How to Cope When Others Hurt You
'More hearts pine away in secret anguish for unkindness from those who should be their comforters, than for any other calamity in life.'
- Edward Young, English poet (1681-1765)
We don't think in terms of hearts "pining" away these days. But then, Edward Young lived some time back.
Today people are sad, depressed, withdrawn or just plain "hard to get along with." We take pills, eat too much, go dancing, join clubs, watch endless reruns on TV. Or we just mope (pine away).
Loneliness and poorly developed social skills no doubt play a large part in people pining away. It's easier to pine away and be lonely if you don't know how to make new friends. Edward Young brings our attention to one cause we would all rather not think about. Living with someone who is unkind or who doesn't care enough to make life really worthwhile. In most cases, a person suffering this fate reacts the same to each of the two because they can be the same problem with only slightly different faces.
What is an unkindness? It sounds bland and meaningless, unless you're the victim. An unkindness is an act of behaviour by one person that hurts another. It's not the intent of the doer, but the reaction of the receiver that matters. Neglect can also be an act of unkindness.
Of course you may be tempted to think that something considered an unkindness is personal, that, as some believe of happiness, unkindness is a personal choice. In that case, if a person chooses to see the action of another as an unkindness, it is, but if the person chooses to ignore the act, it's not an unkindness. Choose to see something as unkind or choose to not think anything of it.
It doesn't work that way in real life. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. What one person considers unkindness seems beyond their control. If an act violates the basic life values of a person, that person is incapable of controlling their reaction. If the unkindness is in the form of neglect, that may be outside of their control as well.
What's the choice? The choice is to consider unkindness from someone we care about as not worth time or thought. Just ignore it. But ignoring behaviours that used to hurt stuns the emotions, makes them "cold." No one who is capable of deep feelings for others wants to lose that, to become cold, to maybe lose the ability to love in the process.
Therapist offices fill each day with people who feel others have been unkind, are unkind, continue to be unkind to them. They don't know how to cope with a problem they believe rests with the other person. More lives are ruined by an inability to cope with problems than for any other single reason.
So is living with or being close to a friend, neighbour or workmate who is unkind--who commits unkind acts--hopeless? It is if you believe it is.
If the unkind person is someone you live with and you want to continue that relationship, you need to show the unkind person more love. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to love them more or have sex more often. We humans assess the weight or value of the love that others have for us by touch. The more someone touches us, the more we feel that person shows their love. The touch may be casual, such as touching the other's arm as you pass. It could also be a lingering touch, such as when you watch television sitting next to each other or do something else together. Just don't linger long enough that the touch seems fake or contrived. That's turns people off.
Of course the touch method of assessing love works both ways. But many people don't know that. In fact, some people find touch--even loving touch--in some circumstances almost offensive. That kind of person lacked love and touch as a child. Learning to touch and to be touched may take that person years, but they will come around. Consistency and persistence matters. They can change if they want to and if the other person tries hard enough for long enough.
Friends, workmates and neighbours can also find ways to touch each other casually. Often that involves a hand touching the arm of the other as a means of emphasis in a conversation. That kind of touch is always brief, never more than a second or two. Longer than that could cause alarm or suspicion.
Dealing with a situation of repeated unkindness almost always involves doing something you are not accustomed to doing. If you were doing it already, the unkindness may never have occurred.
Will this method work for everyone? No. Some people are emotionally cold and can't be changed. The choice then is to stay or leave, keep the friendship or find other friends. Staying with an emotionally distant mate does not necessarily mean living a life in the belief that the other person doesn't love you. It means accepting what you can't change and doing something differently yourself.
Join a group or activity where touching is a part of the activity. Take dancing lessons, for example, or join a group where close contact is the norm. Or help others. Many volunteer situations involve circumstances where two people touch in the course of an event. Volunteering can help both the person who needs help and the volunteer. Both benefit.
Often people who need help from others have found themselves in that situation because they could not cope with their life circumstances. Sometimes those life circumstances involve needing loving touch and having no way to get it. Lives can literally dribble away when people need love and touch, don't know it, and waste their life away looking for something they don't understand in places they will never find it.
