Höchste Lust: music as the opposite of social distancing by Katharine Dain

“At some point I noticed a shift in the quality of attention between us—a marked preference for each other’s company, surreptitious glances of appraisal—but I didn’t worry about what felt like a little gig crush…

But it was more, and I knew it. I also knew that if this happened once, it could happen again, which was even more horrifying to realize. I wasn’t immune; a happy relationship didn’t protect me. It felt like a sudden collapse of long-held beliefs about who I was. I was deeply ashamed that I had let something get out of my control—I, the level-headed one, the one who could resist temptation!—and I feared for my marriage, even though I knew this had nothing to do with my partner, who I loved as much as ever and didn’t want to lose.

What had I actually done wrong, I began to wonder? I hadn’t been cruel or selfish or unreasonable. I had done my best, in a particularly vulnerable professional environment, to find satisfaction and meaning in my work, to be open and reactive, to protect what I love, to be kind. I hadn’t chosen what I felt; that had emerged naturally from the work, time spent together, a lovely friendship. Eventually I decided that my guilt, and my instinct to try to hide and squash a forbidden feeling, were rooted in toxic assumptions about partnership that I hadn’t ever truly questioned.”

How Vision Metaphors Exclude the Blind by Jo Livingstone (from Medium)

“Relying on perfect vision as a metaphor for perfect understanding leaves the ableist speaker with a limited concept of knowledge itself.”

7 Uncomfortable Rules of Life Everyone Knows, But Only a Few Follow by Thomas Oppong (from Medium)

Life is not a sprint or marathon, it’s a maze […] Real-life has no signs, and no straight lines. There’s just a maze of infinite options: Some paths, like some careers, take five times longer. Some paths, like some relationships, are dead ends.”

I Predict Your Predictions Are Wrong by Yascha Mounk (from The Atlantic)

“In 1974, the sociologist Jib Fowles coined the term chronocentrism, “the belief that one’s own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison.” The past few weeks have, understandably, confronted us with an especially loud chorus of chronocentric voices claiming that we are on the cusp of unprecedented change.”

Why So Many People Are Unhappy in Retirement by Arthur C. Brooks (from The Atlantic)

“Too often, we imagine life to be like the hero’s journey, and leave out its crucial last step: letting go…

The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script. People rarely change the story they’ve constructed for their lives; they rage, instead, trying to pound their lives back into the story line, often with sad results.

But this rage is born from a misunderstanding of the hero’s journey. Defining it in terms of three phases, as I did above, makes the mistake of leaving out one last, critical phase. The literary scholar Joseph Campbell, author of the book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, notes that many great myths involve a subtle twist after the triumph in battle. He calls it “The Crossing of the Return Threshold.” “The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world,” Campbell writes. “The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life.””

Photo by Jasmin Sessler on Unsplash