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Reality Acceptance: For Happier and Healthier Lives

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Brian Kirwan

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“I'm fine,"she said, keeping her head down,wiping the back of her hand across her eyes.It was probably too late,but she didn't want him to see she'd been crying.She was fourteen.That's not a child anymore, whatever dumbass old people might think.Parents and teachers,every-one---but friends most of all.All they ever want to do is keep you small. They're scared of who you are becoming. Of what you know.Of who you are.”

“Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life.”

“It's a truism that we see the past as far more distant than it is in reality: my parents were adults before they could share bathrooms with white people; my grandmother was middle-aged before she could confidently enter a voting booth in Alabama. Yet these images fade easily into gentle sepia tones for me today. That's because it's safety, not wisdom, we're after when we look backward. We picture ugly things at a comfortable distance. But Americans distort the past in other ways, too. We see horrible people as exceptional, and their many accomplices as mere captives of their times. We tell ourselves we would contain such wickedness if it arose today, because now we know better. We've learned. In our illusory past, progress has come in decisive and irrevocable strokes.”