I’m not as cool as Kafka when I suffer
or how my April went by.
“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?”
―Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
I
Being graceful to yourself is not an easy task. Particularly when you feel like the world is against you. And your mind is mercilessly torturing you for your inadequacies. If it weren’t for my loved ones, my friends and family, I wouldn’t have picked myself up so easily. Truly, I’m still learning to do so.
Apart from dealing with heartbreak, the tremendous burden of being a teacher, and the piling up of administrative and parent concerns, April has been very eye-opening for me. It seems that the consequences that I’ve accumulated are not what I intended. It shows that we often are unaware of what we sow until we reap the results ourselves.
Below are some ideas that I’ve been tinkering with for the past month.
Let me know which one provokes you.
II
One of my biggest aches every time I complain about my work is when people say:
“Every company has its faults”.
Well, thank you for the comment, Captain Obvious.
Of course, each company has its own flavor of imperfection. The question is a matter of degree and necessity.
Is it to the extent that the company systematically hinders their employees’ growth outside of their work? Or it’s a more of policy issue?
Is it necessary because we’re trying to keep the bottom line? Or is it a matter of incompetence in building a better management?
III
In life, the laws of physics can’t be broken. In managing projects, certain laws can’t also be broken. One of them is a trade-off between budget, time, and quality.
If you have a low budget, then you need to increase the amount of time to maintain quality. And if you’re low on time, then you need to increase the budget.
You can’t be low on budget and short on time, and expect to have good quality work. It just doesn’t work.
IV
Shame is an odd emotion.
It’s odd in the sense that it tends to get what it fears.
It has a self-fulfilling element to it.
This video describes it well.
V
I’ve been listening to a lot of good albums lately.
Check out this playlist.
VI
Friends often change priorities, and it’s hard to deal with that fact.
The changes imply that one doesn’t necessarily become as close as one used to. It leaves room for insecurity to creep in, and it’s hard to remain understanding and compassionate towards these feelings when your needs that were once met in the relationship have now become obsolete.
It takes a certain kind of maturity to let and accept that people come and go, and even come again into your life. The question then as you go through these phases, you also change as a person, so you need to ask: while it may have served you before, does the relationship serve you now?
No wrong answer to this question, but it needs to be honest and clear.
VII
Why are content creators removing their followers by giving statements that signal allegiance to a given group? Statement such as “Transwomen are women”.
Wouldn’t this increase the chances for a given creator to be audience-capturing? They ended being in an echo chamber.
Personally, I want my subscribers to stay, even if we differ in our political views.
VIII
Parents just need our acceptance of their quirks at times.
We often forget it’s their first time parenting anyway.
IX
There’s a loss of innocence that I’ve come to acknowledge when reading children’s books. This one hits me when reading a chapter of Gongka, and how the character explains the joy of visiting an old mall. I remember that I once is as enthusiastic about visiting one the malls that I often visited back in my childhood. I always run toward the store when I see Kids Station because I want to see their latest display.
Nowadays, I don’t feel that same level of enthusiasm.
X
There’s no magic in education.
Or even if there is magic, it is not sustainable.
There will be a threshold where “the quality of one’s relationship” cannot substitute pedagogical and substantive competence.
XI
When Ferry Irwandi talks about not wanting to be idolized, like how a cult treat their saviors. He realized that compromises might be necessary to achieve one’s goal.
My question is wouldn’t technically that’s what President Prabowo tries to do? Or to be fair, isn’t that all the former President tries to do?
President Soeharto, despite the atrocities that have been done under his regime, also thinks this way. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have prepared for REPELITA I - V. He wouldn’t also prepares for Repelita VI and the Second Long-Term Development Plan till 2019.
It’s that tight rope between not falling into what Lenin called “Left-Wing” Childishness, but also dealing with the hypocrisy that comes from having any ideals.
XII
It’s interesting to think about the words we use when encountering the same problem, the question is how do we know it’s the same problem?
How does an individual categorize the task that they deal with the same as the ones they have done before?
How do organisms categorize their problems? What count as a problem?
XIII
One of my students ask, “What is the purpose of reflection?”
I answer, “For the person to develop a kind of meta-cognition”.
After reflecting on it, I realized that it doesn’t really answer the question.
A better answer to that questions is to track yourself. You can only improve yourself if you have a sense of where you’re going and the speed of which you’re going. You can only know these two based on your past trajectories. That’s why you need to track yourself.
The clearer the picture you have about yourself, instead of mere noises, the better you get at basing your improvement.
XIV
I once argued with a friend on the notion that relationship aren’t transactional. In the end, I switch position and realize that she is right.
To make the case for it, I can demonstrate by showing that the term “friends with benefit” is an oxymoron. Because it implies that one can befriend a person that doesn't entail a benefit towards them.
Why would you befriend anyone who doesn’t improve your life or, worse, causes you harm? Of course, you wouldn’t.
Realizing this implies that every relationship involves a cost-benefit analysis. And like any transaction, you ideally want it to be reciprocal—a win-win for both parties. However, as with any transaction, there are times when you provide more value or incur more cost than the other person does.
Recognizing this, I emplore you to have some rules. It what allows for you to remain ethical in your transactions. Or in other words, to reduce asymmetries.
XV
On the idea that “Life itself remains a very effective therapist”, I go out and look for the full passage in Horney’s book Our Inner Conflicts:
Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. Experience of any one of a number of kinds may be sufficiently telling to bring about personality changes. It may be the inspiring example of a truly great person; it may be a common tragedy which by bringing the neurotic in close touch with others takes him out of his egocentric isolation; it may be association with persons so congenial that manipulating or avoiding them appears less necessary. In other instances the consequences of neurotic behavior may be so drastic or of such frequent occurrence that they impress themselves on the neurotic's mind and make him less fearful and less rigid.
The therapy effected by life itself is not, however, within one's control. Neither hardships nor friendships nor religious experience can be arranged to meet the needs of the particular individual. Life as a therapist is ruthless; circumstances that are helpful to one neurotic may entirely crush another. And, as we have seen, the capacity of the neurotic to recognize the consequences of his neurotic behavior and to learn from them is highly limited. We could rather say that an analysis [[241]] can be safely terminated if the patient has acquired this very capacity to learn from his experiences—that is, if he can examine his share in the difficulties that arise, understand it, and apply the insight to his life.