judging by appearance

In general, it's better to be positive than negative, but sometimes negativity can be refreshing, and sometimes positivity can be obnoxious and shallow. You know those people who are just very honest when everyone else is trying to be polite....I like that. 

The book of the Bible that is most like this is Ecclesiastes. It's like, everything is meaningless.....I've tried all these things to make me happy - to fulfil me - and nothing does. It's just refreshing to read a message like that in the Bible of all books. 

I was part of a Christian group for many years where joyfulness was obligatory. You were judged according to how joyful you were, among other things. Of course, no one can really know how joyful you are, so you were judged by how joyful you appeared to be. So, to avoid getting into trouble everyone was always trying to appear to be joyful. We justified it with the idea that that was what we were meant to do - that was God's will. We weren't being fake. We were denying ourselves as it teaches you to do in the Bible. We made ourselves appear to be joyful, whether we felt like it or not. 

The irony is that forced joy is the very definition of fake joy. Real joy and love and faith are always based on freedom of choice. Real faith doesn't come from a refusal to countenance any doubts whatsoever. Being positive is not about rigidly refusing to be negative about anything. Real repentance is not about eschewing any kind of struggle completely. 

satisfaction

It's a good thing to do what you really want to do in life - to follow your dream and to do the things you enjoy and are passionate about. But you can't do those things all the time, and actually, you wouldn't want to. Life involves a range of experiences and feelings. A lot of satisfaction and fulfilment in life comes from doing things you don't feel like doing or things that are difficult. 

12

According to AA and other twelve step programs, you can't get help or help yourself with your problem until you admit there's a problem. Why is it so hard for us to admit it? I think it's because we feel that it reflects badly on us. We don't want people to think there's something wrong with us. We don't want to appear weak. I don't think it's just about what other people think of us though. It's a perception issue. People really don't see that they have a problem. 

Although I am an alcoholic, and I will never drink again, I've never been to AA, but I went to a mental health twelve step support group called GROW, which really helped. I learnt a whole different way of thinking from what I was used to. What I appreciated was the way that it provided an environment where it was normal and acceptable to talk about things that are normally pretty taboo. 

One of the big lessons I learnt from my involvement with the group was that truth is not self-evident. There are a lot of lies that we just accept as true simply because they seem true. That was the big lesson - a lot of my thoughts and perceptions were straight up lies....not just a little bit distorted, but actual lies. 

escape

At times I have wanted simple answers to important questions but, ultimately, I'm glad that the answers aren't simple. I was part of a group that wanted to simplify the message and what it meant to be a Christian. It's kind of exciting and refreshing at first to concede to that influence. It's a known challenge. Ultimately, it was a kind of enslavement and deception. It wasn't true. Thank God. When I was part of it, I thought that this is reality. It was a small, constrained world. But I thought, well, God made this world and decided on the rules, so I need to accept them. I thought that I would be in that world for the rest of my life and beyond because leaving was unthinkable. 

It was liberating when the reality of my life was no longer confined to those boundaries and rules.

Even though I no longer agree with them, I don't regret my time with them because it was part of my journey. My commitment from the start was to God, and that remained the case, and I think the more I sought God and pursued my relationship with God, the more that groups rigors and processes seemed empty, soulless, mechanical - not 'of God'. Drawing closer to God drew me away from them. 

winning

We all have our own world that we live in, and no one can touch that world. We face challenges, we overcome, and the victory is ours. A victory is not a trophy or a certificate that you frame, it's something that lives in you - something that you embody, permanently.

langue

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco talks about how medieval monks subverted the text of the Bible through the illustrations they drew in the margins. This works in two ways. Firstly, the margins frame the text and framing augments meaning. 

Secondly, margins are narrow which means that the meaning conveyed within them is concentrated. It's like when you take a small portion out of a picture, that portion somehow becomes more vivid and vibrant. 

The same principle applies to language. If you have a passage of writing, and you take out phrases and sentences, they have more potential meaning than they did when they were part of the passage. When they were part of the passage, they were just a vehicle to deliver the meaning of the passage. The reader hurriedly moves through them. Nothing interesting or noteworthy happens. But when you take them out of the passage, their meaning is, first of all, concentrated, because, instead of having to give your attention to the whole passage, you're now attending to these few words. 

