The Year In Retrospect

It's the end of 2019 as I write this. I haven't been able to post on my blog here for a whole year. I was unconcerned about having lost access to being able to write online because I keep a hand-written journal of my thoughts and observations. Now typing these stories, thoughts and impressions etc. has become a chore instead of the pleasure of communicating! So I'm just going to go forward from here...and gradually type up a post here and there, back-dating to when it was written in the past year.

I don't know how much it really matters. When someone doesn't update their blog, it disappears from view and nobody comes to look at it. It appears that not many people tolerate reading as an activity...unless it takes something like seven seconds or less - which I hear is about the attention span of a goldfish. They would rather watch a video than read.

I prefer reading because I can read rapidly; for me it's as if I'm slurping up words as if they are being absorbed directly as if they are my own thoughts. Reading for me is a form of meditation; it's as if the words I'm reading silence the drivel of my own narrative for awhile. What's with the brain doing this "word salad" so constantly? I find myself stretching out the space between the words I'm thinking and it's such a relief when the words come to a halt. Making art contains this sort of relief for me too, as does listening to music. For me, music also has it's own unique shapes and expressions of thinking that goes beyond words, thankfully. That's why I enjoy do much what musicians do as an expression of how they think in the language of music.

I don't always act on what I read, but the ideas soak into me. I find myself in a way "tonguing" about what I read. What I mean is I go over it again and again in terms of judgment about whether I "like" it or not. Instead I look for where these ideas take me later. It's only rarely and much later that I am motivated to make a judgment about what I read.

The movement trajectory of the ideas are what are important to me, where the ideas are "taking me." I take the supposition of what someone has written or communicated, supposing It is absolutely true for them.

In a way, emotional truth has more impact than absolute truth. The way humans remember things has to do with putting it in the context of a story - which is why testimonials are so powerful.

I'm aware how our English language is structured as if we're constantly adding to the pool of absolute truth-with-a-Capitol-"T." Because of the suspicion of the nature of absolute Truth, our job seems to be to determine not if someone else's description of what's going on is believable but how much they are lying - to themselves and to us!

What about the unknown - where everything we learn comes from? 

What's our relationship to that which we don't know yet? 

How can we imagine that everything that's "valid" has already been discovered, described, catalogued and classified?

Complimenting

Initiated by my Dad's talent for complimenting, I have put quite a bit of effort into the challenge of offering an effective and useful compliment. I believe that it's among our most important jobs as a friend to be able to compliment others. It’s especially valuable to me to get an observation from a stranger who possesses no "vested interest.” They have nothing to gain from offering you approval and/or articulation of a quality they’re noticing that you seem to possess. It’s so useful to get a sense of observations from others about how I "come across" socially, emotionally and creatively.

However, some people react oddly to being complimented. Most commonly, people will avoid receiving a compliment by brushing it off, discounting the value of the compliment, ignoring it, including deciding that the quality of the compliment is "hollow."

Just become someone wasn't the most perceptive or specific about what it is they admire that is the root of their offering, doesn't mean their comment was categorically insincere. If someone offers an unspecific compliment, my next move in that "lame" situation is to open a dialog, saying something like, "It would be more useful to me if you could be more specific?" I might ask them a question to help them to point their observations. Their lack of specifics might mean that they are shy to intrude into the territory of being my judge. When asked about this, especially women will plead that they don’t want to be perceived as vain, proud or better than others.

When being complimented, sometimes people react with, "Why should I care what YOU think?" It's as if a person must have a "right" to offer the compliment! I'm never sure if, by delivering a compliment, I'm setting myself up as an authority who is in a position to bestow the approval that I imply the person supposedly craves from me. I'm just offering an observation.

I love it when people are acute and specific about their observations. Don’t make it “about you,” as in “I like that you...” etc. To just offer what you observe is enough.


At least the intent to bestow a compliment was happening!

Book Review: Guy P. Harrison "Good Thinking"

I've just read a book called "Good Thinking" by Guy P. Harrison at the request of a my best friend who knows I enjoy the topic of thinking skills. This is the rare book that made my judgment hackle rise up. It violated my sense of hypocrisy because of the title being so different from the actual content of the book not containing enough process or tools.

I have to say, that if a writer doesn't have a relationship to what they can learn, I'm not sure that I have much respect for what they communicate that they do know. I mean, can this guy tell me the ways he became convinced that what he does believe is really truth? It doesn't appear so, he just tells me the results of what he knows and tries to convince me he is right.

How did Guy come to his conclusions? He doesn't say, he just writes the content of what he has become convinced is fact and makes fun of people who have not come to the same conclusions as he has grabbed onto as his own beliefs. Granted, some of this fact he relates is interesting because it's about the brain and what's known about it.

This author attempts to convince about what exactly is "good thinking" without telling me what sort of thinking he is actually doing. Rather than just talking about the results of his conclusions, can't he have written a bit more about his process of thinking so someone else can do it instead of having to listen to him pronounce his own results? It appears he cannot - or he all too rarely did not.

It just makes me want to slap him up side the head - because if he did want other people to think...he's going to need to get a bit better at teaching and do less preaching.

(...Which is probably exactly what *I* could stand to do too.)