Through the Prism: The Best Way to Achieve It Is to Think Better of Others

Our eleven-year-old could not get himself to wake the other morning. Over 30 minutes of his mom and me taking turns nudging and coaxing him, since he responds best to a positive, gentle touch. Finally, though, we were out of time and I was busy getting myself ready, so I resorted to playing Lisa Loeb's intentionally cheerful, obnoxious song "Everybody Wake Up!" at a rather generous volume. It quickly elicited loud groaning and his first words of the day: "My head hurts so bad. That song has given me the worst headache I've ever had."

After he slammed a door in my face, worked out his grouchiness, and got ready for school, I offered this bit of wisdom: "And now you understand the power of the Dark Side of the Force. Kindness and support did not have the ability to wake you up--today it took anger and hatred to help you find the necessary motivation."

Which leads the question: Are humans more naturally drawn to the Light Side or the Dark Side? Clearly, both have their appeals and uses and the answer lies somewhere in the middle, a combination of both. Circumstances and experiences certainly shape which one speaks to us more in different moments. I know there are many who would argue for one or the other to dominate. It's my strong conviction that we should always strive for the Light Side and resist the allure of the Dark Side; that doing so leads to both more individual happiness and societal health. It's a better choice for each person selfishly and for all of us collectively. Humans are innately social, so the more we can develop our prosocial aspects the more likely we are to reach our full human potential.

Cynical people take preemptive strikes and bring out the worst in others. Hopeful individuals take leaps of faith and bring out others' best. . . . Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.

That's from Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki, which I'll share more in a bit. In it, Zaki points out the pitfalls of our natural negativity bias, our tendency to see and hold onto the bad more than the good. He makes the case instead for developing a positivity bias, a belief in the good.

It's not about being foolishly innocent or unguardedly trusting. That people are a mix of both good and bad is never in question. It's simply deciding which one we want to nourish and grow. When we cultivate and develop the goodness in ourselves and others, there is less of the bad to go around. The best way to achieve a better existence is to think better of others.

A key to avoiding negativity bias and leaning toward a positive one is calming fear. A healthy level of caution and skepticism is different than expecting threats everywhere and always being on guard. Fear drives us to expect the worst.

I also just read Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering by Scott A. Small. A neurologist, he writes about how the brain forms memories and the importance of forgetting in that process, of filtering what we experience so we hold onto only what matters. Memories of scary things are stored in the amygdala; the amygdala is where our fear lives. One chapter focuses on the importance of keeping the amygdala from becoming too full and active, as that leads to obsessive fear that closes us off to others.

To introduce the idea, Small uses a comparison of chimpanzees (C) and bonobos (B). From a genetic standpoint, humans, chimps, and bonobos are nearly identical. We have more DNA in common with each other than any other. Yet chimps are aggressively antisocial and bonobos are enthusiastically prosocial. The main difference in their brains is that chimps have large amygdalae and bonobos have small ones.

All agreed that C was very clever, but it was his ruthlessness that truly distinguished him. As a youth, C never backed down from a fight. Now, as a barrel-chested, gravel-voiced adult, he was always challenging authority--not with the nuanced repartee of a skilled diplomat, but with bloody-minded rage. Status obsessed and with no time to play, he rapidly ascended to the pinnacle of his society, one that rewarded his macho bullying. Unloving and unlovable, he nevertheless sired offspring from a collection of different mothers. Among his family he cultivated a reputation as a harsh disciplinarian, but his wrath was most easily provoked by those outside his social circle. He was a shameless xenophobe. They never met, but C undoubtedly would have sneered at his cousin B, whose friendly personality and social lifestyle C could never respect and would scarcely recognize. B empathized with friends and outsiders alike. As long as his community was harmonious, he seemed not to care less about social hierarchy or whether its leaders were male or female. While B's affability extended to the workplace, he dedicated nearly as much time to work as he did to romance and play. . . .

The amygdala is the brain's central command for recording and orchestrating our responses to danger from the outside world. It is the brain structure that learns how to perform danger management functions through experience by remembering or forgetting fearful memories. . . .

Fear memories are formed and stored in the amygdala, and the more fear memories we acquire, the more active our amygdalae become. . . .

