@lettpoupette The tricks may serve you, however the regret of ruining a real peach will gnawingly remind you that it is not worth the fleeting satisfaction of opening a thousand unripe peaches with them.
No tricks - be you.
Nothing dispels excess aggression and psychic residue quite like combat sport. It is a paradoxical yet elegant way of attaining coherence, for it enables regulation and trains aperture and focal precision amidst hyper-alertness and extreme exertion. It ruthlessly discharges the accumulation of that which is not needed in those with a strong life force while simultaneously enhancing the quality of their creativity thereafter. The ultimate kinetic somatic flush.
My friends are all very different but every single one is, without exception, 1) high openess 2) quite assertive.
They are fiercely interested in all kinds of lives and all kinds of ideas, they do not expect anyone to read their minds, they go after what they want even when it scares them, they agree it is better to love and have lost than never have loved at all. In their eyes there is that unmistakable gleam, once you see it you can never unsee it.
@buridansridge Oh sweet Lauren please do
The writings you weave together reveal parts of me that I intuit, but can rarely put into words in such a precise way
They make me think AND feel
I am very much looking forward to seeing love from your eyes to realise how I see it from my own
My Grandfather died this weekend.
Peacefully, with bliss, he drifted into an everlasting sleep.
A lawyer, barrister, businessman, preacher, loving patriarch.
He lived with voracious spirit. Immeasurable.
Until his final days at 96, nobody could keep up with him.
He would wake up every night at 2AM to read, write, study, pray, sing. An ambition so intense others often could not stomach the fire in his belly.
Of his 6 children, it was my mother he cherished most dearly. Every remaining ounce of his love was poured into her.
It was obvious, grace, beauty and the foundation of unconditional love exist in her as delightful consequence.
For me it was different. In the physical world we were not close. We did not talk much.
For his entire life, he lived with a fire of his own. He had done everything to share it with others, but the intensity was too much.
When he stayed with us, every night he would sneak a peek into my study to see me doing the same as he did: Reading, studying, writing, perfecting through works.
Every night he would smile to himself, it gave joy to his voice. He would try to silence himself as to not disturb me, but I heard new passion in his quieted hums.
For the first time ever, he was no longer so restless. His life efforts were never wasted. He poured so much love into my mother some of his flame went with it.
He never had to force anyone to carry anything.
The radiating light from the inferno was enough.
Love was the secret all this time.
I always had a reverence for him – and every time he looked towards me I could tell he felt the same. Around me he was more quiet; at peace. Relieved. He knew it was done.
He had figured out how to pass it on.
He could take time to rejoice in his creations.
He saw that when nurtured with love and intention, the seeds sprout flowers that do not wither. That is exactly what he did.
His body has returned to slumber in the earth.
But he knows how much love he gave to the soil and seeds that grow there.
He knows all of his offspring will develop exactly as they should.
He has done enough.
So I cannot mourn; what should I grieve when there is no sadness. With every step I am thankful for what he has done to the earth.
I know heaven is spread above our heads.
He has shown me that if you plant seeds of love, affection, and care; heaven also exists in the soil beneath our feet.
For everything you have done, everything you are, and for the prosperity and virtues made possible because of you –
Thank you.
Mission complete. Finally you can get some rest.
You can trust a logical woman because she doesn't just give into whim and vibe, but gives things proper thought, possesses a sense of order, and cares about structure, principle, sustainability and problem solving. And it is these things which are conducive to cooperation, long term planning and the sense that someone is serious, orderly, and more than just their feelings and sentiments, but in possession of a true thinking mind with real depth. She is present in a way that the irrational woman is absent.
And yet you can't trust a logical woman, because her eerie emphasis on pragmatism and absence of overwhelming intensity and failing restraint signifies a lack of devotion, and a devoted woman is not a measured problem solving woman. A logical woman is sterile, flattening and prone to erase the sacred in her calculations and thus lacks proper depth, because everything is kept at a distance from her as an equation to her, rather than a state to be ridden, embodied and intimately known. She is absent in a way the irrational woman is present.
A cold woman is reliable because she keeps her head straight for problem solving, but extremely unreliable because she is too pragmatic, calculating, and mercenary to be truly loyal. Her rationality signifies a lack of emotional attachment, in that she is driven primarily by optimisation and transactionality.
A burning woman is unreliable because she can't think clear enough or deep enough to optimally problem solve, but she is reliable because she is loyal, devoted and bound to her man. Her irrationality signifies her willingness to transcend herself and become more herself, by serving something higher than herself she recognises as part of herself.
The wrong move is to conclude women are categorically uninvestable because irrespective of rational capacity, there is an intolerable flaw (and so you must pick your poison). It is the instinct of the logic dominant man to collapse paradox into a binary with a false conclusion, when the paradox is the point. In a sufficiently great woman, both end points exist in flux, and it is the dance between them which produces a state of generative tension.
