"We love what we take care of, and we take care of what we love. Instead of groaning at the task of treating my cast-iron skillet..."

"... I now treat it as a fulfilling act of service; I know that my time seasoning it with salt and oil will affect its life span and the palate of future generations. I scrub away at the hand-me-down dinnerware from my father-in-law, and I’m connected to him. In an unexpected way, pride has seeped into my kitchen work. Cleanliness is a matter of principle.... Carl Jung once said, 'Modern man can’t see god because he doesn’t look low enough.' Will you find God in your kitchen sink?"

Writes Tyler Shane, in "You don’t need to meditate. Just wash your dishes by hand" (WaPo).

A sense of profundity attaches to one of my cast-iron pans — the one that I grew up hearing called the "spider." It is, I believe, older than I am. I use it all the time and can't imagine what one might do to it that would make it need any more seasoning. Is that low enough?

"The episode... signaled the repudiation of an honored and admired intellectual archetype – the curmudgeon."

"I'm not a close friend, but, as a book writer and former critic myself, I've encountered [Carlin] Romano over the years, and I'd describe him as something of a throwback to an earlier era, when a crusty, Socratic, erudite style carried with it a certain charm. But that's one of the ways Romano seems no longer to fit in. One critics circle board member, Columbia University professor John McWhorter, an African American, agreed with him on the substance of the anti-racism pledge, but told the website Vulture that Romano's way of expressing his dissent was a bit tone-deaf. He 'was not being a modern person in the way he responded' to the anti-racism pledge, McWhorter said, perhaps referring to Romano’s charge that some of the arguments of the anti-racism pledge were 'absolute nonsense.'"

From "Inside an Elite Cancel Culture Session, Where Leftists Met the Enemy and It Was ... One of Them" by Richard Bernstein (RealClearInvestigations).

I'm most fascinated by the question what it means to be "a modern person" these days. The meaning of "modern" is changing!

I googled the phrase and quickly got to Carl Jung's "Modern Man in Search of a Soul":

"12 Rules sets out an interesting and complex model for humanity, and it really has nothing to do with petting a cat or taking your tablets or being kind to lobsters."

"It is about strength, courage, responsibility, and suffering, but it is deep and difficult, and it is not easy to pigeonhole. In a sense, 12 Rules contains a number of hidden structures and hidden processes, and confusingly, these are not always made explicit in the text. The first of these is Deep Time. We are biological creatures, evolved beings who can only be truly understood through a model that encapsulates the notion of geological time.... Quite apart from the immensity of Deep Time, our story must take into account indescribable spans of historical time... His message is far from a 'Christian' one: it is a Jungian one...  Like Jung, Peterson senses a secret unrest that gnaws at the roots of our being, because we have forgotten too much from our long and dangerous journey. We must listen to our myths, understand them, and learn from them.... This leads to a second hidden concept: the Unconscious. Here Peterson recaptures ground that’s become unfashionable in modern psychology. His model is heavily influenced by Freud and Jung. 'You don’t know yourself,' he says. We are not who we thought we were. We carry secret, shameful knowledge that’s scarcely accessible to conscious exploration (Freud). We also carry elements of a Collective Unconscious (Jung) that’s glimpsed via our myths and creation narratives. If you think you are an atheist you are wrong, says Peterson, because your mind has been bent and shaped and molded by a god-fearing past stretching back into the unfathomable abysm of time."

From "Jordan Peterson and the Return of the Stoics/His book in part is about accepting the ubiquity of human suffering. No wonder reviewers don't get it" by Tim Rogers in The American Conservative.

You can buy the book at Amazon, here.

And here's Jordan Peterson doing a nice job on Bill Maher's show last Friday:

"What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size."

Said Carl Jung, quoted in a Psychology Today article from last spring, "You Only Get More of What You Resist—Why?"

Psychologically speaking, resistance and resolution are at opposite poles. For resistance has fundamentally to do with not being able, or willing, to  deal with the negative experiences in your life. And ultimately your happiness depends a lot more on handling—then letting go of—such adversities than it does, self-protectively, denying them, or fighting against them. In addition, so does (unwittingly) holding onto their associated feelings of hurt, sorrow, anxiety, or anger.

Without consciously deciding to, you can even get “attached” to feelings you haven’t resolved. But if you become aware of the exorbitantly high costs of not acknowledging, and working through, these feelings, you’ll realize that heedlessly clinging to them hasn’t at all contributed to your welfare. Quite the opposite.....

I ran across that article as I was looking for a link to put on my coinage "persisting-resisting" in this post, referring to "the people who are persisting-resisting Trump after the election, who go heavily into not-my-President politics." I knew that Mitch McConnell, squelching a Senator, had said "Nevertheless, she persisted" and created a feminist meme and that Hillary Clinton had combined "persist" with its rhyme "resist" in some kind of advice to Democrats. Ah, yes, here it is in all its tin-eared glory:

"Let resistance plus persistence equal progress for our party and our country. Keep fighting. I'll be right there with you every step of the way."

It's worth noticing that the psychologists have gotten there first with the resist/persist rhetoric. I don't know if I trust psychologists more than politicians. The old psychiatrist advice stop resisting sounds rather creepy. I'll be right there with you every step of the way — that's creepy too.

Anyway... connect that Hillary quote and that Jung quote. "Let resistance plus persistence equal progress" and "What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size." Seems like progress will come in the form of more Trump.