Any problem you may have with another person may be very hard to cope with. Now you have a choice. You have a way to improve the relationship between you. Or you can leave. The latter choice may not be easy, especially if the other person is a spouse or life mate. It doesn't guarantee eventual happiness either, especially if leaving means finding yourself in a life situation where you need social assistance just to survive.
Learning coping strategies may be the best answer. It isn't easy. Life problems and working through them never are.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for people who need to learn what they missed as children or who want to teach their own children what they need so they won't grow up to be socially or emotionally unbalanced adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
The Movie That Changed My Life, And May Change The World
The Movie That Changed My Life, And May Change The World
If you plan for one year, plant rice.
If you plan for ten years, plant trees.If you plan for 100 years, educate mankind.
- Chinese proverb
1967 proved a banner year for young movie star Sidney Poitier, with three major films in a single year to his credit. The least popular movie at the time was the British school flick To Sir, With Love. The song of the same name, sung by Scottish actor/singer Lulu hit number 1 on the US pop Billboard charts and was rated the best pop single of 1967 by billboard.
While the music of the song was spectacular (I could have lived in Dreamland with that song), its lyrics may have ruined the extremely important message made by the film. "How can you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume" made parents believe the movie was about a lovesick teenage girl who had a crush on her teacher, and who needed another one of those? Are teachers really teaching about perfume in school?
The movie took place in an East London high school where the senior class wanted nothing more than to get out of school and find jobs. The curriculum had so little bearing on their future (Denham: "I've me own barra when I'm finished here") that disruption of class became their primary objective in life. New teacher Mark Thackeray (Poitier) had no more success than his predecessors. Those kids were more misbehaved than any teacher deserves. They took in nothing of the lessons anyone taught.
Then Thackeray had an inspiration. Denham needed to know more about life than just how to conduct business from a fruit and vegetable stand (barrow). They needed life skills. When he changed his teaching from "This is the grammar and arithmetic the school wants me to teach you" to a "This is what you need to know to get through each day of your life" style, he had their attention. The misbehaviour stopped like magic. Of course it worked out beautifully, it was a movie. But its message was critically important for me then and it's critically important for each of us today. (I became a teacher and studied the sociology of education.)
No child starts out life wanting to be antisocial, to be a misfit. Before anything else, they want to know what they need to get through their lives. They want to know what problems they will face as they get older and how to cope with them. They want to know how to make friends, how to patch up broken friendships, how to find a mate, how to act with a boyfriend or girlfriend, what skills they need to know in their heads in order to survive the working world. They need to know the survival skills of adulthood.
To most kids, social and emotional needs take precedence over intellectual needs and sports. If they can't find answers to their questions on these subjects, they can't bring themselves to care about the school curriculum. They don't care much about learning to read if their parents fight at home every night. Sometimes they know inherently that they need something, but don't know what. They expect their parents or teachers to provide that information without their having to ask. When it doesn't come, they object. They misbehave. They bully. They steal. They take drugs. They do whatever they can to make up for the lack that has turned into a permanent hurt.
They are broken. Why try to fix broken people if you can prevent them from breaking in the first place?
To Sir, With Love
Still, in most school jurisdictions, curriculum remains mired in the 19th century. Discipline is worse than ever before. The admonishment to "return to the basics" has failed. The basics of life are not reading, writing and arithmetic, but life skills. If you don't know how to cope with your problems, what good will it do to know the rules of grammar or how to do trigonometry? What good is a job with high pay if half or more of it goes to the spouse you couldn't manage to live with because you didn't know how?
The students who were in high school in the late 1960s and succeeding decades have become adults and now constitute the main constituency that operate our companies, that elect our political leaders, that make decisions that affect our lives. When the most common medical prescription in the USA is Prozac and use of marijuana and alcohol has become so pervasive that they can't be evaded at parties and social gatherings of all sorts, we must wonder if our schools are teaching what the future adults who run everything really need. When we examine the politics of the USA, Egypt, Israel, Sudan, Russia, China, Indonesia and many other countries, we must ask ourselves if we are teaching what kids really need. If we taught what they need, they wouldn't mess up their lives so badly.