That the amygdala is the region of chimps' brains that differs the most from that of bonobos' brains is itself evidence of how ruthless and unforgiving chimp society must be. . . .

Evolutionary biologists have convincingly argued that chimps' key adaptive trait is fear, while bonobos' is the opposite, fearlessness. It makes sense that an individual whose social temperament leans fearful and rageful will be less inclined to be altruistic, compassionate, empathetic, kind, tolerant, and playful. This fearful difference in social temperament is the key that drives the rest of the antisocial or prosocial traits, with each personality a better fit for a species' divergent environment. The chimp, for example, competing for limited resources with the bigger and stronger gorilla, lives in a much rougher neighborhood than the bonobo. . . .

While the degree of our amygdala activity is likely determined in part by our genes, we now know that it strongly depends on the fear memories we acquire. We also know that the amygdala is the anatomical engine that drives both fear and rage, emotions that can influence our social temperaments. We can plausibly hypothesize, therefore, that relaxing our amygdalae would in turn improve our personalities. . . .

Remembering fears is of paramount importance for our survival, and the amygdala is hardwired to learn and hold on to fearful events. Luckily, it is also bestowed with a braking system that can temper those fears and the memory of them, plausibly allowing us to forget them just enough to be able to form and forge social bonds. . . .

For those of us lucky enough to have blissfully forgotten some of our fears--who have the capacity for compassion and keep rage in check--the neurobiology of forgetting teaches us why we should sympathize with those suffering souls who can't forget and who live in the viciousness of their fear and trembling. We should be thankful that most of us can, if not silence, at least occasionally muffle the scream of our fear memories. Without the benefits of fear forgetting, we would live dreadfully lonely lives.

The primary driver of antisocial tendencies is fear; the primary driver of prosocial tendencies is fearlessness.

There is a tension in holding both truths as valid at the same time: humans are innately self-interested; humans are innately generous and social. We are complicated creatures. My desire to emphasize the good and tamp the bad is not dependent on canceling either of those truths. Just the opposite, in fact. The best way to control the harmful potential of our chimpanzee natures is to intentionally nurture and promote our bonobo qualities.

The Weight Between Things

The older I become, the more I suspect that wisdom has very little to do with certainty.

It has everything to do with learning to carry paradox. Life is almost never asking us to choose between opposites but asking us to hold them.
To love deeply while knowing everything is temporary.
To hope without demanding guarantees.
To grieve without allowing grief to become our identity.
To remain open-hearted in a world that cannot promise we won’t be hurt again.

There is a tension that runs through everything alive.

A violin string must be pulled taut enough to make music, but not so tightly that it snaps.
Our hearts survive because they contract and release.
The lungs fill because they empty first.
The tide only reaches shore because it first retreats.
Nature does not seem interested in permanence.

It is interested in rhythm and I don’t think we're ever meant to escape that rhythm.

We spend so much of our lives trying to eliminate one side of the equation.
We want the joy without the loss.
The confidence without the doubt.
The freedom without the responsibility.
The intimacy without the vulnerability.
The success without the possibility of failure.

But every attempt to remove one pole seems to flatten the entire experience . . .

Wisdom is learning to carry paradox.

It is not only sociology and neurobiology that see humans as inextricably social and relational, it is also quantum physics and mathematics.

The Myth of Perfect Knowledge

Reality is more complex than we expected. Physics questions the possibility of a full description of how things objectively are. An electron can be in a “quantum superposition,” so that to an observer, it doesn’t occupy just one location--and so can you, my reader. This does not mean that you could perceive being dislocated between two positions; as perceived by yourself, you are always in just one place. But an object’s properties may differ depending on who, or what, is looking at them--or may not even be defined at all. Properties are not simple features of things: They are relations between one thing and another. What we call “the world” is therefore only how some parts of reality manifest themselves to other parts--us, for instance.

Humanity has always been aware that our understanding is partial and biased. But the fact that an objective and knowable reality is incompatible with the grammar of physics is astonishing. The Enlightenment could consider the mind as being outside the world, in an abstract realm of reason where knowledge resides. But human minds are not outside reality, watching it from its exterior. We, like everything else, are part of the very nature we study. . . .

