1. Problems and Pain
我在阅读笔记里试着把这本书里的suffering都改成practicing，pain改成troublesome, discipline改成method 感觉上会更好接受一些。
Once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.
uncomfortable feelings: frustration, greif, sadness, anguish, despair
Life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.
Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning.
Problems call forth out courage and our wisdom.
When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems.
Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems.
We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away, even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain. We attempt to skirt around problems rather than meet them head on. We attempt to get out of them rather than suffer through them.
... proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out.
By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for 'practicing' and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the trouble involved.
Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems.
It will become clear that these tools are techniques of 'practicing', means by which we experience the ‘troublesome’ of problems in such a way as to work them through and solve them successfully, learning and growing in the process.
There are four kinds of 'method': delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.
To the contrary, they are simple tools, and almost all children are adept in their use by the age of ten. The problems lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them, which is love.
2. Delaying Gratification
I suggested that if she were to force herself to accomplish the unpleasant part of her job during the first hour, she would then be free to enjoy the other six.
... being basically a person of strong will, she no longer procrastinates.
Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the trouble first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.
This tool or process of scheduling is learned by most children quite early in life.
At six children may start eating their cake first and the frosting last. Throughout grammar school this early capacity to delay gratification is daily exercised, particularly through the performance of homework.
By the age of twelve some children are already able to sit down on occasion without any parental prompting and complete their homework before they is expected of the adolescent and is considered normal.
These are the problem students, despite average or better intelligence, their grades are poor simply because they do not work. They skip classes or skip school entirely on the whim of the moment. They are impulsive, and their impulsiveness spills over into their social life as well.
Play now, pay later, is their motto. So the psychologists and psychotherapists are called in.
They miss their appointments. They avoid all important and troublesome issues. So usually the attempt at intervention fails, and these children drop out of school, only to continue a pattern of failure that frequently lands them in disastrous marriages.
Why do a majority develop a capacity to delay gratification, while a substantial minority fail, often irretrievably, to develop this capacity.
2020-02-17
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