Cover photograph supplied by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
Rest is an important part of work.
When you look not at what someone is trying to portray but at the person behind the performance, it is easier not to get drawn into the performance itself.
Sometimes shock is needed to set further adaptation in motion. The important thing is not to get stuck in it.
Our immediate adaptation depends on how quickly we mobilise. Long-term adaptation, though, depends on how we can calm down and distribute our strength.
Fixation on novelty eventually disrupts adaptation, because constant impressions stop being a resource and become exhausting and destabilising.
Adaptation is a process of moving towards spending fewer resources on reactions in situations of challenge or threat.
How do you assess whether a strategy for coping with challenge, threat or loss is adaptive or maladaptive? By the possibilities for replenishing the resources spent on adaptation.
Sometimes building a new adaptive repertoire is difficult because it requires changing your image of yourself from someone who cannot cope to someone who can.
Adaptability depends on a broad range of adaptive strategies and the ability to assess realistically the resources immediately available for a particular strategy.
Boredom is exhausted disgust.
Creativity is a way of living through the unbearable.
A large number of obligations may be a desperate attempt to buy a sense of your own importance. The more you owe everyone, the more important you are.
Believing that very little effort can bring a very big result usually leads not to a result but to a very great deal of effort.
Love is what is stronger than all the things we get wound up about.
In cruelty’s shadow lies weakness. In domineering behaviour’s shadow lies powerlessness.
Sometimes keeping yourself exhausted is a way to cope with anxiety. When there is no strength for anything, there is not much strength for worrying either.
Contempt for others is a defensive response when the sense of your own worth is wounded. What I despise cannot pose a significant threat to my sense of dignity.
Consistency and movement in one direction produce more results than bursts in different directions, if only because a burst usually consumes more strength than the progress it brings.
Self-destruction is often self-punishment for guilt you have put on yourself.
Adaptability is not about indifference to circumstances but acceptance. Different things can happen in life; acceptance may take time, but ultimately lets you preserve your strength.