Niels Bohr, a founder of quantum theory, realized that quantum phenomena indicate that we cannot discard our own physical nature when we observe the world. The ideal of grasping objective reality by making the observer irrelevant is incompatible with physics. We are quantum processes interacting with other quantum processes. Our knowledge is a rich but incomplete set of correlations between one piece of the world--ourselves--and the rest of it. . . .

Objective statements independent of any knower are fictions. Purely objective reality is a useful myth, but only a myth. Anything said about the state of the world comes from someone’s singular perspective.

This means that all of our knowledge is intrinsically uncertain. All statements have unavoidable margins of uncertainty. . . .

Within science, there are different ways of describing the same things. A glass of water can be described in terms of physics (its mass, velocity), thermodynamics (its temperature), chemistry (there is more than just H2O in any glass of water), biology (bacteria swim in it), particle physics (its electrons, protons, and neutrons), psychology (“Why did I fill the glass?”), economics (its price), and more. Each account is valid in its own terms; each reflects a way in which the same object interacts with different parts of reality, from atoms to the global economy. But none exhausts an “ultimate truth” of the glass.

The same is true for human beings. I can think of you, my reader, as a body, as a mind, or as a soul. These aren’t different entities: They are the same entity, described in different languages, using different conceptual schemes, focusing on different aspects of the same you and different ways in which you interact with other parts of reality. There is no sharp separation or metaphysical gap between body and soul; matter and spirit; the physical world and the world of laws, ideas, and norms.

In this sense, all things are equal: They are all aspects of the same natural world, considered from different perspectives, none of which is the ultimate one. Everything can be considered fundamental from one perspective or another. . . .

This is the view to which I think modern science leads us. Many people resist it, some out of fear of losing solid reference points: objectivity, certainties, absolute morality, an immortal soul. But scientific knowledge does not become less valuable if you remain open to doubt. Morality does not lose power if you recognize that it is rooted in our biology, culture, and history. Our values do not weaken because they are rooted in what we are, not in something outside us. And life is even more beautiful and precious without dreams of immortality.

In fact, it seems to me that recognizing the perspectival aspect of knowledge, values, and beliefs, and of reality itself, could help us become a bit less arrogant, a bit humbler and wiser. Conflicts between individuals or countries don’t stem only from greed and thirst for power. They are also fueled by the belief that we are objectively right and the enemy is objectively wrong, which ignores the plurality of perspectives. We have our values that guide us, but understanding the perspective of others is the first step toward wisdom.

Wisdom is understanding that everyone and everything exists with a particular perspective; that existence is relational and occurs in the interactions between different perspectives.

Wisdom is learning to carry the paradoxes in accepting a multiplicity of perspectives, including their apparent contradictions with each other. Every perspective has validity.

From Reweaving the Rainbow:

this is how a life is made:
chance and choice
rubbing together
like the two wings
of a prehistoric insect
to make the unique
sound of you
this distinct acoustic figure
in the some of time.

From your perspective emerges the unique sound of you.

As promised above, more about Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki, starting with my review.

An accessible deep dive into the science of believing that people are more inherently compassionate, generous, capable, and social than that they are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. It does not deny those negative tendencies exist, only that our innate negativity bias makes us weigh those characteristics more heavily than we should. This is not blind, naive optimism, but skeptical, supported evidence. Those who focus on the better qualities of others are found by studies to be happier, more successful, and more cognitively capable. It makes them better as individuals. And by extending that belief to others as hopeful trust and positive expectations it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, making them better as well. Having hope in human goodness makes everyone better. Zaki's writing is personable, conversational, and enjoyable. An excellent book.

Excerpts from the book, beginning with the idea of cynicism--of being like a chimp:

Cynical people take preemptive strikes and bring out the worst in others. Hopeful individuals take leaps of faith and bring out others' best. . . . Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.

-----

Cynicism encouraged me to expect the worst from people, but what gave me the right? It told me the future would be awful, but how could anyone know that? What was cynicism doing to me? To all of us? As I soon learned, it wears away the psychological glue that binds us. Trust, the willingness to be vulnerable to others, is an expression of faith that they will do the right thing. It is how hope lives between people. By eroding trust, cynicism steals our present together and dampens the futures we can imagine.

