Contentment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We know which skills we need and want to develop. We have goals and subgoals. When we take detours from our path or become involved in entanglements that distract us from our goals, we feel uncomfortable and quickly get back on course. We may explore and have adventures, as is natural for us when we are young, but there is a relative direction to our exploring that frees us from continual doubts and distractions. This path does not require that we follow one simple line, or that our inclinations be narrowly focused. Perhaps we feel the pull of several types of knowledge. Our path involves mastering a variety of skills and combining them in highly inventive and creative ways. This was the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, who combined his interests in art, science, architecture, and engineering, having mastered each one of them. This way of following the path goes well with our modern, eclectic tastes and our love of wide exploration. When we engage this internal guidance system, all of the negative emotions that plague us in our aimlessness are neutralized and even turned around into positive ones. For instance, we may feel boredom in the process of accumulating skills. Practice can be tedious. But we can embrace the tedium, knowing of the tremendous benefits to come. We are learning something that excites us. We do not crave constant distractions. Our minds are pleasantly absorbed in the work. We develop the ability to focus deeply, and with such focus comes momentum. We retain what we absorb because we are engaged emotionally in learning. We then learn at a faster rate, which leads to creative energy. With a mind teeming with fresh information, ideas begin to come to us out of nowhere. Reaching such creative levels is intensely satisfying, and it becomes ever easier to add new skills to our repertoire. With a sense of purpose, we feel much less insecure . We have an overall sense that we are advancing, realizing some or all of our potential. We can begin to look back at various accomplishments, small or large. We got things done. We may have moments of doubt, but they are generally related more to the quality of our work than to our self-worth—did we do our best job? Focusing more on the work itself and its quality than on what people think of us, we can distinguish between practical and malicious criticism. We have an inner resiliency, which helps us bounce back from failures and learn from them.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Knowing that that her illness had a purpose to it, there was no need to feel self-pity. And by confronting and dealing with it straight on, she could toughen herself up, manage the pain that racked her body, and keep writing. By the time she had received yet another bullet, the separation with Erik, she could regain her balance after several months, without turning bitter or more reclusive. What this meant was that she was thoroughly at home with the ultimate reality represented by death. In contrast, so many other people, including those she knew, suffered from a reality deficit, avoiding the thought of their mortality and the other unpleasant aspects of life. Focusing so deeply on her mortality had one other important advantage—it deepened her empathy and sense of connection to people. She had a peculiar relationship to death in general: It did not represent a fate reserved for her alone but rather was intimately tied to her father. Their sufferings and deaths were intertwined. She saw her own nearness to death as a call to take this further, to see that all of us are connected through our common mortality and made equal by it. It is the fate we all share and should draw us closer for that reason. It should shake us out of any sense of feeling superior or separated. Flannery’s increased empathy and feeling of unity with others, as evidenced by her strong desire to communicate with all types of people, caused her to eventually let go of one of her greatest limitations: the racist sentiments toward African Americans she had internalized from her mother and many others in the South. She saw this clearly in herself and struggled against it, particularly in her work. By the early 1960s she came to embrace the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. And in her later stories she began to express a vision of all the races in America converging one day as equals, moving past this dark stain on our country’s past. For over thirteen years, Flannery O’Connor stared down the barrel of the gun pointed at her, refusing to look away. Certainly her religious faith helped her maintain her spirit, but as Flannery herself knew, so many people who are religious are just as full of illusions and evasions when it comes to their own mortality, and just as capable of complacency and pettiness as anyone else. It was her particular choice to use her fatal disease as the means for living the most intense and fulfilling life possible. Understand: We tend to read stories like Flannery O’Connor’s with some distance. We can’t help but feel some relief that we find ourselves in a much more comfortable position.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  However, approaches that attempt to tame the restless mind may not be nearly as accessible or effective as those that help us return to our bodies in a sustaining way. The poet Budbill discovered that when he fully engaged his body in purposeful activity, his mind finally rested. The immersion in his body is what allowed him to directly encounter the nitty-gritty, moment-to-moment experience of being alive. Rather than obsessive worry or regret, he opened to the experience of appreciation and gratitude in the “shining moment in the now.” For our distant forbearers, survival was the only game in town. This put them in a perpetually reactive mode—surviving from threat to threat, triggering one protective instinct after another. While we are under the domination of these same instincts, saddled with the reflexive reactions to perceived threat, we possess the opportunity to recognize them, stand back, observe and befriend these powerful sensations and drives, without necessarily acting on them. The conscious containment and reflection upon our wild and primal urges enlivens us and keeps us focused on actively pursuing our needs and desires. It is the basis for reflective self-awareness. Rather than automatically reacting to (or suppressing) our instincts, we can explore them mindfully, through the vehicle of sensate awareness. To be embodied (as I will use the term in referring to our contemporary experience) means that we are guided by our instincts, while simultaneously having the opportunity to be self-aware of that guidance. This self-awareness