Successful Relationships Reading Corner
This week, Phil said that we’ve written about relationships every week for 15 years. Here are some articles about our writing.
What Does it Feel Like to Experience Peace in Your Relationships? “Hi, Phil and Maude here. We sit down each week and talk about how we are, or how our week has been and how we navigated it, and out of that comes a post. We look for a particular angle or a new way to express how we are, but in the end, it’s just us talking about what it is to experience peace.”
How the Play Between Words and Feelings Affects Your Relationships “Besides writing with Maude, I also write independently on Substack. Maude is away on a trip for a few weeks, so I want to describe some ideas of mine and explain how they apply to relationships. I’ve been thinking about language and how it has captured our attention. Many moons ago, we lived quite successfully without language, but once it was developed, we created ideas about the world far beyond what our senses could tell us. From the Greeks through the scientific revolution, we have come up with ideas about germs, atoms, electromagnetism and much more that we have used to construct society as we know it today. But let us be clear about language. Words are not the world; they are only labels for it, yet they are so powerful that our attention works almost exclusively with them. When we become aware of sensations or feelings, we find words to describe them, and in that way, we incorporate them into our verbal world.”
How Radical Non-Interference Makes Our Relationship Feel So Peaceful ” To write these posts, we hang out at night and jam on how we are and what we’ve been doing, and try to describe our connection in ways that we haven’t used before. It’s difficult because how we are is a sense before it becomes words. When we’re lucky, we come up with a description that goes beyond our common portrayal as peaceful and uses other words. Last night’s conversation went into an area that we don’t find other people writing about, so you might find it esoteric. I’ll put it out here in the hope that you might have a brief glimpse of what is possible. It started with the fact that Maude is going on a 2-week cruise with her brother and sister-in-law, and when she described this to other people, they all assumed I would be going, too. Nothing like that even crossed our minds. That is her trip, and it’s not my style at all. This led to a conversation about the peculiar sense we have of both being completely autonomous and also connected in a very deep way.”