The world is indeed a messy place to live. At this time we have little choice but to live in the mess. But it doesn't have to remain a mess.
The means and opportunities to correct our problems are in our schools. We elect the people who set school curriculum. We can make changes if we speak up about them.
As always, if we leave it to others to make decisions for us, they will make decisions that will benefit them more than the rest of us. Change happens at the ballot box. That kind of change can only happen when we all help to inform others about what is needed. Spread the word.
Education is your affair, not something you leave to leaders of industry and political parties.
Speak up. Talk to others. Forward this article to other people you believe might care.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for changing school curriculum and teaching by parents that will help make the 21st century the one that finally gets it right. Kids matter and this book teaches us how to make that work for all of us.
Learn more at was far from the last attempt the film industry made to try to turn school curriculum away from traditional lessons that kids know they will never use to material that every one can and will use in their lives. Why Shoot the Teacher?, The Principal, Conrack, Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Teachers, Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, Mr. Holland's Opus, Music of the Heart, Take the Lead, Freedom Writers, The Ron Clark Story and Sister Act 2 picked up on the same theme.Turning It Around makes clear proposals that will prevent kids from breaking, from becoming social problems for their communities and heartaches for their parents. The book has answers, solutions that are virtually without cost, but require some changes in what teachers are allowed to teach, what they are allowed to tell the kids whose futures are in their hands.http://billallin.com
If you plan for one year, plant rice.
If you plan for ten years, plant trees.If you plan for 100 years, educate mankind.
- Chinese proverb
1967 proved a banner year for young movie star Sidney Poitier, with three major films in a single year to his credit. The least popular movie at the time was the British school flick To Sir, With Love. The song of the same name, sung by Scottish actor/singer Lulu hit number 1 on the US pop Billboard charts and was rated the best pop single of 1967 by billboard.
While the music of the song was spectacular (I could have lived in Dreamland with that song), its lyrics may have ruined the extremely important message made by the film. "How can you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume" made parents believe the movie was about a lovesick teenage girl who had a crush on her teacher, and who needed another one of those? Are teachers really teaching about perfume in school?
The movie took place in an East London high school where the senior class wanted nothing more than to get out of school and find jobs. The curriculum had so little bearing on their future (Denham: "I've me own barra when I'm finished here") that disruption of class became their primary objective in life. New teacher Mark Thackeray (Poitier) had no more success than his predecessors. Those kids were more misbehaved than any teacher deserves. They took in nothing of the lessons anyone taught.
Then Thackeray had an inspiration. Denham needed to know more about life than just how to conduct business from a fruit and vegetable stand (barrow). They needed life skills. When he changed his teaching from "This is the grammar and arithmetic the school wants me to teach you" to a "This is what you need to know to get through each day of your life" style, he had their attention. The misbehaviour stopped like magic. Of course it worked out beautifully, it was a movie. But its message was critically important for me then and it's critically important for each of us today. (I became a teacher and studied the sociology of education.)
No child starts out life wanting to be antisocial, to be a misfit. Before anything else, they want to know what they need to get through their lives. They want to know what problems they will face as they get older and how to cope with them. They want to know how to make friends, how to patch up broken friendships, how to find a mate, how to act with a boyfriend or girlfriend, what skills they need to know in their heads in order to survive the working world. They need to know the survival skills of adulthood.
To most kids, social and emotional needs take precedence over intellectual needs and sports. If they can't find answers to their questions on these subjects, they can't bring themselves to care about the school curriculum. They don't care much about learning to read if their parents fight at home every night. Sometimes they know inherently that they need something, but don't know what. They expect their parents or teachers to provide that information without their having to ask. When it doesn't come, they object. They misbehave. They bully. They steal. They take drugs. They do whatever they can to make up for the lack that has turned into a permanent hurt.
They are broken. Why try to fix broken people if you can prevent them from breaking in the first place?
To Sir, With Love
Still, in most school jurisdictions, curriculum remains mired in the 19th century. Discipline is worse than ever before. The admonishment to "return to the basics" has failed. The basics of life are not reading, writing and arithmetic, but life skills. If you don't know how to cope with your problems, what good will it do to know the rules of grammar or how to do trigonometry? What good is a job with high pay if half or more of it goes to the spouse you couldn't manage to live with because you didn't know how?