requires us to recognize and track our sensations and feelings. We unveil our instincts as they live within us, rather than being alienated from them or forcibly driven by them. These facts of life make living in the now, free of ruminative thoughts, a formidable task. When embodied, we linger longer in the lush landscape of the present moment. Even though we live in a world where bad things can and do happen, where unseen dangers nip at our heels, we can still live in the now. When we are able to be fully present, we can thrive with more pleasure, wonder and wisdom then we could have imagined. “Embodiment” is a personal-evolutionary solution to the tyranny of the yapping “monkey mind.” It is one that paradoxically allows instinct and reason to be held together, fused in joyful participation and flow. † Embodiment is about gaining, through the vehicle of awareness, the capacity to feel the ambient physical sensations of unfettered energy and aliveness as they pulse through our bodies. It is here that mind and body, thought and feeling, psyche and spirit, are held together, welded in an undifferentiated unity of experience. Through embodiment we gain a unique way to touch into our darkest primitive instincts and to experience them as they play into the daylight dance of consciousness; and in so doing to know ourselves as though for the first time—in a way that imparts vitality, flow, color, hue and creativity to our lives.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Let’s look more deeply at the functions of this massive nerve, which not only connects organs and brain, but functions primarily in the direction of gut to brain. Why is it even important for the body to talk to the brain in the first place? From the perspective of evolution (and the general parsimony of nature), it is unlikely that such a myriad of nerve fibers would be allotted to making bidirectional communication possible if that linkage weren’t vitally important. Most of us have experienced butterflies in our stomach when asked to make a public speech. On the other hand, some people are known for “having gall,” while others are quite “bitter” or “bilious.” And then too, at times we may have “knots in our guts” and are “twisted up inside.”q Or we may be “heavyhearted” or nursing a “heartache.” And blessed are the times when we have surrendered to the pure mirth of a spontaneous “belly laugh.” Or, again, we may be “openhearted and filled with warmth in our bellies,” feeling an inner peace and love for the whole world. On the occasions when we have accomplished notable achievements, our chests may “swell with pride.” Such is the variety of poignant messages emanating from our viscera. When aroused to fight or flight (sympathetic arousal), our guts tighten, and the motility of the gastrointestinal system is inhibited. After all, there is no sense in spending a lot of metabolic energy on digestion when it is best used to speed up the heart’s rhythm and to strengthen its contraction, as well as to tense our muscles in readiness for impending action. When we are mortally threatened, or when the threat is internal (say, from the flu or from eating a bacterially infected food), our survival response is to vomit or to expel the contents of our intestines with diarrhea, and then to lie still so as to conserve energy. It seems possible that prey animals also resort to this reaction when a predator suddenly springs on it from within striking distance. In this case, the violent expulsion of the animal’s intestinal contents may actually lighten its weight and give it a better chance of escaping. This fraction-of-a-second advantage could mean the difference between life or death. I have seen this happen on several occasions when a mountain lion has lunged at a group of deer drinking from the North St. Vrain River, which runs behind my Colorado home.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: Operations are pleasant, in so far as they are proportionate and connatural to the agent. Now, since human power is finite, operation is proportionate thereto according to a certain measure. Wherefore if it exceed that measure, it will be no longer proportionate or pleasant, but, on the contrary, painful and irksome. And in this sense, leisure and play and other things pertaining to repose, are pleasant, inasmuch as they banish sadness which results from labor. Whether movement is a cause of pleasure?Objection 1: It would seem that movement is not a cause of pleasure. Because, as stated above ([1276]Q[31], A[1]), the good which is obtained and is actually possessed, is the cause of pleasure: wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 12) that pleasure is not compared with generation, but with the operation of a thing already in existence. Now that which is being moved towards something has it not as yet; but, so to speak, is being generated in its regard, forasmuch as generation or corruption are united to every movement, as stated in Phys. viii, 3. Therefore movement is not a cause of pleasure. Objection 2: Further, movement is the chief cause of toil and fatigue in our works. But operations through being toilsome and fatiguing are not pleasant but disagreeable. Therefore movement is not a cause of pleasure. Objection 3: Further, movement implies a certain innovation, which is the opposite of custom. But things “which we are accustomed to, are pleasant,” as the Philosopher says (Rhet. i, 11). Therefore movement is not a cause of pleasure. On the contrary, Augustine says (Confess. viii, 3): “What means this, O Lord my God, whereas Thou art everlasting joy to Thyself, and some things around Thee evermore rejoice in Thee? What means this, that this portion of things ebbs and flows alternately displeased and reconciled?” From these words we gather that man rejoices and takes pleasure in some kind of alterations: and therefore movement seems to cause pleasure.