Dear Abbie - The Non-Advice Podcast

Playfulness is a mode of living that always seemed to me stupendously desirable – almost the acme of experience! But if we want to know what it is, that’s rather hard to pin down.

Clearly, "when you’re hot, you’re hot and when you’re not, you’re not",  but coincidences don’t always foster a good outcome or discourage a bad one.

Courage, Plato said, is knowing what ought to scare you, and what ought not to.

Let’s suppose for a moment that we live many lives, as different personalities in a variety of circumstances. The TV documentaries on reincarnation, and the past life regressions available online, allow us to meet individuals who seem to have recovered far memories.  These can include data not previously known to them but subsequently confirmed by means of old maps, birth records, tombstones, diar...

I’ll venture a definition: a busybody whose interest and advice is not really well-intentioned, though it purports to be.

Whenever I really had fun, I hadn’t sought it and never called it that.  What times am I thinking of?

If the current era were to gain a label, it might be called “The Age of Ambiguity.” Whether in self-praise or regret, there is wide agreement that nothing is clearly X or not-X.  Rather, everything is a bit of both.  Black and white is out.  Grey is in.

When I catch myself silently repeating, everything’s fine , I pay attention.  It’s my somewhat roundabout way of noticing, something’s wrong .

So far as I’ve been able to see, this is a world of desire.  If we no longer care to live, there’s a fair chance we won’t.  Depending on how deep it goes, our bodies will take the message.

Years ago, Esquire magazine ran an article on the state of cancer research and treatment.  It included this line: “When you’re playing against the Big Casino, the odds are with the House.”

Anne was one victim, among millions, of what is by all accounts the World’s Longest Hatred.  

From about the age of twelve or thirteen, I have wanted to be the kind of saint who could merge her own consciousness with God’s.  It was never clear to me whether this longing was really for God or for safety.  Perhaps, I reasoned, if I could only be filled with divine Love, right up to the brim and overflowing, people would not want to hurt me.  Or if they still did, it wouldn’t hurt!  The Love...

It was during that interval that I first felt it.  It was the thing grownups often warned about in a tone that said, you’ll see; the world is not as you think; no one escapes it.

Mom was right.  “You have the price you put on yourself.”  Sooner or later (nowadays it’s generally later) we learn that, and we raise the price.

What is femininity? 

Unlike me, my mother would give advice, solicited and unsolicited.  For example: “Never tell other people your sexual history or how much money you have.  That’s Life Capital.”

For a good many years I had a close woman friend.  She was also a colleague, thus for me among the most cherished of life’s treasures.  We were very different types, almost polar opposites in our ways of responding to everyday life and doing philosophy.

But, to love is to … bring it about that the one you love will … suffer ?  Go figure.

I have been following, with a mixture of emotions — including curiosity and claustrophobia — C. S. Lewis’s account, in Surprised by Joy , of his conversion to theism (belief in a personal God) from his former atheism.  My last and most unexpected reaction has been recognition!  

What is the place of faith in a woman’s life or a man’s?  In what should we have faith and when is it best to withhold it?

When I was about twenty-five, I said to a friend, “I thought, when I’d be twenty- five, I’d be at least wonderful.  But I’m not.”

To marry off Abigail was never a cinch.

There are worlds in each of us that can’t be discovered if we are too wary.

Two roads diverge in a wood.  The word was, you pick one or the other: love or work.    

Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly out of sorts, I imagine how my day or week would look to me if I were a materialist.  That makes me feel better, because I remember that I’m not one.