š You donāt change until you have to
Book of TREE 2.73
Iām an ecstatic materialist who often references Christian texts when writing to a few hundred people of all sorts of (non)spiritualities about how to thrive.
Thatās a fun mix!
Itās got me thinking about why people hold the big beliefs that they do.
Iāll tell you why it is for me.
I grew up believing ā really believing ā what my family believed. If you read my autobiography, you know I owned my beliefs.
Then my kid died and my Christian beliefs no longer provided an answer that satisfied me. My stillborn sonās death started me on a 12-year search for an answer that did.
(Notice Iām not saying the ārightā answer. Iām talking about an answer that is personally satisfactory.)
I wonder how common that pattern is?
Inherited beliefs
disrupted by pain/grief
that canāt be satisfactorily explained by the inherited beliefs
causing a search for
a more resonant answer
resulting in new beliefs
Does that look familiar to you?
I was at Cheltenhamās vintage market on Saturday. The record stall was playing this song. I Shazamed it. Now I know about Susan Cadogan.
Fridayās PUNZLE proved trickier than I thought it would be. The answer is the name of a tasty dip. The clue was: āSpooner wants you to choose deliciously curdled milk. The tastiest curdled milk is cheese. Another word for choose is pick. If itās Spooner who says āpick cheeseā, you know heās mixed up the first sounds of the two words. He meant to say āchickpeasā, which are, as we all know, the main ingredient in hummus.
Grow slowly
Jeff
Iām so glad I rewrote my story. It is my life that is about truth and good stuff. Bad things happened to me like others. I chose to live and love and see my past life as a stepping stone. Iām here now šŖ·
Iām going through something right now thatās potentially changing my beliefs. Itās a GOOD thing though, rather than grief, thatās triggered the change. Either way, youāre rightā¦ I donāt care much about its validity, just that the explanation feels satisfactory at this point in my life.
As for punzle, super clever in hindsight! Though, yes, high on the difficulty level (gotta know spoonerisms, explore varieties of curdled milk, think outside dips and moreso ingredients that need to be processed to be a dip). When the answer didnāt arrive in your late Sunday night email, I toyed with it again to fall asleep. I was working with pick and trying to find the second dip-related word, starting with P, but stopped when I didnāt know if Spooner rules dictated the words had to be spelled correctly. I wonder if this rephrasing couldāve helped a little bit: āSpooner says, āChoose deliciously curdled milk.āā That way itās the same verb: Spooner says pick cheese // Spooner says chick peas. Maybe?