-----

Cynicism is the theory that people are selfish, greedy, dishonest. Like any theory, it changes how we see reality and react to it--in this case, the social world. . . .

To diagnose yours, think about whether you generally agree with these statements:
No one cares much what happens to you.
Most people dislike helping others.
Most people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught.
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Beliefs are assumptions or conclusions; values are the parts of life that bring a person meaning. Beliefs reflect what you think of the world; values reveal more about yourself. Confusing these two can be dangerous business. When someone attaches their self-worth to a belief--political, personal, or otherwise--they desperately need to be right. Challenges to what they think feel like threats to how they think--evidence they aren't smart or good enough. The person screaming loudest is often most fearful of being wrong.

Though cynics doubt others, they also tend to define themselves through social comparison. . . . Needing to prop themselves up, they search for evidence that can put others down.

-----

If cynicism were a pill, its warning label would list depression, heart disease, and isolation. In other words, it'd be a poison.

-----

Most of us valorize people who don't like people. But it turns out cynicism is not a sign of wisdom, and more often it's the opposite. In studies of over two hundred individuals across thirty nations, cynics scored less well on tasks that measure cognitive ability, problem-solving, and mathematical skill. Cynics aren't socially sharp, either, performing worse than non-cynics at identifying liars.

-----

In a study of five thousand people, those who thought the world was dangerous and competitive, versus safe and cooperative, had less-successful careers and were less satisfied with their lives.

-----

Market creep encourages us to count and compete through life, but the science of well-being is clear: To thrive, human beings need unquantifiable experiences, pursued for their own sake. Like a favorite hobby, communal ties can be blissfully useless. In a marketized world, this means purposefully erasing the way we usually connect, by "uncounting."

-----

Humanity's most common predators are other people. In response, evolution equipped us with a mental armadillo shell: cheater detection. We naturally seek out signs of deception and malfeasance. This is a great strategy for self-defense, but what protects us in small doses can become toxic in larger ones. People are so vigilant for cheaters that we regularly overestimate how many there are, while ignoring signs of human goodness. Psychologists call this negativity bias.

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Negativity bias and global gossip have worked together to warp humanity's view of itself, like an unfun fun-house mirror. We perceive our species to be crueler, more callous, and less caring that it really is.

And a collection of excerpts related to hope--to being like a bonobo:

People don't just change; we change them through our expectations and actions. . . .

In a study, when people learned how powerful trust can be, they used it. Changing their beliefs changed their reality, improving outcomes for them and their partners. . . . a reciprocity mindset could help people build stronger connections, brick by brick. . . .

Trust doesn't just teach us about people; it changes them. It's a gift they repay.

A reciprocity mindset means understanding this. Leaps of faith are actions inspired by that knowledge: deliberate bets on other people. Where preemptive strikes bring out the worst in others, leaps of faith bring out their best--especially when people feel our belief in them. Trust is most powerful when people offer it loudly: clearly giving others the chance to show us who they are. . . .

Cynical stories can become self-fulfilling, but hopeful ones can, too. By feeling--and wielding--the power of trust instead, we can transform cynicism's vicious cycle into a more virtuous one.

-----

Imaginary shark attacks took away my real joy. For many of us, talking with other people can be like that. Across dozens of studies, researchers have compared social predictions to reality. Some participants in these experiments were asked to imagine interactions with other people, while others actually interacted with people and reported back. In virtually every case, people's expectations were worse that reality. . . .

Interacting with others is more pleasant and meaningful than most people realize. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's hard to understand this, in part because of negativity bias. When we imagine chatting up a stranger, our minds flood with worst-case scenarios: rejections, glacial pauses, someone rolling their eyes and putting their headphones back on. When we envision saying things we've been meaning to say to people in our lives, we might still picture disaster. These are social shark attacks: dangers that are much rarer than we realize, but so frightening that they dominate our imaginations.

Hope and trust--believing the best about people and expecting them to be so--creates a positive feedback spiral.

The book also describes cynicism as a cultural temperament.

Organizational cynicism--the feeling that one's community is full of greed and selfishness--has overtaken countless workplaces, destroying morale, well-being, and productivity. Many of these problems reflect an old misunderstanding of what allows any company, team, or school to thrive.

