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Are.na
chloé 👁‍🗨
the self / other selves
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reflections on the self, others, and our generally nonsensical lives.

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All that you touch, tender, existentialism + psychoanalysis, The Modular Body, this existence, feelings, to think, journal , Crate Diggin', channels i love, alternatives to the self, and experiencing >
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We each are engaged in a multitude of acts of service to our brothers and sisters. Every time we stop at a red light, offer money to a cashier, say hello, wash the dishes, put out the trash cans, we serve our family, our community, and the earth. In each of our daily roles - as builder or merchant, gardener or artist, teacher, healer, secretary, or salesmen - we can awaken compassion, we can find the spirit of Sangha and freedom.

Awakening Compassion Through Our Daily …
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What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs (“I get kinda creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies”) or not (“Let me tell you about the plot of the movie Must Love Dogs…”). Good taking makes the other side want to take too (“I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it’s so crazy” “What?? Was there a ceremony?”). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs (“Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?”) and some don’t (“How many of your grandparents are still living?”). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking (“I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has––how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread––and how I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can”).

But maybe you don’t need to be explainable. Maybe the most interesting perspectives come from being willing to occupy a difficult-to-define place, even if it means sacrificing others' understanding of you. The challenge then becomes committing to occupy that place far longer than most feel comfortable — long enough to cultivate a voice out of your curiosity that is confident enough in its own continuity to tell you exactly what’s worth committing to when the time comes.

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I've never really met anyone else who oscillates so frequently and fervently between an intense desire for anonymity, to disappear even, and to crack oneself open entirely for the whole world to see. To be the maximum version of oneself in public, consequences be damned.

A Tale of Two Selves
Connection, Solitude, and Loneliness
by Hallie Rose Taylor
130 blocks • about 5 hours ago

I am full of love for every one. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is sad, it is sad. But everything has meaning (…)

∆ Virginia Woolf, from The Complete Works

Virginia Woolf, from The Complete Works
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