Bearing Reality: Thinking About Thinking Part II

Patterns of Attention

In the first entry of this series, I shared the raw material from several weeks of reading, highlighted passages without interpretation. If you haven't read the first installment, read it here. In this entry, I want to turn toward the patterns those highlights reveal. Reading is never passive. What we underline and return to exposes something about our internal orientation long before we consciously articulate it. My aim here isn’t to analyze myself in a psychological sense, but to model a discipline I often ask others to engage in: noticing how our thinking shapes itself over time.

When I stepped back and looked at my highlighted pages, one of the first patterns that emerged was a clear preference for frameworks that place human dignity, agency, and responsibility at the center. I am drawn to ideas that refuse to treat people as objects to be managed, soothed, or optimized. What matters is not productivity or efficiency, but the integrity of the person, someone rather than something. That orientation makes sense to me; I have little patience for therapeutic approaches that instrumentalize people in the name of care or that confuse validation with formation.

Aversion to Sentimentality (with personal note)

Another pattern was an aversion to sentimentality. Many of the passages I highlighted rejected the idea that comfort can be offered without cost or that compassion can be meaningful without responsibility. I have always been suspicious of frameworks that promise relief without formation or that attempt to soothe suffering rather than make sense of it.

Part of that orientation makes sense when I look back. I grew up in a home where sentimentality was mocked, where expressions of caring about the world were dismissed as naïve or frivolous unless they produced status, achievement, or financial gain. From an early age, I learned that suffering was not something to be sympathized with but something to be endured, and ideally, endured without drawing attention to it.

I also learned that life does not spare people suffering. The question is not whether we suffer, but whether we do it well. My early attempts at “suffering well” were improvised and, in hindsight, more avoidant than resilient. As a child, I coped through extroversion; as a teenager, through partying; as a college student, through overperformance, i.e., working three jobs, sleeping in my car between classes, studying the work of a field I hadn’t yet joined. I didn’t have language for it at the time, but I was trying to outrun the discomfort rather than learn from it.

As I matured, I began to understand that those strategies weren’t actually helping me bear suffering; they were keeping me from paying attention to what it was asking of me. Over time, I have become more convinced that suffering demands interpretation. To avoid it, numb it, or bypass it is to miss its instruction. That is not to romanticize suffering, it is to refuse to waste it. My aversion to sentimentality, then, is not rooted in cynicism. It is rooted in the belief that suffering deserves better than consolation. It deserves meaning, orientation, and the possibility of integration.

Capacity

I also noticed a consistent respect for capacity. The neuroscience texts in particular reminded me that agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it exists in a body with limits. We don’t abandon responsibility when capacity is compromised, but we also don’t pretend that responsibility is effortless. Much of the highlighted research suggested that maintaining moral orientation under load is not automatic; it requires energy, regulation, and integration across multiple systems. That’s not an excuse; it’s an acknowledgment of reality.

Looking at these patterns together, I can see that I tend to value what I would call formation: the ongoing, sometimes slow process of becoming someone capable of bearing reality without collapsing into despair or denying complexity. Formation is different from problem-solving. It doesn’t ask, “How do I feel better quickly?” or “How do I fix this?” but, “What kind of person must I become to handle this truthfully and well?” Many of the highlighted passages, whether theological, neuroscientific, or literary, were speaking to that question in one form or another.

Authenticity

Another pattern that emerged was a consistent pull toward coherence. Not certainty. Not agreement. Coherence. I’m drawn to ideas that take the whole person seriously: thought, behavior, conviction, and responsibility, instead of allowing them to remain fragmented or compartmentalized. In that sense, what I’m calling coherence is a form of authenticity. Not the cultural version of authenticity that centers self-expression or preference, but a deeper authenticity that requires one’s internal life and external life to be aligned enough to be lived without distortion or at least unrealized distortion.

Fragmentation is its own form of suffering. When our beliefs, emotions, and actions refuse to speak to one another, we lose the ability to act meaningfully in the world. Coherence, or authenticity in this older sense, doesn’t promise simplicity; it simply offers the possibility of being one person rather than several competing versions of ourselves.

As I reviewed these patterns, I noticed something else: resistance. There were domains I did not highlight, places where the material pressed against my preferences or demanded a different kind of attention. That became important because orientation isn’t only revealed by what we embrace; it’s also revealed by what we avoid, minimize, or under-emphasize. I’ll address that in the next entry.

Orientation

Orientation isn’t about making claims or defending positions. It begins by noticing how our thinking takes shape: what we attend to, what we elevate, and what we ignore. Naming patterns isn’t the same as resolving them, but it is the first step toward thinking more authentically and responsibly.

In the next entry, I’ll turn toward what my highlights did not reveal, what I skipped, avoided, or under-emphasized, and why our omissions matter as much as our preferences.