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Conflict is rising in the US and beyond, for lots of reasons, including tribal cynicism: the belief that people on the other side are stupid, evil, or both.

The best way to fight cultural cynicism? Learning about the perspectives of others.

To unfreeze fear and hatred, Emile and Casas didn't need to trick people. They simply told Colombians the truth about the other side. As Casas describes, "We Colombians are on the brink of peace. This research teaches us that the best way to achieve it is to think better of others." The same strategy has worked in subsequent studies carried out in the US and elsewhere.

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Good disagreement is more than nice; it's powerful. In experiments, people given the recipe you see here listened more intently and asked better questions. But the people they talked with also became more open-minded, even though they received no training. Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.

Finally, a selection of statements from the appendix's list of claims from the book that have strong supporting evidence, are firmly established and widely accepted within the scientific community:

- Trust is associated with group-level positive outcomes and resilience to adversity.

- Acts of kindness boost well-being.

- People have a natural inclination to focus on the negative.

- Higher expectations lead to an increase in performance.

- Trust is self-fulfilling: When we trust others, they are more likely to act in trustworthy ways.

- People frequently underestimate how much they would enjoy interacting with others.

- Groups that collaborate internally succeed more than those that compete among themselves.

- People overestimate political out-groups' negative qualities.

- Contact with members of the out-group helps build empathy and hope.

- When faced with the problem of the commons in real life, people often find ways to cooperate instead of acting selfishly.

- When individuals' sense of self extends beyond their immediate surroundings and life span, they are more likely to cooperate and contribute to conservation efforts.

People are a mix of both good and bad. It's up to us to decide which one we want to nourish and grow. When we cultivate and develop the goodness in ourselves and others, there is less of the bad to go around. The best way to achieve a better existence is to think better of others.

About fifteen years ago I wrote a post comparing some similar sections in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick about the importance of forgetting: Memory, Like All Information, Needs Filters. Gleick shares that from the perspective of information science and computer science, information can be stored (remembered) without an energy cost--it is the wiping clean and resetting of the storage (forgetting) that uses energy. Forgetting takes work. Foer's book is a deep dive into human memory, and he writes about the necessity of selective remembering to give memories a focus--we don't record every sensation and input we perceive, only the important and relevant ones. I've had a strong interest in the importance of forgetting ever since.

Which is why, I'm sure, I chose to read Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering by Scott A. Small when I cam across it. I enjoyed reading it and learned many interesting, valuable things, though I didn't say much about it in my brief review comment:

A fascinating look, from a neurological perspective, at the importance of forgetting and the benefits of remembering our experiences only partially. This is Small's first time writing popular science and he's still developing the skill--so, fascinating information with writing that is good but not great. Still, a worthwhile read.

A better overview of the book's contents is contained in this passage from the book's introduction:

Forgetting in balance with memory is required for sculpting cognition: for granting us the flexibility to accommodate to an ever-changing environment, for extracting abstract concepts from a scattered mess of stored information, for seeing the forest for the trees. Forgetting is required for emotional well-being: for letting go of resentments, neurotic fears, and hurtful experiences that fester. Too much memory or too little forgetting imprisons with pain. Forgetting is required for societal health and creativity, lightening the mind for those eureka moments when unexpected associations are made. Without forgetting, all flights of creative fancy would be moored by memory.

Thus the selection at the top of this post about chimps and bonobos, how chimps have antisocial tendencies because their brains hold onto past dangers and hurts to make them more fearful and bonobos are impressively prosocial because they don't designate as much brain power to keeping those negative experiences emphasized and are thus more fearless.

I also liked this brief comment from early in the book about how memory is a fluid and dynamic process.

Among the many metaphors for memory, a steel trap is one of my least favorites--partly on aesthetic grounds (the violent visual of a trapped paw is repugnant), but mainly for its misleading scientific implications. Even for those in the superior range, memory is never steely; it is flexible, form-shifting, and fragmented. The trap metaphor is also mechanically incorrect by implying that memories are formed instantly, with a decisive snap.

And this, about how forgetting is not simply a lack of remembering, it is an entirely different function that takes its own work to accomplish. Some parts of brain cells are devoted to building memories and other parts of brain cells are devoted to deconstructing memories.

