HAVING FEELINGS IS PAINFUL

So you instinctively retreat into a state of non-feeling.

IN THE WORLD AS TERRIBLE AS THIS LIMIT EMOTIONS.

When encounters with the outside world are painful, when you're actually caught in pain, try to remember or take into account some emotions you are willfully excluding.

What emotions?

Joy, of course.

Allow your mind to rest on those first blades of tentative grass that will poke into the light out of the lava in a million years time.

In order to keep ourselves sane we will have to learn to rely on those blades of grass. It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling tenderness alive, it will be necessary to FEEL these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased,
or what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only.

Or if what we feel is pain then we MUST feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences.

- snippets from Doris Lessing