I sometimes imagine each of us as standing upon stilts. When I look down, I have more than two stilts below me, though each still has a single leg going down to it - I guess I have more than two legs now, although my imagination is too lackluster to sharpen the focus around the midriff area to make it clear how that works. At the base of each stilt there is one of the people that keep me upright in the world. I can’t grip the wood with my hands and direct them; it doesn’t come up past the foot, they’re not that kind of stilt. When the people I’m standing upon move away from me I tilt, waiting until they come back, or I can shuffle the rest of them into a more balanced arrangement. If everyone stays still for a while, or there’s suddenly a benevolent arrangement of support, I might have time to look up. Pyramidal - very cohesive with Maslow.

Sometimes I’m a leaf on the wind. That is, I am unguided, exploratory, seeking change rather than progress. Trying to let go of the cyclical aspects of behaviour, of trauma. The best way not to repeat things is to be on a genuinely different path. The best way to avoid strong emotion is to not be in the situation that calls for it.

What are the consequences of letting go of the brain as a machine, and favouring the brain as a parliament? By introducing politics into our internal decision making models?

What I’m trying to say is we have different ways of understanding ourselves and those metaphors of self guide us into different behaviours. Broadly speaking modern psychology is also doing this a lot of the time. Are negative thoughts separate from the ‘you’ that is keeping track of them? This would mean ‘you’ can identify and reject them. Or are they perhaps coming from some kind transgression of an underlying belief, something that sits below the conscious self, which keeps the self within the lines using the piercing umpire’s whistle of self-loathing?

Is changing the self a zero-sum game? I prefer ‘two sides of the same coin’ over something like a ‘double edged sword’, but the question is the same regardless: personally, can I have the social o​bservation skills without the hyper-criticality? Can I have the analytical power without the sharpness of tongue? Can others have the warmth without the neediness? Can they have the free spirit without the chaos? Is there a perfectly shaped human, living within the geometrically perfect circle? Are all of these models just ways of excusing or rationalising our poor behaviours?

ze frank says, ‘Let me find and use metaphors to help me understand the world around me and give me the strength to get rid of them when it’s apparent they no longer work’. Of course I notice now that he says, ‘to help understand the world around me’ and I remembered it as ‘to help understand myself’. The solipsistic self will intrude. My question really: how I could I think about myself in a way that would allow myself to post this, to begin? If I post it, does that mean I must have found out?