Category: Josh Feingold Blog

Humans tend to gravitate to extremes.  We act this way, due to a desire to bind conflicting realities and giving weight to one reality or the other.

I better approach it to recognize that the two conflicting extremes exist, and honestly live in your reality.   By doing this, issues don’t “pop up” since you are already figuring out a way to incorporate them into your already healthy life.  You also, don’t seek out the surpressed value in others, in a nod to self-acceptance, since you already repect that same value in yourself, leading to healthier relationships.

Just to make this post clear.  I don’t mean living two different lives – that is dishonest to an exterme with others, but most importantly yourself.  What I do mean is incorporating the different aspects of your reality instead of blocking them in their entirety or surpressing them.

To me, as I try to model humanity, the capability to do this is evidence of higher personal growth, than our default programming.

Like my complex use of alliteration? (Side note, I totally couldn’t help me seventh grader with his homework the other day.  No idea what part of English grammer he was learning, but I’m sure it’s really important.)

Seriously, though.  There is no place for bitterness in our lives.  Life sucks at times, and that’s just how it goes.  However, when we choose to focus on that bitter time, we have no one to blame but ourselves for holding on to negativity.

I have seen this in many ways this past year.

I have seen it in bitter girls that are so jaded by the process of finding a “good guy” they have given in, and just go through the motions of meeting people, not even realizing the negativity that they are giving off.  I feel sorry for those girls. It’s not my place to tell them my opinion, but I do wish that someone would hand them my blog post so they could question their own perspectives on dating.

I have seen it in myself, as a bitter person who life took a turn that was unexpected and made me challenge the fairness of the world.

I have seen it in others who feel cheated in different ways in life. Where they find themselves as the underdog, though they may be the ones choosing not to change their own situation.

However, the common denominator of bitterness, is a feeling that things are “not supposed to be this way.”  To which we all must remind ourselves, that if you belive things are as they are supposed to be, well, they ARE supposed to be this way, and if you don’t belive that, you don’t have a leg to stand on and make this claim.  Either way, though, there is not place for bitterness.

Sure there is a place for being sad, if you want to focus on the negative (probably not a good thing), but bitterness comes from an unfair world.  And, unfortuantely, no one said the world is fair.  The world just is.  (Unless you believe that God actively maintains the world.  But even then, if something bad happens, and if you belive, like most religions that God is intrinsically good, then you also have to assume that the bad that you percieve as happening is really good, so there is still no room for bitterness.)

That’s right, the world is what it is, and we better be comfortable with that reality.  Otherwise, a sunami of bitterness will follow in realities wake.  And bitterness helps no one.  So learn that no one said life is fair, though life can certainly be wonderful if we work at it, and lose the bitterness. You’ll be happy you did!

 

Memory is a tricky thing.  In general, we forget about the bad, and tend to hold on to the good.

One upshot of this is our pasts can tend towards being better than our present.  Though, in reality, the past really may have stunk.  We just don’t remember really well.

Nostalgia is reflective of this attitude.  In movies, decore, and people (instagram, vintage clothes, and hairstyle).

Myself included, of course, or I wouldn’t have noticed it in the first place.  So as I focus inward, I just need to remember that my today beats the heck out of any yesterday.  And of course, any tomorrow, as well.

I have been struggling with time lately.

Here is the basic conundrum:

When I don’t have excess time, I wish I did.  When I have extra time, I wish I had something to do with it.

Basically, when I am busy and everything is flying in different directions all around me, or perhaps I am enjoying myself in a zone, hyper-focused, I lament the fact that there isn’t enough time in the day, and that time slips by me so fast, as I silently march towards the grave on the steady escalater of time. However, when things are slow, and there is nothing to do, I bemoan the fact that I have nothing to do with my time, and what a waste of a moment!  Of course, I could choose to fill it with something fun, but them I am back to the first part of my conundrum.

The upshot is that time is either filled or it is not.  Those are the two states of time from my personal perspective.  Time filled, moves fast.  Time unfilled, moves slow.  Time filled, slips quickly away into the past, but is fulfilling.  Time unfilled sits steady, but is unfulfilling.

Thinking about it, I think time is meant to be filled meaningfully, and allowed to speed by.  For the process of bemoaning the unfilled state stems from unhappyness (probably due to a chemical reality about fulfillment).  Of course, looking back and bemoaning where did the time go, is equally not acceptable.However, I would think that the importance of enjoying your now trumps, looking back and bemoaning your past.

Of course, in everything that we do, if we allow mindfulness and new experiences to populate our lives, it will allow for a slight slowing down of time when we are in it.

 

I went to the Goat Farm down near Howell Mill Road today, and there was a photo shoot going on.  Awesome location.  I think this is the best of the pictures I took.  Unknown model.  The other three are pictures I took over the past year, that seem to tell a compelling story.