Then also, there's a lot of creative potential now. You could put the words or phrases with other words or phrases that they wouldn't normally go with, thus creating new and interesting meanings. 

fire

Something you don't see a lot in TV shows or movies is people who are idealistic and passionate about things. We see a lot of Machiavellian characters whose passion and interest are devoted solely to getting and exercising more power. 

In a novel, if there are a few short statements of true, well-expressed passion, the whole book will center itself around them and they will echo beyond the book.

This kind of passion is not hype, bluster or anger. That's often what we mean when we talk about passion, but you see that sort of passion all the time. You see it every day in politics. People try to show that sort of passion when they make speeches, because it's impressive. They do it for effect. But this other sort of passion can be expressed without raising your voice or even sometimes without speaking because it's not about effect. It's about truth and substance and conviction.

now

What is more important - acceptance of where you are and what you've got or making progress towards your goals and dreams and what you want? On an actual physical journey, it's definitely the latter. If you are walking from one place to another, you keep walking. But life is different. 

The future itself never arrives, or rather, we never arrive at it. All we really have control over is the present moment. In a sense, that's true, but in a sense, it's not. The present moment is not all we have. Our past and our future are ours as well, we just have a different relationship with them. And, just like lines and points are ideals that can never be realized in this world because a true line or point would be invisible, the present moment is an unrealizable concept. So, effectively, there's no such thing as the present moment, or, at least, we can't really perceive it. We live on a continuum between the past and the future and our present is informed by both.

words for it

Sometimes it's hard for me to distinguish between what is depression and what is anxiety, which makes sense when you think about it because it's not like the two are compartmentalized in one's mind. 

And, strangely, my own judgement about these things isn't definitive. Like, there have been a couple of times when I thought that my main problem was anxiety but when my psychologist gave me that test that measures your levels of stress, anxiety and depression, she said that I was suffering from severe depression but only moderate anxiety.

I suppose that the depression is just so intense that I perceive it as anxiety. Like, to my mind, anxiety is more intense than depression. Depression sounds like something subdued, even benign - something manageable - but what I was experiencing at those times was not very manageable....like, that's why I was seeing a psychologist - to get help in managing my mental health issues. 

Labels are useful, even if they have a negative side. Just to be able to have words for different issues we experience enables us to address those issues. We can say - this issue is why I am being like this, and people will know what we are talking about. The reason that's so helpful is that communication goes a long way towards dealing with these issues. Then, on the other hand, labels can also become limitations. 

cut

The way we think of things and represent them is always a distortion. To tell the truth we have to lie and make stuff up. For example, it seems pretty obvious that the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line, but on earth, that isn't true. Because the earth is round, the shortest distance is always a curved line. And speaking of lines, the line itself is another example of this kind of simplification. A true line has no thickness and therefore would be invisible. So, when we draw a line, it isn't really a line - it's a rectangle - but it represents a line.

We suspend our disbelief though. When we watch a film or read a book, it evokes in us the sense of a story that happened in time and space. It evokes in us the perception of something very different from a book or a film or even what can be shown in a book or film. Films are only a couple of hours long, but they generally portray periods of time that are much longer. 

When I watched Adolescence, I noticed that they filmed all the parts that would normally be cut - like, people walking places. I learnt later that that's because they made every episode in single takes, with no cuts, which was quite a technical achievement. I don't know why they did that but when I was watching it I was thinking about how it makes the series more realistic, because life is punctuated with waiting times and walking from one place to another. 

the mystery of progress

Anything special or meaningful has an unpleasant side to it - a necessary shadow. Progress is always necessarily challenging and painful, among other things. 

You can't really see progress as you're making it. If you're like me, you're just aware of all the challenges. Then the progress seems to appear all at once. 

a movement begins

There were 3 bears and 3 pigs that shared a house in Bankstown. The bears were named Wilhelm, Alexandria and Neptune and the pigs were named Edison, Roe and Nerf. Wilhelm and Alexandria were best friends, as were Edison and Roe, but really they were all friends. Neptune and Nerf were in a band together.

