Home

1. Work together
2. Spend time together doing fun things
3. Talk about important things and hard questions
4. Stop talking when you get angry or emotional
5. Take care of yourself
6. Give each other space
7. Give each other thoughtful gifts
8. Find new ways to say I love you
9. Laugh together
10. Be patient

Sometimes I don’t understand my own mind. I have thoughts and feelings that I can’t make sense of. I try to come up with sensible explanations, but they don’t always work out very well. It can be a chaotic space sometimes, and I don’t always know how to deal with my own brain.

• Quiet moments
• Reading and study
• Temple/holy places
• Church services/classes
• Talking with others
• Service
• Music
• Nature

Sometimes I am not the best at conversation. But asking a question is usually a good way to keep a conversation going.

Questions such as:

• How are you, really?
• How is your family doing?
• How is your job/business/etc.?
• I am thinking of taking up a new hobby. What do you like to do?
• Do you have any new projects going on?
• Can you recommend a book/movie/recipe?
• I need advice about ______. Do you have an ideas?
• Do you understand _______ that I’m having a hard time with?
• What do you hope for?
• What are you struggling with?
• Where did you grow up?
• Where have you lived? What has been your favorite place to live?
• What is something you miss in your life? What is something you are grateful for?

And ask someone a question that you wished someone would ask you.

But listening and caring about the answers might be even more important than asking the initial question. Listen enough to ask a follow-up question about what they are saying.

Sometimes we want to improve ourselves. Sometimes we want to help others improve.

But pointing out what someone does wrong (just criticizing them) can do little to make that change. Somedays, I have this internal voice that is constantly telling me everything that I do wrong in my life.

And that negative voice does not inspire me to improve.

My brother, William, said today that he wished that everyone could learn a language. He said when he was first learning the language, he didn’t like when he was corrected. But as he got better and better, he started to appreciate any corrections. When we think we are good at something, we want to do better.

So change only happens when it comes from a place of positivity.

It’s so much easier to become a better person when you think you are a good person in the first place.

It’s easier to become better at piano or writing or drawing or cooking or anything if you tell yourself that you are doing a good job and that you want to do even better.

So when we want to improve ourselves, or we want someone we know to improve, start with positivity. Start with praise: you are good at something, but you can be even better.

That positivity will be the catalyst for change.

Conceived by philosophy Tamar Gendler, “alief” is used like belief, but it’s more of an automatic reaction that is not necessary rational. Often, an alief conflicts with a belief, but we act on our alief even though we believe otherwise.

For example, I can believe that something is safe, but I can still get scared and act like it’s not–like walking on a sky bridge.

To have an alief is to a reasonable approximation, to have an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. It is to be in a mental state that is… associative, automatic and arational. As a class, aliefs are states that we share with non-human animals; they are developmentally and conceptually antecedent to other cognitive attitudes that the creature may go on to develop. Typically, they are also affect-laden and action-generating.

Gendler, Tamar, “Alief in action (and reaction)”, Mind and Language, 23(5): 552–585.

Okay, now that I learned a little bit about what alief means, I’m wondering if it’s even useful and necessary to have a word for this concept or if the concept is coherent? The concept is similar to instinct, but basically an instinct that conflicts with our more rational beliefs.

But I don’t know if an alief is really that different than a belief. We believe conflicting things all the time, and the version of rationality that makes alief possible assume that rationality is not conflicting, when I think it very well can be. (I can believe something is safe and also believe that it is not safe at all, and all of that is quite rational).

Some of examples of alief are being scared on a sky bridge, crying during a fictional movie, or acting on a bias that we know is wrong. And these things are very different from each other, so I’m not inclined to think that this concept is entirely useful.

Further reading:
https://www.wi-phi.com/series/cognitive-biases/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicit-bias/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272764251_Why_Alief_is_Not_a_Legitimate_Psychological_Category

Sometimes I really like planning and dreaming and thinking about things that may or may not ever happen. In my home renovation, I am constantly going through and thinking about how things will change and what I want to make out of my home.

Sometimes I get too caught up in planning and I don’t do as much as I need to to actually put those plans into action.

Sometimes I don’t even care if I complete my plans; I just like to imagine.

I’ve used a lot of spray foam in my renovation. And you have to be very careful with that stuff, because it is very sticky. If it gets on your clothes, they will forever have spray foam on them. If you get it on your skin, you basically have to peel off some of your skin to get it off. Mechanically peeling it off is the only way I have found to remove it–once it’s hard, nothing helps.

And so today, I sat and picked at my arm until my skin was sore and hurting as flakes of spray foam gathered below.

Be careful when you use spray foam.

Sometimes things seem to be so needlessly complicated. And I can see that if the world were different, there could be so many easier ways to do simple things.

But it’s complicated. And I just have to deal with that and do my best to make my way through the complications.

Direction.

Comfort.

Forgiveness.

Strength.

Friendship.

Peace.

Improvement.

Family.

Music.

Charity.