetting. You’d been nervous beforehand; now this! In another role last year you’d had some problems here and had seen a life coach. In this new job, you’d been determined to lift your game. Your self-respect was already bruised. And your father was especially critical of the way you spoke, mocking the slight lisp you had before the age of eight. But others can’t tell all this. You don’t look especially at risk. You’re like a vase with tiny cracks you can hardly distinguish. Yet even a minor jolt will make the whole thing fall apart.
Ideally we would be able to give other people early warning of our areas of fragility, so that they could take this into account when dealing with us. We’re pretty ready to do this around physical bruises and injuries. If you have a bandaged hand, people know not to grab it. And, in theory, the same could happen with tender psychological areas.
Yet, it can feel too shameful and convoluted to explain to others just how many cracks we are already carrying. There’s no time. And in any case the reasons may not reflect well on us. We’re perhaps fragile because we wasted a lot of money; because we’re having an affair and feel deeply guilty and terrified we’re going to get found out; because we’ve been watching so much online pornography we feel disgusted at ourselves. We feel we’re burdened and can only just keep going: and yet we can’t often really let other people know why. And so we are faced with a tortuous dilemma: people will cause us a lot more distress than they ever meant to, given who they thought we were.
Secret fragility – the cracks that have been accumulating over days, weeks and years – explains our occasionally extraordinary outbursts which can be so puzzling to onlookers. An apparently tiny remark unleashes a furious response from us. Imagine we are paying at the local corner shop and the total is a bit more than we’d been assuming it would be. Instantly, we feel that the person at the till is trying to cheat us. We hand them a note and they take a bit longer counting out the change and we suddenly say furiously ‘Just keep it’, and make a grim and storm out, crashing painfully into large tub of new potatoes as we do so.
Small children sometimes behave in stunningly unfair ways: they scream at the person who is looking after them, angrily push away a bowl of animal pasta, throw away something you have just fetched for them. But we rarely feel personally agitated or wounded by their behaviour. And the reason is that we don’t assign a negative motive or mean intention to a small person. We reach around for the most benevolent interpretations. We don’t think they are doing it in order to upset us. We probably think that they are getting a bit tired, or their gums are sore or they are upset by the arrival of a younger sibling. We’ve got a large repertoire of alternative explanations ready in our heads – and none of these lead us to panic or get terribly agitated.
This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults. Here we imagine that people have deliberately got us in their sights. If someone edges in front of us in the airport queue, it’s natural to suppose they have sized us up and reasoned that they can safely take advantage of us. They probably relish the thought of causing us a little distress. But if we employed the infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different: maybe they didn’t sleep well last night and are too exhausted to think straight; maybe they’ve got a sore knee; maybe they are doing the equivalent of testing the boundaries of parental tolerance: is jumping in front of someone in the queue playing the same role as peeing in the garden? Seen from such a point of view, the adult’s behaviour doesn’t magically become nice or acceptable. But the level of agitation is kept safely low. It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learnt to be so kind to children: it would be even nicer if we learnt to be a little more generous towards the childlike parts of one another.
The French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier (know as Alain), was said to be the finest teacher in France in the first half of the 20th century. And he developed a formula for calming himself and his pupils down in the face of irritating people. ‘Never say that people are evil,’ he wrote, ‘You just need to look for the pin.’ What he meant was: look for the source of the agony that drives a person to behave in appalling ways. The calming thought is to imagine that they are suffering off-stage, in some area we cannot see. To be mature is to learn to imagine this zone of pain, in spite of the lack of much available evidence. They may not look as if they were maddened by an inner psychological ailment: they may look chirpy and full of themselves. But the ‘pin’ simply must be there – or they would not be causing us harm.
Alain was drawing on one of the great techniques of literary fiction: the ability to take us into the mind of a character, perhaps a very unglamorous or initially off-putting figure, and show us the powerful – but unexpected – things that are going on in their mind. It was a move novelists like Dostoevsky was deeply excited by: he’d take the kinds of characters that his readers would normally dismiss with a shudder – an outcast, a criminal, a gambler – and describe the complex depths of their inner lives, their capacity for remorse, their hopes, their powers of sensitive perception.
This move – the accurate, corrective, reimagining of the inner lives of others – is relevant far outside the realm of literary fiction. It’s a piece of empathetic reflection we constantly need to perform with ourselves and with others. We need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry and sadness in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive. We need to aim compassion in an unexpected place: at those who annoy us most. To grow calmer, we must move from fear to pity.
