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Wikipedia reports:
"Negative capability is a theory of the poet John Keats, expressed in his letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 21 December 1817.
"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence."
--Wikipedia
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It IS scary to feel what doesn't bring us joy. What if we don't come back from that place? We wonder, and so yes, we try to avoid feeling and live in fear of sadness. But I do truly believe that it is impossible. I think we feel more than we even know. And that we need ALL that we feel, to some degree, the way everything else in the universe needs what it needs to survive and is equipped. We are all equipped. That we are also all imperfectly equipped makes us never really know when we'll slip. I think we just have to accept both failure and success knowing there is no rest between the two, that they/we are constantly in Keat's state of Negative capability (uncertainties, mysteries, doubts) because even though the clock appears to pause for us to read it, time doesn't stop.
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