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  you’re the only one able to read it. At the time when he told his cofounders and investors on November 12, he understood that quitting had a better expected value than continuing. In essence, Stewart Butterfield was thinking like a poker player. Winning poker players aren’t thinking about trying to win a single hand, come what may. They know that while any two cards can win, only some hands can win enough of the time to make them worth pursuing. Poker players are making decisions based on whether playing or folding will have the greater expected value. In other words, if they played the hand out over and over again, which choice (staying or folding) would be the more profitable decision in the long run? Obviously, we’re not omniscient and most of us aren’t going to be as good at doing this mental time travel as Stewart Butterfield, but every single one of us is capable of getting some peek into the future and that’s going to help you be better at your quitting decisions. Quitting Decisions Are Expected-Value Decisions In the summer of 2021, I received an email from a reader who wanted help working through a decision about whether to quit her job. Dr. Sarah Olstyn Martinez felt she had reached a crossroads in her professional life. She had been an emergency room physician for sixteen years, having fallen in love with emergency medicine from the first moment in 2005 when she rotated through a hospital ER during her one-year internship after medical school. Mount Sinai Hospital, where Olstyn Martinez did her internship, was a leading trauma center in Chicago. Its neighborhood, North Lawndale, is considered one of the most dangerous in the city. According to a 2019 study on trends in firearm violence based on emergency room data, “it is accurate to say that Mount Sinai sees a large percentage of the total firearm violence that occurs in Chicago.” It was great training and she loved the experience of working in a leading trauma center. The internship worked out so well that she did her four-year residency in emergency medicine.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Dwight made some noise but she backed him down. The rifle belonged to me, she said. He could yell all he wanted but on that point there was nothing to discuss. She made Dwight agree that when Champion’s owner sent up the AKC papers he’d promised to send, papers that would prove the dog’s illustrious line of descent, Dwight would call him and arrange to drive Champion down to Seattle and get my rifle back. He couldn’t do that now because he didn’t know the man’s last name or address. In this way the affair was settled to my satisfaction, except that the man somehow forgot to send the papers. WE TOOK CHAMPION hunting for the first time at a gravel quarry where mergansers liked to congregate. These ducks were considered bad eating, so most people didn’t shoot them. But Dwight would shoot at anything. He was a poor hunter, restless and unobservant and loud, and he never got the animals he went after. This made him furious; on the way back to the car he would kill anything he saw. He killed chipmunks, squirrels, blue jays and robins. He killed a great snowy owl with a 12-gauge from ten feet away and took potshots at bald eagles as they skimmed the river. I never saw him get a deer, a grouse, a quail, a pheasant, an edible duck, or even a large fish. He thought his equipment was to blame. To his collection of target rifles he added two hunting rifles, a Marlin 30/30 and a Garand M-l with a telescopic sight. He had a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun for waterfowl and a semiautomatic 16-gauge that he called his “bush gun.” To spot the game he never got close to he carried a pair of high-powered Zeiss binoculars. To dress the game he never killed he carried a Puma hunting knife. For all the talk of Champion being my dog, I understood that he was supposed to be part of Dwight’s total hunting system. When we reached the quarry, Dwight threw a stick into the water to stimulate Champion’s retrieving instincts and to demonstrate the softness of his mouth. He said weimaraners were famous for their mouths. “You won’t see one tooth mark on that stick,” he told me. Champion ran up to the water, then stopped. He looked back at us and whimpered. He was quaking like a chihuahua. “Go on, boy,” Dwight said. Champion whimpered again. He bent one paw, stuck it in the water, pulled it out and started barking at the stick. “Smart dog,” Dwight said. “Knows it’s not a bird.” The mergansers came in at dusk. They must have seen us, but as if they knew what they tasted like they showed no fear. They flew in low and close together. Dwight fired both barrels at them. One duck dropped like a stone and the rest rushed up again, quacking loudly. They circled the quarry long enough for Dwight to reload and fire.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I should point out, however, that not all lovers seek passion, or even, at one time, basked in it. Some relationships originate in feelings of warmth, tenderness, and nurturance, and the partners choose to remain in these calmer waters. They prefer a love that is built on patience more than on passion. To them, finding serenity in a lasting bond is what counts. There is no one way, and there is no right way. Mating in Captivity aspires to engage you in an honest, enlightened, and provocative discussion. It encourages you to question yourself, to speak the unspoken, and to be unafraid to challenge sexual and emotional correctness. By flinging the doors open on erotic life and domesticity, I invite you to put the X back in sex. 1 From Adventure to CaptivityWhy the Quest for Security Saps Erotic Vitality The original primordial fire of eroticism is sexuality; it raises the red flame of eroticism, which in turn raises and feeds another flame, tremulous and blue. It is the flame of love and eroticism. The double flame of life. —Octavio Paz, The Double Flame PARTIES IN NEW YORK CITY are like anthropological field trips—you never know whom you’ll meet or what you’ll find. Recently I was milling around a self-consciously hip event, and, as is typical in this city of high achievers, before being asked my name I was asked what I do. I answered, “I’m a therapist, and I’m writing a book.” The handsome young man standing next to me was also working on a book. “What are you writing about?” I asked him. “Physics,” he answered. Politely, I mustered the next question, “What kind of physics?” I can’t remember what his answer was, because the conversation about physics ended abruptly when someone asked me, “And you? What’s your book about?” “Couples and eroticism,” I answered. Never was my Q rating as high—at parties, in cabs, at the nail salon, on airplanes, with teenagers, with my husband, you name it—as when I began writing a book about sex. I realize that there are certain topics that chase people away and others that act like magnets. People talk to me. Of course, that doesn’t mean they tell me the truth. If there’s one topic that invites concealment, it’s this one. “What about couples and eroticism?” someone asks. “I’m writing about the nature of sexual desire,” I reply. “I want to know if it’s possible to keep desire alive in a long-term relationship, to avoid its usual wear.” “You don’t necessarily need love for sex, but you need sex in love,” says a man who’s been standing on the sidelines, still undecided about which conversation to join. “You focus mainly on married couples? Straight couples?” another asks. Read: is this book also about me? I reassure him, “I’m looking at myriad couples. Straight, gay, young, old, committed, and undecided.”

