What they forgot to teach you at school __笔记节选

2023 最佳阅读之一，The shool of life的第二本书。

总体感受就是人能活着，真不容易。理解自己，理解别人，理解世界，是艰辛甚至不可能得任务。能尽量幽默、轻松些，最好！

Chapter 20: No destination

Life is a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal-seeking. The only stable element in our lives is craving: the only destination is the journey. 

So, not banishing anxiety but learning to manage and live with them, heartily laugh at our anxious cravings. 

Chapter 21: Live Light-Heartedly 

此笑容并非没经历过伤痛和哭泣；反之，是多年伤心痛哭之后的释然之笑；历经希望破灭、步履蹒跚而绝望之际，仍决定继续前行。

而前方并不一片光明，但一片琐碎中，亦或被天光之蓝所吸引；聆听巴赫复调之美；孩童天真地呼唤等。执着地带着反抗意味地说声“不认输”。

一团糟的生活是常态。万物混乱又无逻辑。沧海一声笑，用一生时间将悲伤转为完美。

最喜欢的是第10章，管理你的情绪。

开篇讲，我们是情绪的动物。一方面，我们知晓并宽容自己的过失。但有时，一定层面上，我们又成为被谴责对象，自责，有负罪感并无法自拔。

许多小事情会忽然影响情绪。比如，早上精神抖擞想去创造完美世界，午饭后因为工作领导批评或同事冷漠而心痛无比。

以下几点作为理解我们任性之情绪的指导：

1）认识到脆弱性

We should acknowledge how vulnerable our moods are to being perturbed by so called “small things”. We belong to a species of extreme, but also fateful, sensitivity; we shouldn’t expect to be able to appreciate a Mozart aria or Rembrandt self-portrait on the one hand and then, on the other, stay unbothered by our lover’s pensive expression or the slightly distant gaze of a would-be client. We shouldn’t berate ourselves for how thin our skin is; we should adjust ourselves to the full consequence of our extraordinary openness to experience.  

2）社交管理

We can too easily find ourselves in the company of people who, though they call themselves our friends, are- in terms of what they do to our moods,-no such thing. Beneath a veneer of kindness, some people are the bearers of latent hostility, deadly competitiveness, self-absorbed hysteria or priggish moralism. To start to be a friend to ourselves means learning to recognise those people that leave us feeling riled, dispirited or depressed and edit them from our social lives. 

3）安抚友谊

The one great solace for a low mood is the right sort of company: people who know how to reassure us that we still belong, that sadness is to be expected and that our errors never put us beyond compassion. These consoling souls will have suffered, they will have hated themselves and they will have learnt how to laugh at the absurdity of being human. Most importantly, when we show them our low mood, they will gracefully take that moment as the essential next step of friendship: display one or two of their own. 

4）尊重身体的反应

Maddeningly, some of the explanation for why our moods shift is that we inhibit a body. But because it's so humiliating to have to accept that our ideas about ourselves and our lives might be dependent on bodily factors- how long we slept, how much water we’ve drunk, what illnesses we are fighting in the background- the temptation can be too insist that our ideas must solely be the offspring of reason. A wiser interpretation would be that most of what passes through our minds is in some way dependent on particular things going on in our bodies. At points, it isn’t that it’s all over and that we’re the worst person on earth, it’s just that we may need to lie down for an hour or urgently have a glass of orange juice. 

5）关闭某些不良情绪

Moods are proud, imperious things. They show up and insist that they are telling us total certainty about our identities and our prospects- perhaps that our love lives will never work out or that a professional situation is beyond repair. Still, we always have an option of calling their bluff, of realizing that they are only a passing state of mind arrogantly pretending to be the whole of us- and that we could, with courage, politely ignore them and change the subject. We might recognise, but not give way to, a mood and put a bit of distance between it and our conscious selves. We might, at times, even do precisely what a mood commands us not to do: see someone rather than cede to shame, show our face rather than give way to paranoia, go out for a walk rather than fold our limbs into the foetal position.  

6）让有些情绪作古

Our sad moods strongly imply that they are about what lies ahead of us, but very often, they exist chiefly as symptoms of a difficult past. They stem from a projected memory of people around us who, long ago, told us with particular authority that we were no good, that we would fail, that we should be ashamed of ourselves and that catastrophe was around the corner. We should learn to historicise such voices and differentiate them from a trustworthy verdict in the present. Our low moods are far more about a past we still need to mourn fully than a future that there is any reason to dread. 

7）一点点的关怀

While we are being rocked by a dark mood, we should strive to keep a little light on, the light of sanity and self-knowledge that can tell us, even though the hurricane is insisting otherwise, that we are not appalling, that we have done nothing unforgivable and that we have a right to be. We can strive to keep ourselves plugged into a small pilot light of kindness until a larger sun is ready to rise one more. 

8）一切都会过去

We shouldn’t allow a misplaced idea of permanence to our sorrows. Though we may be unable to shift a mood, with the help of a few hours or days, it too shall pass…..