… He thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths. He was very conscious of the various forms of passionate madness to which men are prone, and it was this that gave him such a profound belief in the importance of discipline.—BERTRAND RUSSELL WRITING ABOUT JOSEPH CONRADIt Never Gets Any Easier(If You Are Doing It Right)You adjust to being upside down pretty quickly. Sure the blood starts pressing down on your face, and the floor and all its weird grainy ephemera are a whole lot closer, but in general, your body adjusts. Your breathing relaxes; your brain sort of shrugs. When you look around, things don’t appear upside down. They appear as things. That’s a woman siting in Lotus, there’s a radiator, a row of mirrors, a pair of leopard-print Lycra shorts, someone’s irregularly bulging poorly shaven crotch.At the moment, I’m upside down, marveling at this fact, staring at these things.