The whole being greater than the sum of its parts, as it were. Her contradiction properly integrated into service rather than internal civil war makes her soul denser, more potent, more beautiful.
The great woman then is neither entirely rational, despite a deep capacity for rationality, nor entirely emotional, despite a deep capacity for devotion.
She is the most beautiful, orderly chaos, oscillating to her own rhythm, on her own frequency - a true soul embodying the truth of her soul.
Most people are blind to procedures, they dont change their mind and dont care about you as a person.
It is best to get away as quickly as you can, but its not always the easiest thing to do.
Sometimes you depend on them and then it feels paralyzing - both choices are hard.
Welcome to the world of the flawed.
I watched a documentary on Leonardo da Vinci recently, and I kept waiting for the part where they talk about how great he was. The paintings, the inventions, the genius; You know the story they always tell.
But what got me was something else entirely. The man rarely finished anything.
The Last Supper took three years. His patrons were begging him. Writing letters. Threatening him. He would disappear for days, show up, stare at the wall, add one brushstroke, and leave again.
They genuinely thought something was wrong with him.
And there’s the part nobody talks about - Leonardo was illegitimate. His mother abandoned him. He was barred from every professional institution in Florence.
The guilds, the academies, everything a talented young man was supposed to enter. The system looked at him and said no. Why? Because of who his parents were.
So he did something that changed history. He kinda stopped reading what other men had written and started looking at things directly. Birds. Water. The human body. He dissected over 30 corpses. Many of his moves were illegal, but whatever was driving the guy was too strong.
His notebooks were an absolute mess. Seven thousand pages. Written in mirror script so people couldn't steal his ideas. Jumping from how birds fly to how water moves to the architecture of the human heart - his mind was always on overdrive.
The most creative human being who ever lived.
His exclusion is what made him observe instead of repeat patterns. What If they had let him in, he probably would have learned what everyone else learned and produced what everyone else produced. The rejection forced him to see the world differently. The obsession kept him hungry for 67 years.
He died at 67 and his last words were an apology.
He said he had offended God because his work never reached the quality it should have.
The greatest of all time. Still felt like he wasn't enough.
Again, welcome to the world of the flawed.
While an average woman might compromise—such as choosing a man who is wealthy but less physically attractive—highly attractive women demand maximum perfection across all four distinct evolutionary clusters simultaneously:
• Good Genes (Attractiveness, fitness, masculinity)
• Economic Investment (Wealth, career ambition, status)
• Parenting Proclivities (Desire for home and children, emotional stability)
• Emotional Commitment (Loyalty, devotion, kindness)
Because these four clusters contain traits that are often sociologically and psychologically inversely correlated (e.g., a hyper-aggressive, workaholic corporate executive is statistically less likely to be a highly present, gentle, domestic homebody), demanding the ceiling of all of them simultaneously does create a standard that is mathematically nearly impossible to find in a single human being.
According to evolutionary calibration theory, an attractive woman's brain does not view a multi-hyphenate, flawless "unicorn" man as her equal. She views him as her baseline. Physical attractiveness is a woman's primary currency determining her "mate value" in the mating market. Therefore, she doesn't perceive this impossible man as a rare, superior prize that eclipses her; her evolutionary programming convinces her that a man who possesses elite wealth, peak physical fitness, intense emotional devotion, and perfect parenting traits is simply her equivalent market exchange.
@buridansridge It feels lonely when you are yourself and express emotion and it ends up being the thing that breaks the relationship
Thoughts like this give hope and clarity that it is possible for expressing yourself fully to be welcomed and a good thing
Better nothing, than the wrong thing
There is a difference between technical honesty and genuine transparency. Many who overtly claim to tell the truth utilise linguistic precision, qualifiers, omissions, or selective framing to evade that which they do not wish you to know, for example answering qualified questions in a narrowly accurate way while knowingly avoiding the broader reality being sought - thus, they remain factually correct while strategically obscuring the truth. These patterns will usually occur not only around more salient concerns, but also within minor passing remarks.
Trust your instincts. The micro-idiosyncratic flickers and oddities your intuition silently tracks them on are often more revealing than their words. Those who enjoy opaqueness through such means usually become comfortable over time, and the very same linguistic patterns can then be used to observe the undercurrent of truth which you seek. Patterns always exist.
Do not underestimate the power of presence. Show up for the ones you love, make the effort. Intrinsic want carries disproportionate emotional weight when compared to attendance motivated by duty, obligation, politeness, or social expectation - it counts more because it signals genuine care, to matter enough to be noticed. It is the magic and marvel of expanding what would have been a private contained experience into a meaningful shared reality - the bidirectional giving of finite existence so that two souls can press pretty wildflowers between the pages of their favourite poetry book.