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Once it got boring I went for walks along the road, just far enough away that I could still see the tavern but Pearl couldn’t see me and would, I hoped, imagine herself abandoned, and become afraid. I stood on the roadside with my collar up and my hands in my pockets, watching the lights of passing cars. I was a murderer on the run, a drifter about to be swept up into the passion of a lonely woman . . . When I got tired of this I went back to the car. By now I would be lonely myself, dying to talk, but our official position was that we couldn’t stand each other. Pearl and I sat in our corners and stared out our windows until I couldn’t take another second of it; then I leaned over the seat and turned the radio on. Pearl warned me not to, but she didn’t really mean it. She wanted to listen to the radio as much as I did. We were both big fans of American Bandstand and the local product, Seattle Bandstand . She watched them at home. I watched them at the houses of kids along my route, staying for the length of a song and then tearing down the street to my next outpost, hooking papers over my head as I ran. I knew all the words to all the songs. So did Pearl. And as we sat in the darkness with music flooding the car we could not stop ourselves from singing along, at first privately, then together. Pearl didn’t have a good voice but I never ragged her about it. That would have been too low, like ragging her about her bald spot. Anyway, you didn’t need a good voice for the songs we liked; you needed timing and inflection. Pearl had these, and she could do backup and harmony. You can’t sing harmony without leaning close together, taking cues from a nod, a sudden narrowing of the eyes, an intake of breath, and when it’s going well you have to smile. There’s no way not to smile. We did some songs well—“To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “My Happiness,” “Mister Blue,” most of the Everly Brothers—and we sang them as if to each other, smiling, face to face. Until Dwight came out of the tavern. Then we turned off the radio and leaned back into our comers. Dwight walked toward the car with my mother following a few steps behind, her arms crossed, her eyes on the ground. She didn’t look like a winner now. Dwight got in smelling of bourbon. My mother stayed outside. She said she wouldn’t get in unless Dwight gave her the keys. He just sat there, and after a time she got in. As he pulled the car out of the lot my mother gnawed at her lower lip and watched the road come at us. “Please, Dwight,” she said. “Please, Dwight,” he mimicked.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Dominick is a gourmet. On Saturday, he cooked Raoul a classic Italian stew. It started as a thought—that he’d like to do something nice. He played around with various ideas until he settled on the veal. Then he went to Little Italy for the finest meat, to a bakery in the Village for his favorite semolina bread, and to a specialty shop in SoHo for the chocolate cannoli. Finally, he schlepped all the way uptown for the perfect bottle of Montepulciano. The meal took most of the day, but in the end it was an epicurean delight, even an erotic experience. It was all planned for pleasure. “Yeah, it’s a lot of work,” Dominick admits, “but I enjoy it, so it doesn’t feel like drudgery.” “How is it that sex has come to feel like work to you? You seem reluctant to bring the same intent to your erotic life that you do to your cooking,” I point out. “It seems so contrived when it comes to sex,” Dominick says. Like Dominick and Raoul, quite a few of my patients balk at the idea of deliberateness when it comes to sex. They find these strategies too laborious for the long haul, believing they should no longer be necessary after the initial conquest. “Seducing my partner? Do I still have to do that?” This reluctance is often a covert expression of an infantile wish to be loved just as we are, without any effort whatsoever on our part, because we’re so special. It’s the grandiosity of the baby, and we all carry it inside. “I don’t want to! Why should I? You’re supposed to love me no matter what!” The sex therapist Margaret Nichols observes that though your partner may still love you if you gain fifty pounds and shuffle around the house in bunny slippers and a stained T-shirt, he probably won’t get hard for you (and she won’t get wet). “Is the titillation of seduction only the privilege of those who date?” I ask Dominick. “Just because you live with someone doesn’t necessarily mean he’s readily available. If anything, he requires more attention, not less. If you want sex to remain humid, this is the kind of attention you have to bring to it. No, not every day, but once in a while can you make a meal of Raoul?” Planning Creates Anticipation

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Dominick is a gourmet. On Saturday, he cooked Raoul a classic Italian stew. It started as a thought—that he’d like to do something nice. He played around with various ideas until he settled on the veal. Then he went to Little Italy for the finest meat, to a bakery in the Village for his favorite semolina bread, and to a specialty shop in SoHo for the chocolate cannoli. Finally, he schlepped all the way uptown for the perfect bottle of Montepulciano. The meal took most of the day, but in the end it was an epicurean delight, even an erotic experience. It was all planned for pleasure. “Yeah, it’s a lot of work,” Dominick admits, “but I enjoy it, so it doesn’t feel like drudgery.” “How is it that sex has come to feel like work to you? You seem reluctant to bring the same intent to your erotic life that you do to your cooking,” I point out. “It seems so contrived when it comes to sex,” Dominick says. Like Dominick and Raoul, quite a few of my patients balk at the idea of deliberateness when it comes to sex. They find these strategies too laborious for the long haul, believing they should no longer be necessary after the initial conquest. “Seducing my partner? Do I still have to do that?” This reluctance is often a covert expression of an infantile wish to be loved just as we are, without any effort whatsoever on our part, because we’re so special. It’s the grandiosity of the baby, and we all carry it inside. “I don’t want to! Why should I? You’re supposed to love me no matter what!” The sex therapist Margaret Nichols observes that though your partner may still love you if you gain fifty pounds and shuffle around the house in bunny slippers and a stained T-shirt, he probably won’t get hard for you (and she won’t get wet). “Is the titillation of seduction only the privilege of those who date?” I ask Dominick. “Just because you live with someone doesn’t necessarily mean he’s readily available. If anything, he requires more attention, not less. If you want sex to remain humid, this is the kind of attention you have to bring to it. No, not every day, but once in a while can you make a meal of Raoul?” Planning Creates Anticipation

