13 December

‘Relax’ is another contrast word I think, often used incorrectly. You can be more relaxed than you were a moment ago - the contrast - but I don’t think you can just be ‘relaxed’. Being relaxed generally means taking things just as they are, which is really just being present, not a separate state. This matters I think because a lot of people try really hard to relax, when in fact the real problem isn’t that - it’s that they’re not dealing with and understanding a situation well. And a lot of our lives are also organised around work non-relaxed time and holiday/break relaxed time. Which makes work a crap place to be and holiday like a hedonistic orgy of nothingness. Our misunderstanding about relaxing causes us to structure our lives in that binary way.