I am reading a handful of books. Here’s one: Emotional Resilience by David Viscott. On the shelf beside it: Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) and Emotional Freedom (Judith Orloff). ARE WE SENSING A THEME?

It was 2021 and it was the season of emotions.

Have I learned anything? I don’t know. Maybe. Viscott has gut-punched me a few hundred times already.

Here, I’ll share some of the punches:

“She is always amazed to discover that other people can actually take care of themselves. When she does she only wishes she had let go sooner.”

“Giving without respecting yourself, however, is not giving, but a subtle form of manipulation.”

“…you can lower your defensive wall by deciding to be open, to accept yourself and your shortcomings, and to tell as much of the truth as you know. At its heart continuing to grow requires that you face life’s hurts directly and take responsibility for being in the place that allowed you to be injured.”

“Hiding your true feelings is the source of most of your loneliness and suffering. When you hide your feelings, you become lonely for the part of yourself you’ve excluded from your life.”

“There is no greater destroyer of self-belief than holding hurt inside and polluting your self-image with negative messages of guilt.”

And this zinger:

“Most of your problems come from not wanting to see things as they are.”

Yeah. Some harsh truth-telling in there, but lots of hope, too:

“The world makes perfect sense exactly the way it is. When the truth can be told, everything can be understood. …The more truthful you are in accepting what happens to you and the more responsibility you take for it, the less your defenses will intrude. Living in the truth is always the easiest solution.”

I’m hungry now. Pie sounds good, for some reason.

“Perhaps it is all illusion, this life. All you have of the life you have lived are the memories you carry. You edit these memories and make them fit some scheme. …It is only when you accept your humanness and vulnerability that you can see the past clearly and gain strength.”

—from Emotional Resilience

The last third of Emotional Resilience turned into lots of repetition and examples belaboring the points already made. I skimmed it, and now I’m done. Worth reading, for me, even if some of the reading is skimming.

Perhaps it was lots of repetition through the whole book, but it took me till the last third to connect the dots, to start discerning the patterns.

That’s a tendency in life, as well: to wait until the last 3rd or 10th or 80th section of life to connect the dots, to discern the patterns. At that point, maybe it’s too late to change them, too late to do anything but become aware and accept what is.

This is okay, too.

Freed to be what it was, rather than what you needed it to be, the past is a beacon illuminating the fleeting moment of the present.”

Looking back too soon can keep you from looking forward.

And sometimes the patterns aren’t patterns but inventions, layers of logic we arrange carefully to cover a chaos too random and bright and scary to live with.

Or maybe the chaos itself is a pattern too great for us to comprehend.

“Much of what goes wrong in your life is supposed to go wrong. There are no mistakes.”