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  will be able to shape your own values and ideas and not be such a product of the times. With your awareness of the overall zeitgeist, you will also understand the historical context. You will have a sense of where the world is headed. You can anticipate what is around the corner. With such knowledge, you can bring your own individual spirit into play and help shape this future that is gestating in the present. And feeling deeply connected to the unbroken chain of history, and your role in this grand historical drama, will infuse you with a calmness that will make everything in life more bearable. You do not overreact at the outrage of the day. You do not go gaga over the latest trend. You are aware of the pattern that will tend to swing things in a different direction within a period of time. If you feel out of harmony with the times, you know that the bad days will end and you can play your part in making the next wave happen. Keep in mind that this knowledge is more critical to posses now than ever, for two reasons. First, despite any antiglobal sentiments sweeping the world, technology and social media have unified us in inalterable ways. This means that people of one generation will often have more in common with those of the same generation in other cultures than with older generations in their own country. This unprecedented state of affairs means that the zeitgeist is more directly globalized than ever before, making knowledge of it that much more essential and powerful. And second, because of these sharp changes initiated by technological innovations, the pace has quickened, creating a self- fulfilling dynamic. Young people feel almost addicted to this pace and crave more shifts, even if of a trivial nature. With the quickening pace there are more crises, which only speeds up the process. This pace will tend to make you get dizzy and lose your perspective. You might imagine some trivial shift as groundbreaking and will thus ignore the real groundbreaking change under way. You will not be able to keep up, let alone anticipate what might come next. Only your generational awareness, your calm historical perspective, will allow you to master such times. Strategies for Exploiting the Spirit of the Times To make the most of the zeitgeist, you must begin with a simple premise: you are a product of the times as much as anyone; the generation you were born into has shaped your thoughts and values, whether you are aware of this or not. And so, if you feel from deep within some frustration with the way things are in the world or with the older generation, or if you sense there is something that is missing in the culture, you can be almost certain that other people of your generation are feeling the same way. And if you are the one to

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  He gazed with chaste ardor at the Lovely Champagne Lady Alice Lon, who smiled the same tremulous smile through every note of every song until she got canned and replaced by the Lovely Champagne Lady Norma Zimmer. He gloated over the Lovely Little Lennon Sisters as if they were his own daughters, and laughed out loud at the cruel jokes Lawrence Welk made at the expense of his slobbering Irish tenor, Joe Feeney. Joe Feeney was the latest addition to the Champagne Ensemble and obviously felt himself on pretty shaky ground, especially after the Lovely Champagne Lady Alice Lon was sent packing and then the Ragtime Piano Virtuoso Big Tiny Little Junior got replaced by the Ragtime Piano Virtuoso Jo Ann Castle, who pummeled the keys like a butcher tenderizing meat. When Joe Feeney sang he held nothing back. He worked himself up to the point of tears, and flecks of saliva flew off his wet lips. You had the feeling that Joe Feeney was singing for his life. About halfway through the show, Dwight would take out his old Conn saxophone and finger the stops in time to the music. Sometimes, when he got really carried away, he would forget himself and blow on it, and a squawk would come out. AFTER NORMA GRADUATED from Concrete High she moved down to Seattle. She worked in an office where she met a man named Kenneth who took her for long drives in his Austin Healey sports car and tried to talk her into getting married. Norma called my mother all the time and asked for advice. What should she do? She still loved Bobby Crow, but Bobby wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t even have a job. Kenneth was ambitious. On the other hand, nobody liked him. He had very strong opinions about everything and was also a Seventh-day Adventist. But that wasn’t it, exactly. Kenneth just didn’t have a very good personality. Then Norma called up and said she’d decided to marry Kenneth. She refused to explain her decision, but insisted it was final. Naturally, she wanted to invite Kenneth to Chinook to meet the family, and it was finally settled that he should come up during Christmas, when Skipper would also be home. Dwight got the spirit that year. He made a wreath for the door and hung pine boughs all over the living room. A couple of weeks before Christmas he and I drove up into the mountains to get a tree. It was early afternoon, a cold light rain falling. Dwight drank from a pint bottle as we scouted the woods. We found a fine blue spruce growing all by itself in the middle of a clearing, and Dwight let me cut it down while he took nips off his bottle and squinted up at the misty peaks all around us. Once I got the tree down we started wrestling it through the dense growth, back toward the fire road where we’d left the car.