The Hammock Papers: Boundaries.

05 July 2024

Boundaries.

Ari Weinzweig on the beauty of building boundaries ...

What all this got me wondering is how do we learn to build better, more holistic, caringly constructed boundaries that benefit both ourselves, and also those around us? What are the characteristics of an effective boundary? I can’t say I’ve arrived at definitive conclusions, but in the interest of shared learning and growth, I’ll share what I’ve got so far.

Reflecting on all this, I began to wonder where we learn about boundaries. I imagine that in some healthy family settings, someone sits down and teaches young people how to have them, but I don’t remember anything of the sort happening in my life. Best I can tell, I just sort of figured them out. I learned some unconsciously from my family growing up. Others, for better and/or for worse, I learned socially. And, perhaps more than any other way, I learned to build many of mine mostly by messing up—many a boundary, in my experience, was established only after something went badly wrong.

Taking a more positive, active, and mindful approach—the metaphorical corollary to working on dry stone walls—to boundary creation sure seems like it would help.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL