Discomfort as Offering-Practice
About the wind chimes outside. About how as I've recovered my ability to enjoy sounds like these and like people's voices outside has grown. How sometimes building distress tolerance can only happen after distress has been decreased. How so much can only happen after distress has been decreased.
There's always that advice "make room for joy in your life". It's trite. It's meaningless and has been used to gesture vaguely towards so many meanings.
I think a better way to put it is sacrifice for Joy. Not as penance, not as self-flagellation. Because there isn't any joy to be had there (outside of joyously playing with these things in whatever manner you most enjoy). But as offering.
To joy I offer my perfectionism. To joy I offer my defences against being called lazy. To joy I offer my fears of not being good enough. To joy I offer saying the right thing.
I don't know that this is a New Years Resolution ( NYE2026 ). But I think pursuing joy - pursuing the many different joys - the joy of seeing my partner smile, the joy of being held, the joy of sharing meals, the joy of catching up, the joy of moving and music - is going to be a good framework. My distress has been significantly reduced. My pain is what it is. I offer my pain to joy.
I offer the tedium of organising my notes and sticking to a system to the joy of seeing my graph grow and knowledge build and connections move.
I offer the pain in my wrists to the joy of reading and annotating a physical book.
I spoke to a baby-boomer in a flat cap in the park whilst I was out feeding the birds and there was this common thread in his litany of what is wrong with the world. The spices, the children with cleft palate's and footballers who should be paying to fix them so he doesn't have to see it, the pacifists who took over the council back in the day and made it all go wrong, the sky rats, the young people who don't want to work and want him to think they have something wrong with them, the look on his face when I moved closer and he clocked me.
Fear peppered the underside of his complaints. Fear of being left behind by the world you made. Fear of abandonment. Things are moving too fast, I am not fast enough, I am not as strong as I once felt and I am finding that the world I have long believed too soft is actually harder than I thought. I worry I will not fit, and I know how I feel about those who do not fit. I want you to agree with me that these others do not fit so I can feel reassured that I do.
In 2025 I wrote a note on my phone titled Philosophy
I was thinking about psychology, especially of the self-help literature around and from psychology. These are theories about human nature, theories about what it is to live a good life - philosophical speculation that cannot sit with what it is. And what it is pretending not to be is needed. I think we need to be asking questions about what makes a good life, where our time and effort and resources are best directed, how we navigate conflict and trauma and our varying and complex needs. And more than that - it is worth engaging with for the same reason it's worth engaging with anything that stretches the "what do I think about this" muscles. Not what "should" I think about this, but what do I think about it. I as this current assemblage of experiences and interactions and organisms and biochemistry so arranging itself as to have thoughts about things.
I find myself more and more out of step with the thinking of my peers. Or, in step but out of sync.