Posts
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USA
Just listened to a random song by Joni Mitchell, called “California”. The lyrics were:
Sitting in a park in Paris France
Reading the news and it sure looks bad
They won’t give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had
Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn’t want to stay here
It’s too old and cold and settled in its ways here
Oh but CaliforniaAnd it re-awakened my long lasting longing to go to the USA.
I kind of failed to do it. When I was a student I had two chances. One I let go myself, the other someone let go for me, I suppose.
That’s alright, life was exciting and is good now.
But politically, philosophically and in my heart, I believe I would have loved to be an American.
I am surrounded by people that dislike the USA, but it my opinion they are snobbish Europeans who don’t really know what they are talking about. Or they don’t see the bigger picture. Not the way I do, anyway.
For me the United States remain a dream.
And of course I don’t mean just visiting there. That’s easy, done that, jump on a plane a stay a few weeks. But I would like to work there, live there a little bit. Perhaps even stay for good.
I think Europe is fine, but too bureaucratic. And I think some of it’s values are great and worth living for, but some come at a price, and I don’t think this is seen and understood.
And, being an immigrant, I never fell in love with the country I live in now. I just couldn’t. There’s good people here, of course. Many. But it doesn’t feel like my country I guess.
Maybe the United States wouldn’t either.
Maybe what I am looking for is not a place but a certain vibe, a certain way to see the world.
If I am honest, that’s probably it. It’s an “Alchemist” thing, if you know the book. For sure.
As I write this, I feel this is truer than my wish to emigrate.
But still, I suppose I will keep the dream around. I will live my life here and then it will probably appear in front of me again, some day. Maybe because of another song
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Selectively Numbing Emotions
Just read something interesting. We can’t decide to feel happy and suppress just the negative emotions. For example by distracting ourselves with entertainment or alcohol.
“All emotions just have one volume switch.”
If we reduce our capacity to feel bad then at the same time we reduce our capacity to feel good.
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EQ
The equalizer is an important tool when arranging music on the computer. In every track we can enhance or attenuate certain frequencies, or cut them out altogether. We can for example reduce the punch in a certain area of the strings to make room for another instrument that fits well into the “hole”.
I believe this is a universal principle. It’s true in architecture, design and our thinking.
Even if we enjoy the company of certain people, and we spend a lot of time with them, taking a break can open up a space in our minds which can invite brand new thinking or perhaps a fresh perspective. I guess it’s because it’s not always obvious what frequencies another person occupies in the frequency spectrum of our mind.
Removing them for a period of time can lead to interesting insights and fresh inspiration.
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Autumn
This was taken two weeks ago.
I like autumn this year. The summer of 2020 was very nice, too. Perhaps COVID-19 and climate change have something to do with it.
Even though I was very busy, this year feels like a pause year.
Because I’ve spent so much time at home?
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We Are Actively Looking For Stereotypes
I saw a headline: “Banker caught smuggling Cocaine”. Another one: “Car salesman (46) kills wife”. And wondered why it mattered what their profession or age was.
I think the answer is twofold.
For one it reads more smoothly, because it’s less abstract. We can easily imagine a banker or a car salesman, but if it’s just a person, maybe even without age and gender then imagining takes a little more work. There is an extra step and another abstraction involved, in order to either maintain the abstraction or to replace it with something more real.
The second reason behind these headlines is that we love stereotypes. We are prejudiced. We use mental drawers and put people in them. Every drawer takes a lot of qualities and assumptions and replaces that clunky complicated mess with a tiny label that names the drawer.
Of course it obscures truth, falsifies it completely in many cases, and fools us into believing that we know more than we do, just because we have stored a bunch of labels.
But the truth is we usually prefer the label to the real thing and we actively prefer it when reading news. The newspaper folks know this of course and that is why they write their headlines the way they do.
They know their audience.
There are things in life where a label will not do, of course. We need to know the sublabels, and their sublabels precisely. We need to actually know how some things work. But this takes awareness, first of all. The willingness to look and see if we are not deluding ourselves. Then it takes work to learn. Sometimes a lot of work. We want to be convinced it’s worth the effort before we start.
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