The students who were in high school in the late 1960s and succeeding decades have become adults and now constitute the main constituency that operate our companies, that elect our political leaders, that make decisions that affect our lives. When the most common medical prescription in the USA is Prozac and use of marijuana and alcohol has become so pervasive that they can't be evaded at parties and social gatherings of all sorts, we must wonder if our schools are teaching what the future adults who run everything really need. When we examine the politics of the USA, Egypt, Israel, Sudan, Russia, China, Indonesia and many other countries, we must ask ourselves if we are teaching what kids really need. If we taught what they need, they wouldn't mess up their lives so badly.
The world is indeed a messy place to live. At this time we have little choice but to live in the mess. But it doesn't have to remain a mess.
The means and opportunities to correct our problems are in our schools. We elect the people who set school curriculum. We can make changes if we speak up about them.
As always, if we leave it to others to make decisions for us, they will make decisions that will benefit them more than the rest of us. Change happens at the ballot box. That kind of change can only happen when we all help to inform others about what is needed. Spread the word.
Education is your affair, not something you leave to leaders of industry and political parties.
Speak up. Talk to others. Forward this article to other people you believe might care.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for changing school curriculum and teaching by parents that will help make the 21st century the one that finally gets it right. Kids matter and this book teaches us how to make that work for all of us.
Learn more at was far from the last attempt the film industry made to try to turn school curriculum away from traditional lessons that kids know they will never use to material that every one can and will use in their lives. Why Shoot the Teacher?, The Principal, Conrack, Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Teachers, Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, Mr. Holland's Opus, Music of the Heart, Take the Lead, Freedom Writers, The Ron Clark Story and Sister Act 2 picked up on the same theme.Turning It Around makes clear proposals that will prevent kids from breaking, from becoming social problems for their communities and heartaches for their parents. The book has answers, solutions that are virtually without cost, but require some changes in what teachers are allowed to teach, what they are allowed to tell the kids whose futures are in their hands.http://billallin.com
Monday, December 13, 2010
I Can't Take It Any More
I Can't Take It Any More
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
- Leo Buscaglia, American author, motivational speaker, "Dr. Love" (1924-1998)
When someone has the power to change lives, to make others feel as if their lives have been saved and are much improved, that person deserves attention.
To me, Leo Buscaglia was "the Hug Doctor." He hugged everyone. Even other men did not feel threatened as Leo's infectious smile convinced them that they wanted to be hugged by him. He made others want to hug each other.
My father introduced me to Leo Buscaglia through the latter's many PBS specials. It shocked me when my father first hugged me after seeing Dr. Buscaglia. As a young man who played competitive hockey in a violent league, my father was more apt to fight (even to need police protection because of it) than to hug. As a father he avoided hugging me as he preferred hugging a liquor bottle. My father didn't know how to hug, had no idea how important touch was to a child. A fatherless child himself, he didn't know much about parenting.He had given up alcohol at age 65. He started hugging after he saw Leo. My father came to like hugging. I came to believe that he was a pretty good guy after all. Before he retired he was just the man who came home for supper and naps. Not for hugging.
That sequence of events is important. From Leo I learned that everyone likes to be hugged. As I studied the subject more, I began to understand how important touch is to people. Strange as it may sound to those unfamiliar with the subject, loving touch (hugging is a prime example) is the way we measure love.
We may not know for sure what love is, though everyone wants it, and most of us don't know how to measure love or how to give it in such as way that the message of love will be accepted and understood. Now you do. Give it with a smile, by holding hands, by dancing, with flowers, any way you like. Just make sure you back up your message with loving touch.
It doesn't really matter what kind of touch so long as it's understood as loving by both people. As the Nike ads say, just do it. Something deep inside us tells us that the people who love us most touch us most.What does hugging have to do with worry, the core of the quote? Quite a bit, as you will see.
Worry has no positive side. It's all negative. Worry has never solved anything, but it has destroyed lives and relationships. What's more, people worry mostly about things that never happen. It's like an addiction. How can a person stop worrying if he or she is a worrying kind of person?
