"I feel like a fool," Arsibalt said. He turned and looked at me. "When I think of all the things I've worried about and been afraid of in my life—and now it's plain that I've been scared of all the wrong things."
How do you handle hard things, mentally and emotionally? I'd be interested to hear your strategies.
I handle "reality" by pondering what history will say about current events, about us. Trained as an unflinching historian, I use those perspectives / skills to help maintain whatever sanity I can.
When I need to reset my brain in temporary safety, I pick up a book about hard things that I've already read. There was a long period when that book was Diana Wynne Jones' The Homeward Bounders. I swapped phrases from it into my .sig file [1], choosing them according to fairly strict rules. The most important rule ("well, more of a guideline really"):
Text fragments chosen as .sigs must perform well apart from the books that gave them birth. Whether they are short or long, one sentence or many, they must truly be .sigs, able to provide inspiration or provocation even when utterly severed from the pages where you found them.
I have (in my old age) compassion for my pretentious younger self who wrote "utterly" in that paragraph of meta from the Sig-O-Matic. And for my present self who would rather talk about process than content and is doing so even now. This is who I am; no time to further "improve" before pressing the button. Anyway ...
In the middle of everything [2], I'm going to post here when an Anathem [3] quote jumps out at me, and not worry about spoilers (but the plot is so complex that any one sentence isn't going to spoil it). This quote is from the night the Thousanders' tower was glowing red.
"I feel like a fool," Arsibalt said. He turned and looked at me. "When I think of all the things I've worried about and been afraid of in my life—and now it's plain that I've been scared of all the wrong things."
[1] I have some of the short quotes from Homeward Bounders memorized, so here are two:
Before three of my own kind, I can speak the truth.
I think it's time for the vulture to come.
(Yeah, there's a Prometheus-sort-of-character in it. But each of us has our own vultures.)
The Sig-O-Matic has all "white" authors. To be specific (Tim Wise rant linked) whiteness is the problem, not the authors tagged with the label. Should Parts 3 - N address this or should I continue to let the project fade (a process that began when we all stopped needing .sig files anyway)?
[2] Quoting (sloppily, not checking) from my screenplay: "Our game had more everything in it than I realized." That one's not online, but I have five one-page scripts online at HitRecord. Each of them contains the words, "Here's the thing..." (You might have to log in to see them. HitRecord is a community started by Joseph Gordon-Levitt with projects you might find nourishing.)
[3] Written by Neal Stephenson. I highly recommend this "novel of ideas," if you are willing to grapple with the info-dump (and own-language) of strong science fiction. My reading method is to start over after the first 150 pages ... as many times as it takes.
Prolific, passionate writers who write more quickly than I can read sometimes produce one work where their particular skills luminously serve the themes (=author's obsessions). I am particularly fond of these. I would argue that Anathem is one, and another is The Gate To Women's Country by Sheri Tepper.
Another way to say this: sometimes I'll be memorizing one book by an author whose other stuff I no longer find readable for whatever reason. This blog is more about me than them, always.
Thank you for reading! And there's a question up there ... how are YOU coping?
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