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Stephanie, consumed by motherhood, was too quick to dismiss the inherent value of Warren’s persistence. The way I see it, Warren provides a consistent reminder that erotic intimacy matters. With him, and through him, she potentially can begin to disentangle from the bond with her children and transfer some of her energy back to herself and her relationship with Warren. When the father reaches out to the mother, and the mother acknowledges him, redirecting her attention, this serves to rebalance the entire family. Boundaries get drawn, and new zoning regulations get put in place delineating areas that are adult only. Time, resources, playfulness, and fun are redistributed, and libido is rescued from forced retirement. My work with gay and lesbian couples has led me to recognize that these dynamics are replicated whenever one parent, gender notwithstanding, takes charge of the kids. Since same-sex couples are not constrained by a traditional division of labor—women at home, men at work—they offer a useful basis for comparison. What I see over and over is that the person who takes on the role of primary caretaker almost always undergoes changes similar to Stephanie’s: a total immersion in the lives and rhythms of the children, a loss of self, and a greater difficulty extricating himself or herself from chores (a compulsion that is simultaneously frustrating and grounding). The role of the more autonomous parent is to help the primary caregiver disengage from the kids and reallocate energy to the couple. “Leave the toys for now, nobody is going to give you a medal, go take a nap.” “You don’t have to make these pecan pies from scratch, you’ve done enough today.” “The nanny is here, let’s sit down for ten minutes and share a glass of wine before she leaves.” It’s a different approach from the traditional division of labor, one which emphasizes shared responsibility and mutuality and honors the interdependent agency of both partners. When Warren asks, “Want to?” and Stephanie finally answers, “Convince me,” their dynamic begins to shift. This puts a halt to the grinding antagonism and introduces an overdue mutuality. Asking him to help her is, in itself, an expression of sexual assertiveness. And Warren, finally relieved of being the supplicant, can set out to get his wife back. His role as keeper of the flame is given new meaning. Lifting the Erotic Embargo

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  In order to understand this, we must observe that just as in natural things some happen to attain to their natural perfections, so does this happen in animals. And though movement towards perfection does not occur all at once, yet the attainment of natural perfection does occur all at once. Now there is this difference between animals and other natural things, that when these latter are established in the state becoming their nature, they do not perceive it, whereas animals do. And from this perception there arises a certain movement of the soul in the sensitive appetite; which movement is called delight. Accordingly by saying that delight is “a movement of the soul,” we designate its genus. By saying that it is “an establishing in keeping with the thing’s nature,” i.e. with that which exists in the thing, we assign the cause of delight, viz. the presence of a becoming good. By saying that this establishing is “all at once,” we mean that this establishing is to be understood not as in the process of establishment, but as in the fact of complete establishment, in the term of the movement, as it were: for delight is not a “becoming” as Plato [*Phileb. 32,33] maintained, but a “complete fact,” as stated in Ethic. vii, 12. Lastly, by saying that this establishing is “sensible,” we exclude the perfections of insensible things wherein there is no delight. It is therefore evident that, since delight is a movement of the animal appetite arising from an apprehension of sense, it is a passion of the soul. Reply to Objection 1: Connatural operation, which is unhindered, is a second perfection, as stated in De Anima ii, 1: and therefore when a thing is established in its proper connatural and unhindered operation, delight follows, which consists in a state of completion, as observed above. Accordingly when we say that delight is an operation, we designate, not its essence, but its cause. Reply to Objection 2: A twofold movement is to be observed in an animal: one, according to the intention of the end, and this belongs to the appetite; the other, according to the execution, and this belongs to the external operation. And so, although in him who has already gained the good in which he delights, the movement of execution ceases, by which the tends to the end; yet the movement of the appetitive faculty does not cease, since, just as before it desired that which it had not, so afterwards does it delight in that which is possesses. For though delight is a certain repose of the appetite, if we consider the presence of the pleasurable good that satisfies the appetite, nevertheless there remains the impression made on the appetite by its object, by reason of which delight is a kind of movement.