Discovering that Nature granted us separate molecular toolboxes actively dedicated to memory on the one hand and forgetting on the other clearly refutes the common view that forgetting is just failing memory. . . . Forgetting is a cognitive gift. Our understanding of the dynamics of synaptic plasticity, defined as changes in the strength of neuronal connections with experience, has expanded. Like a car engine or any complex dynamic system, synaptic plasticity needs both an accelerator and a brake. . . .

Both normal memory and normal forgetting work in unison to balance our minds so that we can healthily engage chaotic and sometimes hurtful environments.

That pairing of memory and forgetting allow us to filter what we hold onto. Our senses provide much more input than we are able to process and store, and keeping all of it would create too much noise to find any meaningful signals in the mix. Selective memory allows us to generalize and categorize, to recognize patterns and commonalities so we can transfer knowledge from one experience to the next.

Due to the convergence of insights from computer science and the autistic condition, we now understand that forgetting allows us to better record and recognize representations of the outside world. Both artificial and our own natural intelligence depend on forgetting in order to generalize--to reconstruct the whole from its component parts so that we can categorize and label things even when they vary subtly in infinite ways.

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Minds that forget in balance with remembering have ideally evolved for our fluidly, sometimes turbulently, fluctuating worlds.

Especially fascinating, I found was the fact that the slow, deliberate work of deconstructing the irrelevant data that our short-term memories collect--the process of forgetting--happens during sleep, which explains sleep's necessity. People who go too long without sleep find their brains overwhelmed with too much data, creating confusion and even hallucinations as they're not able to process everything to find what matters.

While we dream, the hippocampus stimulates and replays fragments of our experiences in the cortex, but not the full episode experienced in all of its elaborate intricacies. Dreams are like those "previously seen" recaps in TV series, in which only the most important snippets are reshown, the very few needed to capture and reinforce the gist of the story line. In so doing, the hippocampus persistently stimulates a few privileged cortical spines, stabilizing into a memory those few whose growth reflects the gist of our daily experiences. More sweepingly, however, the vast majority of new spines are left unstimulated while dreaming. Unstable and neglected, vast fields of freshly grown spines should, according to the general hypothesis, wilt back down. After a good night's sleep, we might expect to see some pockets of newly grown spines, now stabilized into a memory. But the net effect, comparing the cortex at the day's end and the morning after, would be spine shrinkage--that is, the net effect of sleeping is forgetting. While it is true that a secondary gain of the large-scale pruning that occurs during sleep would benefit memory--topiary-like, accentuating its details--sleeping's main purpose, according to this hypothesis, is to refresh the cortex. By cleaning and clearing the cortical slate, sleep reopens the cortex to accommodate future memories; by reducing neuronal excitability and effectively deleting extraneous cortical information, it preserves the regulated processing and flow of sensory input. . . .

It takes house for the delicate molecular machinery that governs active forgetting to carefully disassemble a newly grown spine. So, in contrast to hunger, which can be sated by a few ravenous mouthfuls, or thirst, which can be quenched by a couple of long swigs, forgetting can't be rushed. Forgetting takes its slow and deliberate time.

In order to be able to function, we must forget many of the details of our experiences. And if we want to not be overwhelmed by negativity bias, that forgetting must include a fair measure of the bad so that we are not blinded to the good. It helps us be less fearful and more bonobo-like.

Also related to patterns and connections, to creativity and insight, is the ability to relax your brain's focus to enter a more associative state. I love this description of doing so that I recently encountered in Katabasis by R.F. Kuang.

Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go. You'll take the form most pleasing and stable to you, if only you can quiet your mind.

Such wonderful imagery: skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go. I learned long ago how to do this in order for me to be able to drift off to sleep. Just observe the thoughts as they come and go without taking a particular interest in any of them. Keep skimming and never land. It seems similar to the descriptions I've read of meditation, and it's what I experience on a good walk or hike or other physical activity where my body moves without much attention and I quiet my thoughts into a meditative flow state. Finding time to do this regularly is one of my keys to staying refreshed.

I think the image works nicely with the most recent word-based reflection I read in David Whyte's book Consolations II on the idea of "reverie."

