The day-to-day requirements and expectations of social life—to be calm, certain, patient, responsible, impressive, rational, and all the rest—can, in any given moment, go against all the likely reasons to not be any of these things. We are made out of and live in the constant flurry of simultaneous electrical firings and chemical discharges of a brain trying to map a self onto a universe exploding with shifting matter. We sit at the end of this chaos, trying to narrow the ocean of time and space into a tiny, little canal. To successfully function at all, let alone impressively across a whole
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