Into the Magic Shop

I've been pretty depressed lately, worrying about so many things, from health to finances to the 16 (!) cats I'm trying to take care of. The other night I looked up depression online and eventually came across mention of a book, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart by James Doty.



Here's a bit about him from Wikipedia ...

James R. Doty, M.D., FACS, FICS (born 1 December 1955) is a Clinical Professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, an affiliate of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart published by Penguin Random House on February 2, 2016. It has been translated into 31 languages. Dr. Doty is also the Senior Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (2017).

I got the book from the library but have to finish the Stargate book I'm reading first before I can get to it ;) Meanwhile, I'm watching this video talk he gave at Google ...



I've got to say, I'm not sure this book will be of much help to me. In the talk Doty says that it isn't the events in our lives that causes us problems, it's our reaction to the events that causes the problems. This neutralizing of events just strikes me as dishonest. If someone is suffering, there is no question that that is a bad thing. To be upset about that bad thing is normal. To find a way to evade the badness so that you won't have to be upset seems wrong to me. I'm not going to give up making objective judgements of the goodness or badness of events and I hope I don't stop being upset about the bad ones.