2016年3月5日星期六
2016年3月4日星期五
無情情失眠
睡到凌晨三點多自然醒了，然後再也睡不著。躺在床上想些有的沒的。
昨晚一直看林生的書就一直想，自己一直都想以賣文為生，最少也要在有生之年自資出一本書，但平心而論，我又是否擁有足夠的思想深度（或怪異度）？無論如何，如果寫作如林生所言是嘔吐的過程，那我就應從善如流多吃飯。
這星期感覺跟神比以前親近，人也似乎比較積極而快樂（又想到某君曾說積極不一定要配襯樂觀，悲觀也可以積極）。如果能一直保持這種狀態然後慢慢進步也不錯。
確定會搬家了，但日子未定。有新傢具很好，要改住址頗煩。
近來公司出現大量病人病徵，希望我不會成為其中一員。“手指” 存檔的辭呈預定日子已過，信卻還未交出。未定決心。
事情總有兩面，經濟不境，工作機會相對少，流動率低，同時，新工種出現，又因為流動率低，競爭對手相對少。
很少喝茶，一來沒有這個習慣，二來因體質關係，中午以後喝茶注定當晚輾轉反側。但我宣佈，人參烏龍當選我最喜愛的茶類。
昨晚一直看林生的書就一直想，自己一直都想以賣文為生，最少也要在有生之年自資出一本書，但平心而論，我又是否擁有足夠的思想深度（或怪異度）？無論如何，如果寫作如林生所言是嘔吐的過程，那我就應從善如流多吃飯。
這星期感覺跟神比以前親近，人也似乎比較積極而快樂（又想到某君曾說積極不一定要配襯樂觀，悲觀也可以積極）。如果能一直保持這種狀態然後慢慢進步也不錯。
確定會搬家了，但日子未定。有新傢具很好，要改住址頗煩。
近來公司出現大量病人病徵，希望我不會成為其中一員。“手指” 存檔的辭呈預定日子已過，信卻還未交出。未定決心。
事情總有兩面，經濟不境，工作機會相對少，流動率低，同時，新工種出現，又因為流動率低，競爭對手相對少。
很少喝茶，一來沒有這個習慣，二來因體質關係，中午以後喝茶注定當晚輾轉反側。但我宣佈，人參烏龍當選我最喜愛的茶類。
2016年3月2日星期三
再聽三福
因為靈命持續低落，泛起轉教會的念頭。也不是因為舊教會有何不妥，只是總是彷彿難以跟弟兄姊妹熟絡，感覺上有點孤單罷。這也可能是心態問題，之前也是有點自我封閉。新教會可當成新開始。
約了關顧同工再聽三福，起初是覺得無甚必要，因為自覺聖經知識豐富，該知的都應該知道了。但既然朋友聽完覺得值得，我也去聽聽好了。
也確是有得著。因為是單獨會面，就便於理清問題，也容易看見自己的困惑。再次受到提醒，縱然信心會與行為相襯，但得救從來不是因為我們做了甚麼，只要真心相信，就可以肯定得救。比較深刻的是，關顧同工問我，怎樣知道身旁那張空椅可以支撐自己？（我本來是毫不猶豫的，他們這樣說倒令人有點忐忑）然後叫我試試轉移，坐上去。坐下時真心有點擔心，到坐穩後就確定。
就記得，除非我們真正讓主掌舵，不然一切只會是頭腦上的認知，不是親身經歷。
約了關顧同工再聽三福，起初是覺得無甚必要，因為自覺聖經知識豐富，該知的都應該知道了。但既然朋友聽完覺得值得，我也去聽聽好了。
也確是有得著。因為是單獨會面，就便於理清問題，也容易看見自己的困惑。再次受到提醒，縱然信心會與行為相襯，但得救從來不是因為我們做了甚麼，只要真心相信，就可以肯定得救。比較深刻的是，關顧同工問我，怎樣知道身旁那張空椅可以支撐自己？（我本來是毫不猶豫的，他們這樣說倒令人有點忐忑）然後叫我試試轉移，坐上去。坐下時真心有點擔心，到坐穩後就確定。
就記得，除非我們真正讓主掌舵，不然一切只會是頭腦上的認知，不是親身經歷。
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