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He lit another cigarette. For some time as he spoke he hadn’t been smoking, but now he took a deep drag and again I saw him relax as he exhaled. But really everything was fine, he said, I still had my place with my friends and I still had my friendship with B., I could do without the rest of it. B. dated a few girls, so did I, and it didn’t mean much more to him than to me, we were still the same thing to each other, all four of us, and now for the first time G. named the third member of the group, the female friend, what he had said about her to that point hadn’t been enough for me to be sure who she was. She was a beautiful girl, smart, kind, one of my favorite students; she was undemanding, by which I mean that she had never been a source of the worry that makes up so much of teaching, she was a student you could be sure of. Everything was fine, he said again, and this year was our big year, we were finally seniors. We’d been looking forward to it for so long, the trips we would take, the parties. There was a tradition of these celebrations, I knew, one each quarter and then a final post-prom bacchanalia at the seaside that lasted, for some of them, until they left for university in the fall.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Such kinship is not a biological fact. But it is an anthropological one. In other— Aristotelian—words, we would all be, as it were, “by nature” inherently social creatures. And therefore all of us have a certain social group to which we understand ourselves properly to belong. In the case of Paul, this “people” were the Ioudaioi. And they, in turn, were, for Paul, his “kinfolk” (a word that derives, in fact, from the ancient Greek term— genos—that Paul usual y used to describe them). Thus, when Paul describes himself as among those who were physei Ioudaioi, or as someone who was Hebraios ex Hebraiôn, he is speaking—not biological y, but anthropological y—in the key of ancestry. And that is why—even if he had wanted to do so—it would have made no sense for him or for anyone else to imagine that he could somehow cease to be Ioudaios, given that his parents and grandparents were all Israelites, of the tribe of Benjamin, and the like. With regard to Paul’s own “Jewish” identity, I think that it is this simple. Paul was Ioudaios because this was one of the names used by his “people” to describe themselves. The same people were not, however, what we now might call an “ethnic” group but, rather, the much more limited set of Paul’s “kinfolk,” those with whom Paul knew, as it were, in his own flesh, as his own flesh, a sense of “mutual being.” The sense of belonging to such a social group—those who were physei Ioudaios— was profound, to be sure. In fact, it is the kind of feeling that appears to be basic to all human life and therefore would be as ordinary a sentiment as it could be. For this 35 Even though none of this has ever described very well—no matter how much power it may have possessed at a given time and place—the always much more heterogeneous configuration of human life “on the ground,” including the category’s own designated sphere of influence. Not even the social life of one human family is adequately or concretely described when understood to be only an instance in miniature of a given “ethnicity.” What the term does describe more or less accurately, at least as far as it goes, is the ideological and bureaucratic mechanisms of modern political power whereby the concept of the “nation-state” corresponding to a specific “people” would be endowed with some identifiable substance, to wit, color as race, sound as speech, taste as food, mass as land, etc. 56 56 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles reason, to underscore Paul’s “Jewish” identity is, in one sense, merely to restate the obvious fact that, yes, of course, Paul, too, was a human being, which means that he, too, claimed a specified set of ancestors. And he never stopped claiming to be their descendant as long as he continued to display the earthly flesh that their most recent avatars, to wit, Paul’s parents, had produced once upon a time.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Restore self-regulation and dynamic equilibrium A direct consequence of discharge of the survival energy mobilized for fight-or-flight is the restoration of equilibrium and balance (as in the previous example of the spring). The nineteenth-century French physiologist Claude Bernard, considered the father of experimental physiology, coined the term homeostasis to describe “the constancy of the internal environment [milieu intérieur] as the condition for a free and independent life.” 57 More than a hundred and fifty years later, this remains the underlying and defining principle for the sustenance of life. However, since equilibrium is not a static process, I will use the term dynamic equilibrium instead of homeostasis to describe what happens when the nervous system becomes hyperaroused in response to threat and is then “reset,” only to be aroused and reset once again. This continual resetting both restores the prethreat level of arousal and promotes the shifting state (process) of relaxed alertness. Over time this contributes to the building of a robust resilience. Finally, the interoceptive experience of equilibrium, felt in viscera and in your internal milieu, is the salubrious one of goodness: that is, the background sense that—whatever you are feeling at a given moment, however dreadful the upset or unpleasant the arousal—you have a secure home base within your organism. Step 9. Reorient to the environment in the here and now Trauma could appropriately be called a disorder in one’s capacity to be grounded in present time and to engage, appropriately, with other human beings. Along with the restoration of dynamic equilibrium, the capacity for presence, for being in “the here and now,” becomes a reality. This occurs along with the desire and capacity for embodied social engagement. The capacity for social engagement has powerful consequences for health and happiness. As young children we are wired to participate in the social nervous systems of our parents and to find excitement and joy in such engagement. In addition, fascination with the face of another person generalizes to the environment and to the wonder of “newness.” Colors become vibrant, while one perceives shapes and textures as though seeing them for the first time—the very miracle of life unfolding. In addition, the social engagement system is intrinsically self-calming and is, therefore, built-in protection against one’s organism being “hijacked” by the sympathetic arousal system and/or frozen into submission by the more primitive emergency shutdown system. The social engagement branch of the nervous system is probably both cardioprotective and immuno-protective. This may be why individuals with strong personal affiliations live longer, healthier lives. They also maintain sharper cognitive skills into old age. Indeed, one study examining the effects of playing bridge in reducing dementia symptoms concluded that the main independent variable was socialization (rather than computational skills per se). ‡ And, finally, to be engaged in the social world is not only to be engaged in the here and now, but also to feel a sense of both belonging and safety.