tomtomaszewski

[tomtomaszewski]

Save Thinking

Insight and information can help you avoid repeating past ways of feeling, thinking and acting. You need to protect your capacity to think with that information, rather than to remember it. Your capacity to think freely is what will keep you safe and doing life the way you want. Here are three things that you can do three times each day which will help prevent your body from becoming overloaded…

[tomtomaszewski]

Tolerance, Panic and Clinging

HESITATION / PANIC People who have been traumatised might tolerate things well. Their instinct for how long to stick with a difficulty or how much to absorb its effects (often complication, anxiety and irritation) may be just about right. On the other hand they are likely to have tolerance problems. They’ll panic and have faith, hope and trust in nobody and nothing, or in anyone and…

[tomtomaszewski]

Significance, Event, Momentum

MONOTONY / SEEKING Every event in your life, that is every moment of your life, will feel significant or insignificant. The ones that feel insignificant are the ones you are unlikely to notice, and vice versa. You have very little control over which events you regard as significant or insignificant: it’s an instinctual thing.  Notice that we are thinking about feeling here, not knowing. If you…

[tomtomaszewski]

Vulnerability = Resilience

FRUSTRATION / CARE Life becomes a process of gathering momentum out of difficult events (broadly speaking, and unscientifically, entropic ones), the ones that elicit disagreement,  distraction, aggravation, loss, unhappiness and disorder as much as those things that seem to maintain the status quo (loosely, homeostatic ones). The more momentum you gather the less likely you are to become stuck.

[tomtomaszewski]

That Strange Feeling

MONOTONY / SEEKING I sometimes get a very strange feeling that makes me feel unmistakably alive. It’s un-monotony … a kind of super-enthusiasm where everything seems precious and vital. It has more feeling about it than seems real, actually. There are three films I can think of which make me feel like this, but only really the scenes filmed in parks. Cleo de 5 à 7 by Agnes Varda, What Time is it…

[tomtomaszewski]

Unchanging Recollection

HELPLESSNESS / RAGE Remembering a certain song reminded me how when you look at back at something, it can always feel different, always make you think of something else. If it doesn’t then something is stuck. Unchanging recollection is a sign that something is keeping your mind from moving on. Maybe you like it being stuck – but stuck it is. Perhaps you need it to be stuck, a perfect memory of…

[tomtomaszewski]

Why does your childhood feel unreal?

HESITATION / PANIC Why does your childhood feel unreal? It may feel like a cartoon or a postcard version of something. It might seem too quick for anything that actually happened, or too slow. Maybe it feels doom-stricken like the Titanic when you actually recall nothing much bad happened. Or it could feel magnificent, like a glorious dream, the best childhood ever, populated by incomparable…

[tomtomaszewski]

Boundaries as Rules

MONOTONY / SEEKING Those things we call boundaries are thought-things we imagine like perimeter lines you might see drawn on a map. A certain kind of fence which somebody can inevitably walk through. They circumscribe you and to an extent will always limit you. Theyou who can be defined by boundaries can’t help being less than the you who might imagine doing so. Some things are beyond words,…

[tomtomaszewski]

What Gives Who

INEXPERIENCE / FEAR All of the ‘whats’ you invest in can help you understand who you are. The pronouns you choose, the titles you accept, anything and everything you take or have to take as a measure of yourself can show you what you might otherwise never see. You. All you need is a way of noticing who becomes clear, in the way you feel, in the way you think, in your behaviour, when you are…

[tomtomaszewski]

Welcoming an uncertain future

INEXPERIENCE / FEAR All of us have to deal with a frustratingly unimaginative inner soothsayer. Dreaming up the future often seems somehow beyond them. Like new episodes of most TV shows their visions seem like re-arrangements of past successes, or even past failures that didn’t end up in the show being cancelled. To meet life’s challenges We move forward in life drawing on predictable ways of…

[tomtomaszewski]

Your parents are not responsible for you

HESITATION / PANIC As an adult don’t look to your parents to take responsibility for you. Take responsibility for your own life or your life will never feel yours.  Until you take responsibility for your life speaking out in any way against someone in your family will feel disloyal. You may hesitate before recognising that something unfair or worse has been done. There will be family secrets.…

[tomtomaszewski]

Angry for all the cares of the world

FRUSTRATION / CARE Without realising it we do things on behalf of other people as much as we do for ourselves. People operate collectively whether or not they like it, even when they believe they are acting on their own.  Much of what I write about on these pages is about how our ways of living have been shaped by others organising life around us in our earliest years. What’s hard to think about…

[tomtomaszewski]

1 month old. I would have needed carrying.