The Road Less Traveled

Healthy non-sexual physical touch has been banished from proper society. We are the only primates who live this frigidly.

Where did the innocence go?

Why do we automatically conflate feelings of appreciation, understanding and admiration with a desire to consume or own the person?What if we could love without seizing and grasping at the object of our affections? What if we learned to do that so well that we could give love and true encouragement to everyone we interacted with, while also being able to drink in the inspiration of a beautiful mind, to admire a capable body, to curiously study a vast and intricate soul? What if doing so expanded all of our hearts, emboldening us toward our own personal challenges in the process? Innocently, purely, seeing each other’s value?

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/connection-consumption

What are they distracting us from?

Dis:

The dis prefix is a negative prefix that means “not, or none.”

Traction:

1. The force that causes a moving thing to stick to the surface it is moving along
2. The power that is used to pull something
3. A way of treating broken bones in which a device gently pulls the bones back into place
4. The support, interest, etc., that is needed for something to succeed or make progress

Distraction:

The preclusion and impossibility of stability, grounding, momentum, power, movement, alignment, and progress.

......No big deal.

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/distraction

I am where I am supposed to be.

There is a path set before me, each choice leading to the next, that only I can walk. Only I can play these roles and exert this influence on the quest unique to me. Nothing is wasted.

It’s a mandate.

It’s a beckoning to come out of the shadows, shake off the fear. To be fully engaged in now, and use the past as fuel to walk boldly into an unfamiliar future.

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/fully-alive

I rarely read books or essays multiple times, but this one was an exception. It’s called Completeness, Self-Sufficiency, and Intimacy in Seneca’s Account of Friendship, written by Carissa Phillips-Garrett.

Carissa takes us on an expanding and provoking journey, meandering through many contradictory lenses through which to practice friendship.

She explores at length the tension between self sufficiency and intimacy. The question is asked implicitly: What interconnections build a full life?

In my view, friendship is drastically neglected in religious and philosophical writings, which usually focus on romantic and familial relationships, as well as how to help those in need.

In stoicism, a true friend is someone who “activates our virtue.” The Buddhist idea that “there is no self without the other” is invoked here, as many of our expressions and principles cannot be embodied or enacted without another consciousness with whom to interface.

In Seneca’s account of friendship, as explained in this essay, there are three key ingredients to friendship: trust, self-disclosure, and attachment. These ingredients are what make individual relationships unique and irreplaceable.

Pondering the ideas in this essay and allowing them to colour the lenses through which I see and experience my own relationships has refined and defined, given a framework to, my beliefs and practices around solitude, reciprocity, sacrifice, and time spent within friendships while maintaining that “full self,” which is central to the stoic philosophy and imperative in a grounded, peaceful life.

I would love to hear what you think. The essay is here:

https://www.academia.edu/54211894/Completeness_Self_Sufficiency_and_Intimacy_in_Senecas_Account_of_F

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/anph.2021.0052

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/friendships-and-stoicism

We could live on a constant series of small highs from voluntarily taking on discomforts that make us better. It's not a harder road than the "comfortable" one, once you're on it.

Inspired by: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953110?i=1000587689256

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/flipping-the-script-on-dopamine-sourcing

When we cannot change our circumstances, we are challenged to change ourselves. - Viktor Frankl

Perhaps God's plans have more to do with our development, leading to our fulfillment, than they do with our ease.

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/grit-is-developed-when-there-is-no-escape

Isn't it more of a compliment to be chosen from a place of strength, rather than to be used to fill holes in someone else's life? Wouldn't that mean that those people, those growers, see and accept me as I am, while simultaneously believing enough in my trajectory and potential to know they won't need to leave me. And how do we build the net, in relationships, to catch us when we DO need someone desperately?

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/chosen-or-needed

People actually don't know where you stand unless you tell them. What changed my life the most was a combination of love and truth, encouragement to be more than I was birthed out of a place of being accepted and valued exactly where I started.

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/saying-words

Without free speech, there is no clear thinking.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000578074407

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/conversations-save-lives

The function of the mind is twofold - to seek, then focus on, and to solve, problems. When it finds neither to do, it drops a level, to chatter. It is actively seeking a problem to solve, a matter to focus on. It will literally create problems because it is not being put to use for a higher purpose, or a problem that matters.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/chasing-excellence/id1170629044?i=1000561781908

https://www.roadlesstraveled.online/post/purpose-to-focus-and-to-solve