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  See if there’s some ginger ale for the slugger.” Judd rose and left the room. Gil said, “What kind of bicycle would you like to have, Jack?” “A Schwinn, I guess.” “Really? You’d rather have a Schwinn than an English racer?” He saw me hesitate. “Or would you rather have an English racer?” I nodded. “Well then, say so! I can’t read your mind.” “I’d rather have an English racer.” “That’s the way. Now what kind of English racer are we talking about?” Judd brought the drinks. Mine was bitter. I recognized it as Collins mix. My mother leaned forward and said, “Gil.” He held up his hand. “What kind, Jack?” “Raleigh,” I told him. Gil smiled and I smiled back. “Champagne taste,” he said. “Go for the best, that’s the way. What color?” “Red.” “Red. Fair enough. I think we can manage that. Did you get all that, Judd? One bicycle, English racer, Raleigh, red.” “Got it,” Judd said. My mother said thanks but she couldn’t accept it. Gil said it was for me to accept, not her. She began to argue, not halfheartedly but with resolve. Gil wouldn’t hear a word of it. At one point he even put his hands over his ears. At last she gave up. She leaned back and drank from her beer. And I saw that in spite of what she’d said she was really happy at the way things had turned out, not only because it meant the end of these arguments of ours but also because, after all, she wanted very much for me to have a bicycle. “How are the peanuts, Jack?” Gil asked. I said they were fine. “Great,” he said. “That’s just great.” GIL AND MY mother had a few more beers and talked while Judd and I watched the hydroplane qualifying heats on television. In the early evening Judd drove us back to the boardinghouse. My mother and I lay on our beds for a while with the lights off, feeling the breeze, listening to the treetops rustle outside. She asked if I would mind staying home alone that night. She had been invited out for dinner. “Who with?” I asked. “Gil and Judd?” “Gil,” she said. “No,” I said. I was glad. This would firm things up. The room filled with shadows. My mother got up and took a bath, then put on a full blue skirt and an off-theshoulder Mexican blouse and the fine turquoise jewelry my father had bought her when they were driving through Arizona before the war. Earrings, necklace, heavy bracelet, concha belt. She’d picked up some sun that day; the blue of the turquoise seemed especially vivid, and so did the blue of her eyes. She dabbed perfume behind her ears, in the crook of her elbow, on her wrists. She rubbed her wrists together and touched them to her neck and chest. She turned from side to side, checking herself in the mirror.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  No kidding?” She struck a pose with the rifle. I waited while my mother joked around with the men, laughing, trading mild insults, flushed with cold and the pleasure of being admired. Then she said good-bye and we walked toward the car. I said, “I didn’t know you were a member of the NRA.” “I’m a little behind in my dues,” she said. Dwight and Pearl were sitting in the front seat with the ham between them. Neither of them spoke when we got in. Dwight pulled away fast and drove straight back to the house, where he clomped down the hall to his room and closed the door behind him. We joined Norma and Skipper in the kitchen. Norma had taken the turkey out of the oven, and the house was rich with its smell. When she found out that my mother had won, she said, “Oh boy, now we’re really in for it. He thinks he’s some kind of big hunter.” “He killed a deer once,” Pearl said. “That was with the car,” Norma said. Skipper got up and went down the hall to Dwight’s room. A few minutes later they both came back, Dwight stiff and awkward. Skipper teased him in a shy, affectionate way, and Dwight took it well, and my mother acted as if nothing had happened. Then Dwight perked up and made drinks for the two of them and pretty soon we were having a good time. We sat down at the beautiful table Norma had laid for us, and we ate turkey and dressing and candied yams and giblet gravy and cranberry sauce. After we ate, we sang. We sang “Harvest Moon,” “Side by Side,” “Moonlight Bay,” “Birmingham Jail,” and “High above Cayuga’s Waters.” I got compliments for knowing all the words. We toasted Norma for cooking the turkey, and my mother for winning the turkey shoot. My mother was still flushed, expansive. All the talk about turkey reminded her of a Thanksgiving she and my brother and I had spent on a turkey farm in Connecticut after the war. Housing was scarce, and we were broke, so my father had boarded us with these turkey farmers while he went down to work in Peru. The turkey farmers were novices. Before Thanksgiving they’d butchered their birds in an unheated shed, and all the blood froze in their bodies and turned them purple. The local butcher came out for a look. He suggested that the birds be kept in a warm bath for a few days—maybe that would loosen things up and turn them pink. The bath they used was ours. For almost two weeks we had these bumpy blue carcasses floating in the tub. Dwight was quiet after my mother told her story. Then he told one of his own about a Thanksgiving he’d spent in the Philippines, when starving Japanese soldiers ran out of the jungle and grabbed food right off the chow line, and nobody even tried to shoot them.