Tag: quotes

Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming “spaced out” or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning. People with alexithymia can get better only by learning to recognize the relationship between their physical sensations and their emotions, much as colorblind people can only enter the world of color by learning to distinguish and appreciate shades of gray.

Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
(via yesdarlingido)

Here, then, is the case for a [universal basic income], as I see it. For many — perhaps even for most — work brings both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. For those who can work, and can find jobs, a UBI isn’t likely to lure them into indolence. Hell, it may even increase their incentive to work, both because they’ll achieve a higher standard of living and because employers will have to offer better pay and better conditions to attract workers. (As Dylan Matthews notes here, past experiments with basic incomes have shown little effect on work incentives.)
But for those who can’t work or can’t find jobs — and there are millions of these people, and our country has nothing even approaching an answer for them now — a UBI could be a boon, so long as relying on a UBI for income is respected. It could give them the freedom to turn their passions into their vocations — they could be an artist, or a writer, or a Reddit commenter, or a competitive video gamer, even if they don’t make much or any money from those pursuits.
Instead of their social status being in the hands of employers with no use for them, it’s in their hands, and they’ll have plenty of incentive to figure out a way to present themselves as high status.

A universal basic income only makes sense if Americans change how they think about work – Vox (via brutereason)

I mean, d’you know what eternity is? There’s this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there’s this little bird-“

“What little bird?” said Aziraphale suspiciously.

“This little bird I’m talking about. And every thousand years-”

“The same bird every thousand years?”

Crowley hesitated. “Yeah,” he said.

“Bloody ancient bird, then.”

“Okay. And every thousand years this bird flies-”

“-limps-”

“-flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-”

“Hold on. You can’t do that. Between here and the end of the universe there’s loads of-” The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. “Loads of buggerall, dear boy.”

“But it gets there anyway,” Crowley persevered.

“How?”

“It doesn’t matter!”

“It could use a space ship,” said the angel.

Crowley subsided a bit. “Yeah,” he said. “If you like. Anyway, this bird-“

“Only it is the end of the universe we’re talking about,” said Aziraphale. “So it’d have to be one of those space ships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you’ve got to-” He hesitated. “What have they got to do?”

“Sharpen its beak on the mountain,” said Crowley. “And then it flies back-”

“-in the space ship-”

“And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again,” said Crowley quickly.

There was a moment of drunken silence.

“Seems a lot of effort just to sharpen a beak,” mused Aziraphale.

“Listen,” said Crowley urgently, “the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-”

Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds’ beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.

“-then you still won’t have finished watching The Sound of Music.”

Aziraphale froze.

“And you’ll enjoy it,” Crowley said relentlessly. “You really will.”

“My dear boy-”

“You won’t have a choice.”

“Listen-”

“Heaven has no taste.”

“Now-”

“And not one single sushi restaurant.”

A look of pain crossed the angel’s suddenly very serious face.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (via beardedbarefootandbespectacled)

What do people do with all that time? I mean, people other than me. They must do something. All those nights and weekends for years and years. I can’t even imagine what I’m going to do with all that time. Don’t people get awfully tired after a while? I mean, won’t I get awfully tired? And is there something that makes it okay in the end? Is there something that makes it worth it, being so tired, going through all this?

The Myth of Sanity, Martha Stout (via sashayed)

And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.

Sam, The Two Towers (via one-small-garden)

Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.

Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

Ursula K. Le Guin (via jayemichaela)

We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.

Hildegard von Bingen

(via spiritualgateway)

This is difficult to wrap oneself around. The easiest way in is to consider other cultures and how they saw objects, ideas, existence differently. A harder entrance lies in dismantling one’s own taught preconceptions. Why should I only be with one person at a time? Why can’t men cuddle their friends? Why is touch often inappropriate, why is it important and how could the balance be different? Can I wrestle a table? How is the world like upside down? What is sitting, what else can it be?

(via camarguais)

as a frequent furniture-wrestler and hildegard fan, i endorse this

(via dharmagun)

there are no shortcuts. you can’t just embrace everything or discard everything. you have to engage with the world and engage in yourself. it’s worthwhile work.

(via jumpingjacktrash)

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (via sealedtome)

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i can’t uncouple these in my mind

(via sobriquetinbedgrowyrhair)