CxD Newsletter

As I’ve been preparing a dharma talk at my Zen place of practice about what “understanding” is and how the way we understand leads to misunderstanding, I read this insightful op-ed below, which I’m sharing with you all for free: As a Couple’s Therapist, I See the Same Destructive Patterns in Our Political Discourse I hope these few paragraphs whet your appetite enough to read it in its entirety: As children, early in our psychological development, we all resort to a defense mechanism...

On a Reddit forum, the majority of the comments are calling him an absolute MONSTER. Because if you imagine something awful, and then make it brutally far worse, you’re still probably not yet in the ballpark of the crime he’s accused of. I’m choosing to use this newsletter to begin to crawl through the delusion that my grasping after “sense” will be effective; I already know sense will fail me utterly, sadistically.

Esteemed long-time faithful Designers of Character, friends, enemies, and Bunk if your transition into a new realm has greatly improved your literacy: I’m in the middle of my fourth Nietzsche biography — a near 600-page stunner by Julian Young — and it took me this many narrative flybys of Nietzsche’s beastly life to realize that my journey here at CxD —Character By Design— needs to change; I need to become more of who I am.

It is three weeks since I was feeding bunk his favorite beef-stick treats while he fell asleep for good. I was an inconsolable snot-ridden mess the week leading up to his departure and for four days afterward. I’m fine now, back to mostly normal, teaching classes. This return to mostly normal bears a different kind of grief — the grief and guilt of not feeling more grief.

Death always seems so far away, until it’s scheduled for tomorrow. I write this knowing I have a little over 24 hours left with my first dog, child, and son, whom I call a son because I love him in the way he taught me how to love. His life depended entirely on mine; and now, I have come to understand, mine has ferociously depended on his.

There are two ways of watching sports. The first gives you the thrills of an us vs them tribal satisfaction. Your opponent or the other team are your enemies. Face paint is required. Winning or losing is like going to war. Often hatred is involved. I remember as a Mets fan I used to hate the damn Yankees. This is one reasons why humans are always provoking war: there’s a subconscious level of enjoyment in seeing others as enemies. And when one is vanquished, we feel empty until we create another.

Last time I published CxD I was on my way to a Zen retreat on Molokai island in Hawaii. Zen retreats are profound but hard to write about since “you had to be there” is even more applicable about this kind of carefully curated, embodied set of experiences in which there is a lot of silence and beauty.

Identifying with your thoughts is the source of most troubles. In doing so, you are like a fly stuck in a vat of tar. 🪰 Or honey, if you have a sweet tooth. 🍯 You spend most of your time living inside your mind’s projections: stories, interpretations, judgments, complaints, worries, obsessions, evaluations, speculations, conjectures, and fantasies. You confuse these bubbles of thought for reality itself. Learn to create some distance from them. Sit still and be for a while.

Above you can see the local effects of the solar eclipse on the CxD neighborhood: friends and neighbors hanging out together in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, and automatic house lights turning on as the sun disappeared. We were all interuppting our habitual way of seeing by changing our habitual way of being (together).

I would like to stop working all the time, or at least most of the time. I’m lazy at heart, so this aspiration should be easy to achieve in theory. But in practice, I seem to be always clackety-clacking at some project or other, for self-improvement or for work. Recently I discovered I’m 11% Ashkenazi Jewish. And have been slowly poking around Jewish history and culture and discovered that Judaism encourages a weekly ritual called shabbat.