The combined state of rest and broad diffused attention that reverie implies, and the luxuriant sense the word communicates, invites us to inhabit our bodies, our intellects and our imaginations simultaneously, where neither the mind, the body, not the imagination are given precedence yet all of them are felt and inhabited in deeper ways that are not possible when we attempt to focus on them in separation.

To be in a state of reverie is to inhabit multiple layers of our consciousness all at once, to be fully aware of every bodily internal feeling while hazily hearing and seeing every ambient sound and sight: to be present in this time now while inhabiting the timeless, employing the mind to re-interpret the future and even re-imagine the past. . . . Reverie is our ability to take it all in, all at once without making a job of work or a task out of taking it all in, reverie is our multivalent, multitalented ability to connect to all levels all at once and all without effort. . . .

Reverie is a rewarding state in and of itself. In reverie, parts of us meet, join together, converse and even heal, that our isolated intellect is powerless to enjoin. Ideas, understandings and direct physical apprehensions of others form in the cross fertilisation and conversational cross-currents that flowing, dream like states of reverie provide.

Broad, diffused attention to the mental, emotional, and physical all out once. Taking it all in, letting different types of thoughts play freely together, and letting the connections and revelations sort themselves out.

The further this post goes, the more it wanders from the tight focus with which it began--and that is okay. The ideas can play freely together and we can trust that the associations, connections, and revelations will sort themselves out.

I have not yet read the picture book that led to this essay by its author, Azita Ardakani, but the essay itself speaks deeply to me about remaining always close to states of reverie, the relational connectedness of all things, and being able to focus on the good more than the bad.

Ocean of Stars: A Cosmic Origin Story for Young Readers

We often speak about wonder as though it were a charming feature of childhood, something beautiful but ultimately impractical that maturity will eventually replace. To grow up, in this telling, is to become more eﬃcient with our attention. We learn which things deserve notice and which can safely become scenery.

But perhaps the disappearance of wonder is not maturity. Perhaps it is a form of estrangement. . . .

The living world has not become less astonishing. Water still moves continuously between ocean, cloud, root, blood, and breath. Trees exchange information beneath the ground. Migrating animals cross distances they were never taught to navigate. The elements inside our bodies were forged in events that occurred before Earth existed.

What changes is our capacity to perceive any of this.

Modern life trains attention toward urgency, utility, and measurable value. A forest becomes acreage. A river becomes supply. Time becomes output. Even our bodies are treated as instruments expected to perform continuously, largely indiﬀerent to darkness, season, exhaustion or grief.

When the world is understood primarily through usefulness, aliveness begins to disappear from view. We may know more facts while feeling less relationship. . . .

Many of the stories a culture tells place the human being at the center of existence, surrounded by a world of objects. Yet the deeper story revealed by science and careful attention is one of participation. We are made through innumerable relationships: cellular, ancestral, atmospheric, ecological. Life does not assemble itself in isolation. . . .

It is a way of remaining receptive to possibility. Play loosens the rigid categories through which adults often organize the world. It asks what else something might become. Life itself proceeds through a similar experimentation, producing variation, adaptation, improbable forms, and relationships no single participant could have designed.

Wonder begins in that openness, interrupting certainty long enough for the world to become vivid again. . . .

To experience the more-than-human world as intimate, intelligent, and alive is to feel loss diﬀerently. What we love is no longer an abstract “environment” located somewhere beyond daily life. It is the source of our food, imagination, language, bodies, and breath. Attention becomes a form of relationship, and relationship carries obligation, because it looks back at us. . . .

Long before a child can understand climate models or extinction rates, a story can help shape what kind of world they believe they inhabit. Is it a warehouse of materials? A stage built for human ambition? Or is it a vast community of lives, histories, and forces to which they already belong?

I do not want Ocean of Stars to resolve the mystery of existence for a child. I hope it enlarges the mystery while also making it feel hospitable. I hope a child closes the book sensing that they are neither the center of the universe nor a meaningless speck within it: They are a particular expression of an ancient, ongoing creativity.

The world never stopped being extraordinary. We only became practiced at passing it by.

The world is a mix of both good and bad. It's up to us to decide which one we want to nourish and grow. When we cultivate and develop the goodness in ourselves, others, and the world, there is less of the bad to go around. The best way to achieve a better existence is to think better of existence.