Winnie Lim

Not all projects take time, but they do take a lifetime. In calligraphy, the work is created in one movement of the brush. All the intention is in that single concentrated movement. The line is a reflection of the energy transfer from the artist’s being, including the entire history of their experiences, thoughts, and apprehensions, into the hand. The creative energy exists in the journey to the making, not in the act of constructing.

 After all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment passes and vanishes forever, that you can’t stash it away for permanent safekeeping! But it’s the kind of sadness that might otherwise be described as “poignancy”: a feeling that deepens the experience you’re having, rather than detracting from it. The kind of feeling you get once you’re no longer grasping and clutching at the moment – thereby, ironically, driving it further away from you – but stepping fully into it, experiencing yourself as a part of it, being it.

Spending your days trying to get experiences “under your belt”, in an effort to maximise your collection of experiences, or to feel more confident about the future supply of similar experiences, means placing yourself in a position from which you can never enjoy them fully, because there’s a different agenda at play.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of reaching the end of a day on which you’d been unusually successful in getting your work done, or sticking to your fitness routine, but then instead of thinking “What a great day!”, you think: “That’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure I keep on having more and more of them!” The result: you turned a potential source of easy delight into a source of further stress.

Buddhist psychology is uniquely insightful, I think, when it comes to the specific version of clenching I was experiencing on that hillside path: how we make ourselves miserable, not just by railing against bad experiences, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold onto the good experiences we are currently having.

Winnicott says somewhere that health is much more difficult to deal with than disease. And he’s right, I think, in the sense that everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own. Such a relationship is not 50-50—it’s 100-100. Each takes perpetual care of the other, and, within concurrent reciprocity, both thrive. For those who attain it, the benefits of deep attachment are powerful—regulated people feel whole, centered, alive. With their physiology stabilized from the proper source, they are resilient to the stresses of daily life, or even to those of extraordinary circumstance.

Because loving is reciprocal physiologic influence, it entails a deeper and more literal connection than most realize. Limbic regulation affords lovers the ability to modulate each other’s emotions, neurophysiology, hormonal status, immune function, sleep rhythms, and stability. If one leaves on a trip, the other may suffer insomnia, a delayed menstrual cycle, a cold that would have been fought off in the fortified state of togetherness.

Reward a child’s distress with attention, they said (and say today), and you increase the probability of recurrence. A child left alone at night, with no human presence to “reward” him, eventually stops crying and makes do without. But sleep is not a reflex, like the canine salivation a flank steak provokes. The dozing adult brain rises and descends through half a dozen distinct neural phases every ninety minutes, in gradually lengthening symphonic movements that culminate in morning wakefulness. Sleep is an intricate brain rhythm, and the neurally immature infant must first borrow the patterns from parents.

A person with maladaptive Attractors can encounter another by chance who will teach him what he needs to learn. The instructor fate provides, whether husband or wife, brother, sister, or friend, is often amiably unmoved by the other’s problematic emotional messages. Through the reach of their relationship and the utility of his relative imperviousness, he can gently and incrementally dissuade his student from headlong flight down paths that terminate in sorrow.