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Law in Contemporary Society
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Seeing Patterns in the Sand-- By KianaTaghavi - 19 Feb 2025 Moments of reinforcement are effective for me: a Tuesday afternoon, Spotify shuffling on, reluctantly doing [something], oscillating between conclusory thoughts, and oh, if Bon Entendeur plays next, then I was right about [conclusory thought #1]… Perhaps there’s a cosmic pity that feeds me these stimuli, and I feel silly for this, but I find myself more often than not successfully finding ways to externally affirm what I have long arrived at. Generally, shuffled playlists or written language, like Twitter posts or lyrics, give me the opportunity to play psychic, though sometimes I’m able to use bilateral moments, like a conversation, to entertain this silly, self-fulfilling cycle of thought-processing and decision-making. Once I succumbed to the professionals and spent some money on a West Village psychic who didn’t tell me anything that now even has relevance in my life. I think I prefer sporadic, serendipitous moments of reinforcement than artificially organized and ‘legitimized’ ones. I guess that feeds some version of an ego battling naïveté, routine, autonomy, and deference. The multiplicity of identity can co-exist with, and within, the rational self. My rational self seems to actually depend on those magical moments when music and mind temporally match, as much as on sound reasoning and practical decisions. In Standing in the Spaces, Philip Bromberg writes: “A human being's ability to live a life with both authenticity and self-awareness depends on the presence of an ongoing dialectic between separateness and unity of one's self-states, allowing each self to function optimally without foreclosing communication and negotiation between them.” Bromberg treats the unconscious mind as an operation of a dialectical process rather than a unidirectional one. The dialectic in my mind faces what I believe to be one of my more debilitating obstacles: the veneration of linearity. I am a creature of linearity. Tangible, discrete, sequential steps of progress are my metric of fulfillment. I shouldn’t be surprised to admit that I rarely feel meaningful durations of fulfillment. We are taught that fulfillment is a feeling, not a feat, but we also learn that fulfillment at its best is relational, so of course there is an inkling of betrayal when relationships collapse and there is no more part that is worthy of being whole in that moment. And then fulfillment only becomes ever so much as fleeting. It’s therefore refreshing to read Bromberg’s interventions about linear experiences and time, because he does, in fact, affirm that nonlinearity is as essential to a ‘healthy’ sense of self as that which the unitary forces of logic, pragmatism, and convenience create. (Though Bromberg uses illusion of selfhood, not sense of self, which may be an important distinction to develop in a future analysis.) Having surrendered my anxiety to the machine [of logic, of pragmatism], the anxiety transforms into occupation. I take sincere refuge in logical and pragmatic structures of thought and of relation. Of course, they functionally serve to countervail my anxiety, but I have wondered if they ironically create iterative forms of unease and anguish under the guise of occupation. I endeavor to make sense of my observations and connect them, linearly, logically, analytically, and relationally. But rather than accept them, without judgment, the machine turns on. I’m always amused by the “Can we put a pin in this until…?” because, in theory, it’s a lovely notion. In practice, however, it goes against some part of my biology. (Or, perhaps, to invoke Bromberg, the ongoing negotiations in my head are the functional equivalent of preoccupation, which then becomes conflated with self-preservation.) I wonder how the concept of interiority and self-preservation intersect. On the one hand, my most reductive understanding of interiority is internal peace through self-awareness and self-sufficiency. On the other hand, maybe interiority has been weaponized into occupation by the national project of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-help,’ which then triggers my whole psychology of thought. Maybe I’m just seeing patterns in the sand.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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