Those that follow me over at All Consuming know that I use the service to catalog some of the media I partake in. It will also show up in my shared items feed when I remember to note that I've watched a movie or read a book. I'm currently reading two books, one sent to me for free by its author and another lent to me by my girlfriend. The first is Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and other American Idiots by Marty Beckerman and the second is Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach.
Beckerman, you'll remember, is the author of Generation S.L.U.T., a fictional novel of teenagers and sex in middle America, read at a time when sex wasn't a part of my life. Having three years of experience, now, I know a little bit about how complicated that can make life, yet in the book love did not inform many of the decisions and actions taken by the characters. In his non-fictional account of spending time with extreme liberal and extreme conservative forces in the United States, it's clear a chapter or two in that he exposes discrepancies between what those forces propose and the methods they use to enact what they propose. Based on a little bit of interaction with both Beckerman himself and reading interviews and his other writings, he projects a high intensity that calls into question his belief that he speaks for the political centre. This, keeping in mind, after only having read a tiny portion of the book so far.
Radical Acceptance, on the other hand, picks up for me where Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen leaves off. In Hagen's book, we get a sense of what Buddhism is, where Tara Brach relates Buddhism to our daily, psychological life. Karen, who lent me the book, recognized I was struggling with the way I was dealing with some strong emotions in the last few months during this, the current episode of my life which people close to me are familiar with. While Dr. Brach's prescription—such as it is prescription—has much for me to in turn struggle with in understanding, putting some of them into practice, particularly the acknowledging and naming of emotions when they are particularly strong, has improved my mental state over its previous state. Some concepts and approaches to explaining them fall short of my full grasping, as I resonate with some of it and outright reject—more like fail to let myself grasp—other parts. More full sentence than two-word phrase, "nothing endures", from Hagen's book, resonated so much with me when I read it that it became a tagline for this website. While the brain fully understands it, the heart needs some convincing. It's with Radical Acceptance, having read half-through, that I've found ways to deal with some of the changes up until the 30th year of existing on this planet that I refused to believe are could happen in my life.