It was a happy household. There were jokes with no animosity. Every day, the pigs would laugh at the way the bears' fur stood up in the morning and the bears laughed at the sound the pigs' trotters made on the floorboards.

They were just ordinary people in the early days, but they were destined to go down in history as key figures in the movement we now call antignomeanthropomorphanism. It all began with a scandal, which led to a crisis, which led to revolution, which led to a reformation. At the time, no one foresaw the upheaval that would result from the revelations that Hello Kitty was not a cat.

It had all blown over, actually - the HelloKittygate scandal - but, as revelations do, it had planted a seed. Nerf began to ask himself questions, about himself and his associates, that had never occurred to him before. In time, he came to the conviction that all 6 members of his household, including himself, were not people or animals - they were anthropomorphic characters. The rest is history.

serendipity

The idea that we achieve our own goals through application and perseverance is kind of a myth. Good things always have an element of surprise. Also, a lot of things that we don't associate with progress and success - like setbacks, failures and weaknesses - are crucial ingredients of success. 

It's not that our efforts are irrelevant, but they aren't everything. 

deformalization

According to the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism, 'defamiliarization' is the fundamental essence of literature. Language prolongs the perceptive process, leading the reader to question and enrich the meaning being conveyed. Does it though? Yes. Consider how we can think much faster than we read, or how we can read much faster in our heads than we can read aloud. 

If you perceive an event or object yourself, you will form certain impressions and views about it. If you read a text about it, you are perceiving that event or object through the text. Your mind has to process the text, and that slows it down, giving it more time to create meaning. And during that extra time, the object or event is defamiliarized, because you are perceiving a text, not the object or event itself.

When we are familiar with something, we don't really look closely at it. We already know it so we don't have to pay attention to it. Viewing that thing through a text gets us to slow down and pay attention to it, which 'makes it strange'. 

thoughts

We constantly have thoughts going through our minds. When we express those thoughts in writing, it's an exercise in partial translation rather than transcription, because our thoughts are multi-dimensional and can't be represented in any tangible medium.

being here

If you replace the negative prefix of the word 'negation' with the prefix of 'positive', you get 'position', which is surprising. Negation is kind of esoteric and philosophical. Position is very concrete and definite. They're not obviously opposites but they are opposites, since the opposite of negation is 'being' - actually being somewhere - being in a position. We posit ideas. We take a position on issues.

no thyself

I am the only self I know. But knowing yourself is a strange thing. It's not like knowing someone else. Just like you can't see your own face, you aren't aware of your own self. Other people see qualities in me - good and bad - but I don't. We rely on a mirror to see our physical appearance and we rely on responses from others to get a sense of ourselves.

It's funny how we don't really know ourselves. In a way, you know yourself better than anyone else, but, at the same time, you don't know yourself. When you are having a conversation and you say something funny or interesting, it's as funny or interesting to you as it is to the person you are talking to. It's new and surprising to you even though you said it, because it comes partly from this self that you don't fully know. You don't know what this self is going to say.

When I write, a lot of it is responding to what I just wrote. I'll read what I just wrote and see where I can go from there. I respond to it as if.....not as if someone else wrote it, but not exactly as if I wrote it either. The key point is that I respond to it. It's composition and response. I'm a composer and responder. 

compulsion

Opposites are intimately related. You can't be courageous unless you are afraid. And strength is rooted in weakness. One becomes extraordinary by being ordinary. Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are, in fact, the same person.

When religious groups try to banish all possibility of doubt or sin - when they try to enforce goodness by demanding adherence to a set of rules or principles - they extinguish people's faith. Because choice is fundamental to love and faith. When you love, value and believe in a person or in God or even in an ideal, it motivates you to think, say and do certain things. You choose to do those things. If you are compelled or coerced into doing those things, it's not the same. It's not real love or real faith.

We learn through failure and struggle. We don't learn by being told what to do and then doing it because we're told. We have to discover the right thing to do for ourselves. So, struggle and setbacks and mistakes are part of the process. I think religious groups sometimes make the mistake of demonizing struggle itself and insisting that you say, do and be certain things because they have told you to do or because according to their view the Bible tells you to. They want compliance with a set of rules, not realizing that what matters is the heart.