31
" Think back. How many of your sweetest dreams, your greatest hopes, your most cherished desires have come true?
On the other hand, how much of what you didn't really care about wound up happening anyway?
What you have to understand is that it's the god of solitude who also happens to be in charge of denying us what we desperately want.
She does it because she believes the more we get what we desperately want, the more miserable we become, even more so than we already are.
As Truman Capote put it, "More tears are shed for answered prayers than unanswered ones."
So the god of solitude is only trying to help us not be miserable getting what we thought would make us happy.
Though once in a while she'll let it happen to teach us the secret of happiness is to be grateful for what we already have. Not constantly wanting, trying to get more.
The way to outsmart her, then, is not to care one way or the other.
That way, too, when you don't get what you want, you won't be disappointed because it won't really matter. "
― Lionel Fisher , Celebrating Time Alone: Stories Of Splendid Solitude
37
" I woke up this morning with the words clomping around in my head: "Truth does not become wisdom until the exact moment you're ready for it." No one can force it on you, even though everyone thinks they have a right to try. So the rest of us should just put a sock in it. Bug out. Leave everyone to discover their own truths, each in their own way, all in their own time. And go find our own wisdom. Which will happen. But not until that exact, excruciating Aha! moment when, at long last, confusing, convoluted truth becomes simple, crystal-clear wisdom. Because we're finally, gloriously, ready for it. Not a second before. "
― Lionel Fisher , Celebrating Time Alone: Stories Of Splendid Solitude
38
" Vanishing cream for the mind, English writer Jeremiah Creedon calls it.
It's beholding the mote in your brother's eye, says the Bible, while disregarding the beam in your own.
Denial is refusing to listen to the voice that awakens you in the night and whispers, "You know, you really are an incredible jerk and you ought to do something about it!"
"Beware thoughts that come in the night," cautions William Least Heat Moon at the start of Blue Highways, his evocative journal of self-discovery on the back roads of America. "They aren't turned properly. They come in askew, free of sense or satisfaction, deriving from the most remote of sources."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge called those remote sources "an aching hollow in the bosom, a dark cold speck at the heart, an obscure and boding sense of something that must be kept out of sight of the conscience, some secret lodger, whom they can neither resolve to reject or retain."
Denial is keeping from ourselves secrets we already know.
It's choosing to forget what we can't bear to remember.
It's making people tell us what we want to hear so we can keep believing the lies we've told ourselves, keep punishing those who dare to make us listen to the truth.
Denial is the psychology of self-deception, the mind's deliberate failure to see things as they really are in order to protect ourselves from ourselves, says Donald Goldman, author of Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception.
Familiar words of denial:
It's not about the money.
I am not a crook.
I was only obeying orders.
Business is business.
I can quit whenever I want.
I don't remember. "
― Lionel Fisher , Celebrating Time Alone: Stories Of Splendid Solitude
40
" I woke up this morning with the words clomping around in my head: 'Truth does not become wisdom until the exact moment you're ready for it. No one can force it on you, even though everyone thinks they have a right to try. So the rest of us should just put a sock in it. Bug out. Leave everyone to discover their own truths, each in their own way, all in their own time. And go find our own wisdom. Which will happen. But not until that exact, excruciating, exactly right moment when, at long last, confusing, convoluted truth becomes simple, crystal-clear wisdom. Because we're finally, gloriously, ready for it. Not a second before. "
― Lionel Fisher , Celebrating Time Alone: Stories Of Splendid Solitude
