Obsidian Sync 2024-12-06 13:43:53

content/daily-notes/2024-12-06.md

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 ### 2024-12-06
 
+> I learned this way of thinking about avoidance from Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a lovely book entitled Time Surfing. Loomans refers metaphorically to the tasks or areas of life you’re avoiding as ‘gnawing rats.’ But he rejects the conventional advice about dealing with them, which is to man/woman up and confront your rats – to get over yourself, in other words, and to attack the problem with brute force. The trouble is that this simply replaces one kind of adversarial relationship with your gnawing rats (‘Stay away from me!’) with another (‘I’m going to destroy you!’). And that’s a recipe for more avoidance over the long term, because who wants to spend their life fighting rats? Loomans’s surprising advice is to befriend them instead. Turn towards your gnawing rats. Forge a relationship with them.
+> 
+> It’s worth noting, I think, that ‘befriending your rats’ isn’t just another way of expressing the timeworn advice to break an intimidating task down into smaller, more manageable chunks. When you do that, you’re reducing the anxiety you feel by reducing the scale of the threat; it’s like separating one rat off from the rest of the pack, in order to more effectively stab it to death. By contrast, to befriend a rat is to defuse the anxiety you feel by transforming the kind of relationship you have with it.