The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely

Author:Dan Ariely
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Consider the story of Andrew Potok, a blind writer who lives in Vermont. Potok was a gifted painter who gradually began losing his sight to an inherited eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Even as his sight failed, something else happened: he began to realize that he could paint with words just as well as he could paint with colors, and he wrote a book about his experience of going blind.16 He said, “I thought I’d go down and hit rock bottom and get stuck in the mud, but liberation came in a magical way. One night I had a dream where words came spewing out of my mouth, like those unfurling, whistling party favors that you blow on. The words were all beautiful colors. I awoke from the dream and realized something new was possible. I felt this lightness in my heart as pleasing words came out of me. To my surprise, they turned out to be pleasing to others. And when they were published, I saw myself as a newly empowered person.”

“One of the big problems with blindness is a slowing of everything,” Potok added. “You’re so busy figuring out where you are in your travels that you have to pay strict attention all the time. It seems that everyone is whizzing by you. And then, one day, you realize that slowness isn’t so bad, that paying more attention has its rewards, and you want to write a book called In Praise of Slowness.” Of course, Potok still regrets his blindness, which poses a thousand daily challenges. But it has been a passport to a new country that he could never previously have imagined visiting.

So imagine again that you are a cellist. Eventually, you would probably change your lifestyle and become involved with new things. You might form new relationships, spend more time with the people you love, pursue a profession in music history, or take a trip to Tahiti. Any of these things is likely to have a large influence on your state of mind and grab your emotional attention. You will always regret the accident—both physically and as a reminder of how life could have been—but its influence will not be as vivid or as incessant as you originally thought it would be. “Time heals all wounds” precisely because, over time, you will partially adapt to the state of your world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.