June, 1935: Meaning

In this entry of volume two of her diary, Anais Nin is back in Louveciennes after a five-month stay in New York. She notices her old home, which she used to love, rotting away and the walls crumbling around it. It's too quiet, too peaceful, too monotonous, too repetitious, and she doesn't feel like she fits in there anymore; she is restless. She has changed, but nothing around her has changed. She misses the activity, adventure, motion of New York, even if all this activity was meaningless, at least it was new; it wasn't all this sameness she sees around her now.

Anais wants her life to have meaning, and she knows that only she can give it meaning. She says that each individual's life has its own meaning, not the same meaning for all people. She says it's like each person having his own novel about his life. And what gives meaning to Anais' life? Not politics, class, or possessions. She says she makes herself responsible for the fate of every person who comes her way by treating them as human beings and being respectful towards them. She believes if all of us acted this way in unison, there would be no more wars or poverty. I think she's on to something.

April, 1935: Masters of Fate

Anais Nin is in her fourth month in New York city, assisting Dr. Otto Rank, analyzing her own patients. She notes the worst moment for her patients is when they discover they are the masters of their own fate, captains of their own ship. They cannot blame others or bad luck. They are not victims. They are responsible for their attitudes towards the world.

What an eye-opening, mind-expanding awareness this can be. You face reality instead of denying it. You become conscious, discover yourself, and become free. You decide how you spend your resources: time and money. You decide who you want to spend time with and how you spend that time. You decide whether spending money on X is really worthwhile.

You carry your candle out into the world and light it up.

March, 1935: The Potential Self

Anais Nin is still in New York, working as an analyst. She believes that analysis gives vision to the potential self, the self that can be developed after wisdom, insight, maturity and growth become un-stunted through analysis. She wants to help her patients to regain their appetite for life, to fall in love with life, as she has done. Part of this process involves accepting the fact that some compromises must be made, some adjustment is necessary in order to be truly happy and content; otherwise, there is a constant struggle against life. The alternative is to create something that equals what you imagine and live in the world of art, of creation.

This reminds me of a person who is in their twenties, full of hopes and dreams of what their life is going to be. As time goes on, suddenly they are in their thirties, and things may not quite have turned out as they imagined. This is when they make adjustments to their thinking and/or to their plan, or they keep hoping and dreaming and being optimistic, or they become depressed and ready to throw in the towel, wondering what has gone wrong in their life. I've seen a little of all of these attitudes in my own life.

February, 1935: The Real Self

Anais Nin continues to analyze patients who come to her lost, confused, and blind. They cry and become emotionally intimate, and the real self is born as anger, false attitudes, and hatred vanish. Anais believes this cathartic process is the cure for anger and hatred.

I have seen this in myself and in others; as a person is humbled, he/she becomes real and at peace and sees the world with a fresh perspective. It happens every time I get physically sick and hit bottom and then start the recovery process with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude towards life and others.

What are other ways we can rid ourselves of anger and hatred and uncover our real self?

January, 1935: Being Human

In this Diary entry, Anais Nin records a note from Dr. Otto Rank which states that he woke up with a full realization that he has never been human in all his life. He defines being human as acting naturally according to emotions such as cruelty, jealousy, laziness, dependency. Instead, being in the business of helping others instead of hurting others, he has acted with compassion, understanding, and patience. He believes this way of acting is unnatural, not human. The self denial it takes to be good and human is really just a form of self protection based on selfish motives, he feels.

It is often true that human beings suffer and then end up hurting someone else because they've been hurt and have been hardened as a result. Jealousy, anger, rejection gets the best of us and then brings out the worst in us and can grow in to violence. We all want to do our best at whatever we do, and if someone else feels that our best isn't good enough, we may turn on them. This may be based on self protection, but is it selfish as Dr. Rank says? What do you think?

November, 1934: Archeology of the soul

Anais Nin begins The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Two, in New York City, working as an assistant to Dr. Otto Rank. She notices the differences between New York and Paris such as the the emphasis on activity in New York as compared with the emphasis on reflection in Paris. She wonders if she is witnessing a new illness, born of the times. All of this activity leaves no time for reflection, no time for connections, no time for intimacy, no time for friendships or relationships. She imagines herself exploring human beings the way an archaeologist explores artifacts, digging deeply, uncovering, analyzing, learning more.

A new year always puts me in a reflective mood. It is a good time to review and reflect on the year that just ended, think about the highlights and low lights, what I want to do more of, what I want to do less of, analyze myself. If I say I want to do more working out, cooking and baking, connecting more often and more deeply with family and friends, going to the library and studying something, going to church more often, and eating out less often, I then think about what these small changes will do for me, how they'll make me feel. Or maybe I think in terms of goal areas such as health, relationships, spirituality, money, work, and fun and list ideas to move myself forward in each area. Or maybe I just decide to be happy, be a Tigger and not an Eeyore, and hang out with other Tiggers as well.