Description of feelings

I admire people who can vividly describe their feelings. How about these examples?

• Pain
  Feeling a pain like “a finger crushed under the door, or a tooth under a drill
  
  
• Misery
  Your soul shrinks down to the size of a pea
  

Russell and Stillwater

Today, I feel that I want to sit down and have a dialogue with Russell from the movie Up and Stillwater, a Zen panda from the children book Zen Shorts. Perhaps, they can help me make sense of things.

I am drawn to the dialogue between Russell and Mr. Frederickson when they first met. Here how it goes:
Russell: Good afternoon. Are you in need of any assistance today, sir?
Carl Fredricksen: No.
Russell: I could help you cross the street.
Carl Fredricksen: No.
Russell: I could help you cross your yard?
Carl Fredricksen: No.
Russell: I could help you cross...
Carl Fredricksen: No!
[closes the door on Russell's foot]
Russell: Ow.

Here is a summary of Zen Shorts:
"Michael," said Karl. "There's a really big bear in the backyard." This is how three children meet Stillwater, a giant panda who moves into the neighborhood and tells amazing tales. To Addie he tells a story about the value of material goods. To Michael he pushes the boundaries of good and bad. And to Karl he demonstrates what it means to hold on to frustration.

A case of an empty seat

Today, I read an Op-Ed piece from John Edgar Wideman in the NewYork Times:

This is a story about a black person (who is a professor at Brown University). He has to ride an AMTRACK train from New York city to Providence. Over the four years period, he learned that the seat next to him is almost always empty. Nobody really wants to sit next to him. Why?

His conclusion is "because I can’t accept the bounty of an extra seat without remembering why it’s empty, without wondering if its emptiness isn’t something quite sad. And quite dangerous, also, if left unexamined. "

Very disturbing evidence of why we tend to focus more on our differences than our similarities as human beings.

Rahm Emanuel from David Brooks' perspective

Rahm Emanuel is a departing chief of staff for President Obama. He left the white house to pursue a campaign for a mayor of the city of Chicago.

Here is what David Brooks summarizes Rahm Emanuel as the person he knows:

"Any smart pat of butter would spot him at 100 yards and flee. That’s because Rahm is completely in touch with his affections and aversions. He knows who and what he loves — Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the city of Chicago — and there is nothing hedged about his devotion to those things. He may be a professional tactician, but he speaks the language of loyalty and commitment, not the language of calculations and self-interest. "

"I’m writing this appreciation of Rahm because success has a way of depersonalizing its beneficiaries. From the moment kids are asked to subdue their passions in order to get straight As to the time they arrive at a company and are asked to work 70 hours a week climbing the ladder, people have an incentive to suppress their passions and prune their souls. "

"That’s especially true in Washington, a town with more than its fair share of former hall monitors, a place where politicians engage in these pantomime gestures of faux friendship and become promotable, hollowed-out caricatures of themselves. "

Forming ideas ....

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him"

Leo Tolstoy, 1897

Focusing on our commonalities

"No matter what part of the world we come from, we are all basically the same human beings. We all seek happiness and try to avoid suffering. We have the same basic human needs and is concerns. All of us human beings want freedom and the right to determine our own destiny as individuals and as peoples. That is human nature."

Nobel peace price acceptance speech by the Dalai Lama

Karma and compassion

"You need to contemplate ... that you must die ... When you have done so, you will pay more attention to the deeper aspects of life; you will focus on the way that karma works--the ways your own actions bring about specific effects. When you recognize that ..., you will determine what is important ..."

From the book "Becoming Enlightened" by His Holiness the Dalai Lama