My life with Paul before we started the Center was seriousness squared. "People like us squeeze seven years of learning into every one we live," he'd brag — never noticing what living in a pressure cooker was doing to my mental health. There may be some truth in the idea that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger — but is it ever really sane to risk being killed?
When he started coming to the Center several years after I opened it, he was a force of nature. People felt that Center 2.0 had been released, to use the modern metaphor, which now had no time for frivolity, relaxation — or thoughtful reflection either. This started to drive people up the wall. We had several suicides, due to what he would later call "creativity poisoning". None of us knew what to do.
Except for Paul. It was he who figured out that we had failed to appreciate a whole new dimension of life which he now called (needing always to polarize everything he talked about) "fun and pleasure".
All of us breathed a sigh of relief now that the problem had been solved — and went to dinner. We were starving.
Opening passage:
Civilized man needs a sense of his personal importance. He seeks to live in such a way that he experiences life fully. He does not want to die psychologically before the biological fact of death overtakes him. He cannot establish his importance without an inner identity. There are two aspects of man's relationship to his world. The first concerns the way he adapts to that part of his world which is beyond alteration by his personal influence. There are many elements in his world which he must accept as practical realities, such as the fact that when he is a child he is too undeveloped to survive on his own, that physical aging does occur, that various kinds of physical ill-health will have to be dealt with, that the day to day survival needs of society will have to be met through productive job activities, and that he must live in the particular era to which he is born with whatever stage of social progress exists at that time. The second aspect concerns the area of his personal choices, based on judgements concerning what is desirable for him. This is the independent aspect of man's nature. If his independence is to be real, he must have sufficient understanding of himself and others to be able to find alternatives on which to base a choice, and sufficient capacity for responsibility to make his choices effective