“Confidence is not the belief that we won’t meet obstacles. It is the recognition that difficulties are an inescapable part of all worthwhile contributions. We must ensure we have plenty of narratives to hand that normalise the role of pain, anxiety and disappointment in even the best and most successful lives.”
– The School of Life, Confidence – The Battle Against Timidity
“The topic of confidence is too often neglected by serious people: we spend so much time acquiring technical skills, and so little time practicing the one virtue that will make those skills effective in the world.”
– The School of Life, Confidence – The Battle Against Timidity
“One of the greatest sources of despair is the belief that things should have been easier than they have turned out to be. We give up not simply because events are difficult, but because we hadn’t expected them to be so. The capacity to remain confident is, to a significant extent, a matter of internalizing a correct narrative about what difficulties it is normal to encounter.”
– The School of Life, Confidence – The Battle Against Timidity
A surprise of the pandemic has been how well many older adults have adapted to the restrictions. “There’s crisis competence,” said Mark Brennan-Ing, a senior research scientist at Hunter College’s Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging. “As we get older, we get the sense that we’re going to be able to handle it, because we’ve been able to handle challenges in the past. You know you get past it. These things happen, but there’s an end to it, and there’s a life after that.”
“How the Oldest Old Can Endure Even This” – The New York Times
“He learned his lesson in third year, when, after he had passed his preliminary exams, Simone pulled him into her office to debrief. She sat behind her desk with her legs crossed, a beautiful winter day lying white and smooth behind her, all the way to the lake, that blue-white churn and the trees like delicate woodwork in a diorama. He felt good about himself. He felt, for the first time since coming to grad school, like he was finally doing what she always urged him to do — catching up — and he imagined that he saw pride in her eyes. He was excited. he was ready to begin in earnest — to really begin. And she asked, How do you think that went? And he said Oh, well, I thought it was okay. And she shook her head grimly. She said, You know, Wallace, that was … frankly, I was embarrassed for you. Had that been another student, it might have gone differently. You might not have passed. But we talked a long time about what was feasible for you, what was reasonable for your abilities, and we decided we’d pass you, but we are going to watch you, Wallace. No more of this. You need to get better. She spoke as though she was bestowing blessings. Bestowing beneficence. Bestowing irrefutable grace. She spoke as though she was saving him. What could he say? What could he do?”
Nothing. Except to work.“
Real Life, by Brandon Taylor
“It is we in particular, those remorselessly skilled at not giving up, who need to hear a curious-sounding lesson in being a little less loyal. We need to hear that, surprisingly, some people just don’t change: that their characters have been bolted shut through trauma and there is no chance that they will ever – whatever they may say and however intensely they promise – display any evolution. We need to hear that surprisingly, some people aren’t entirely good and we aren’t necessarily the problem. We need to learn to blame and get annoyed with someone other than ourselves. We need to do something very strange: walk away. This is no sign of cowardice or weakness of character. It’s a sign that we have (finally) learnt to love ourselves and so place our needs where these should always have been: at the center of our considerations.”
The School of Life, The Capacity to Give up on People
“But if there’s one single thing that has made the difference between partners who have hope and partners who are struggling, it’s this: we – the ones with ADHD – have to own it. We have to say to ourselves and our partners: “Some of the things I do don’t work for us. They don’t work for the family, for my job, for me. I want to change them.”
That’s it. That’s the baseline. There are many different ways to go from there: couples counseling, education about ADHD, medication, support groups, and forgiveness and growth. There’s no one-size-fits-all “next step,” but if we can’t at least do this – if we can’t at least say “something has to change” – there’s nowhere we can go.
ADDA – We All Want to Be Heard
“[…] Governor Cuomo praised the design of the broad, bland new stations to the New York Times as a “public space where community can gather and where culture and shared civic values are celebrated,” and, at a news conference, predicted that “this is just the beginning of a new period of rebirth.”
What actually happened was that the design of the new subway stations was outsourced to assorted stars of the modern art world, most of whom not one New Yorker in ten thousand would likely recognize by name or achievement. One of them, Chuck Close, filled his station with mosaic portraits of “New York artists who have formed Mr.Close’s wide circle,” which includes Lou Reed and Kara Walker along with Cecily Brown, Philip Glass, Alex Katz, several younger artists he favored, and two self-portraits.
The artist Vik Muniz did Close one better, providing three dozen images of various friends, relatives, and cultural celebrities dressed up, reported the Times, like “normal people,” including “the restauranteur Daniel Boulud holding a bag with a fish tail sticking out; the designer, actor, and man-about-town Waris Ahluwalia”; and Mr.Muniz himself, “in a Rockwell-esque scene of him tripping, spilling papers from his briefcase,” as well as his son, dressed “in a tiger suit, like a Times Square mascot on lunch break.” Isn’t it marvelous? The artists are depicting themselves and their celebrity friends imitating us, waiting for a train and doing all the perfectly ordinary things that we ordinary people do?
The Death of a Once Great City, by Kevin Baker (Harper’s, July 2018)
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu
“PTG is a cousin to resilience, but more of a thug: meaner, more brutal, more devastating – and more transformative. Rich Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, psychologists at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, coined the term in 1995, when they noticed they some people did not recover from their traumatic experiences in a typically resilient fashion. Rather than return to their set point, everything about them radically changed: their worldviews, their goals in life, their friendships. […]
“The one thing that overwhelmingly predicts it is the extent to which you say, ‘My core beliefs were shaken,'” Calhoun adds.
“What kind of core beliefs? “The degree to which the world is just,” Tedeschi says, “or that people are benevolent or that the future is something that you can control. Beliefs about, basically, how life works.”
Life Reimagined, The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife, Barbara Bradley Hagerty