How about a hug? No one can give and receive a decent hug and worry at the same time. But hugs last only a few seconds, so how can a person stop themselves from resuming their ingrained habit of worrying?
One hug will not suffice for anyone. Eighteen a day will. Every day. (What? Is he joking?) If you can't imagine hugging someone you love 18 times every day, you need other forms of loving touch to substitute in for the hugs you can't perform.
You will find it extremely hard to worry when someone you love and who loves you hugs you or touches you in a loving way 18 times every day. Can't fit that in? Can't imagine someone who loves you finding time? That's like saying you can't find time to put gas into your car. You can find time if it matters. Love matters, at least if you want to keep it.Do you have trouble coping with your problems sometimes? Maybe most of the time? The biggest part of a coping deficit is confusion. The easiest way to alleviate confusion in your life is to have lots of love in it. How do you get that? Right, hugging and loving touch. (See? You have been paying attention.) Your mind will be better prepared to cope with problems in your life if it doesn't get bogged down in its search for love.
Your mind will be clear and your problems seem small if you don't feel a lack of love. And how will you know if you have enough love in your life? For one thing, you won't be worrying about your problems. For another, you will feel loved. Yes, it really is that simple.Leo Buscaglia was loved by everyone he knew. At least by everyone he hugged. And who hugged back. I have seen two documentaries that showed two women who lived alone, in different cities (they may both have been widows) who knew they needed hugs but could no longer get them in the way they formerly could. Each one went out onto a main street in their city and asked total strangers if they wanted a hug. In each case, more than half of the strangers said they did want a hug. They got one. None complained. Some came day after day for more helpings.Love, hugging, lack of worry and having the ability to cope with our problems all help our immune systems to function at their best. Studies have shown that immune systems are compromised by worry over problems and lack of love.
How do you get love if you don't have enough or someone to give you more hugs? Love has a secret. Just as hugging requires at least two people, love works best with two or more. However, while a hug usually requires equal participation by all parties, love does not. Give love and you will get back more than you gave. You may not get back more from everyone, but the extra from some will more than make up for it.
Who should you give your love to? Turn it around and ask yourself if you would refuse an offer of love from anyone. But...love? Sometimes love is shown simply by caring for others. Care for someone who has no one to care for them.
Care about others who need your help. They will perceive it as love. You will feel good.
Now go and practice what you have learned. Just do it. Prove to yourself that it works.Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, teachers and anyone who wants to learn the basics of what everyone should know about life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
- Leo Buscaglia, American author, motivational speaker, "Dr. Love" (1924-1998)
When someone has the power to change lives, to make others feel as if their lives have been saved and are much improved, that person deserves attention.
To me, Leo Buscaglia was "the Hug Doctor." He hugged everyone. Even other men did not feel threatened as Leo's infectious smile convinced them that they wanted to be hugged by him. He made others want to hug each other.
My father introduced me to Leo Buscaglia through the latter's many PBS specials. It shocked me when my father first hugged me after seeing Dr. Buscaglia. As a young man who played competitive hockey in a violent league, my father was more apt to fight (even to need police protection because of it) than to hug. As a father he avoided hugging me as he preferred hugging a liquor bottle. My father didn't know how to hug, had no idea how important touch was to a child. A fatherless child himself, he didn't know much about parenting.He had given up alcohol at age 65. He started hugging after he saw Leo. My father came to like hugging. I came to believe that he was a pretty good guy after all. Before he retired he was just the man who came home for supper and naps. Not for hugging.
That sequence of events is important. From Leo I learned that everyone likes to be hugged. As I studied the subject more, I began to understand how important touch is to people. Strange as it may sound to those unfamiliar with the subject, loving touch (hugging is a prime example) is the way we measure love.
We may not know for sure what love is, though everyone wants it, and most of us don't know how to measure love or how to give it in such as way that the message of love will be accepted and understood. Now you do. Give it with a smile, by holding hands, by dancing, with flowers, any way you like. Just make sure you back up your message with loving touch.
It doesn't really matter what kind of touch so long as it's understood as loving by both people. As the Nike ads say, just do it. Something deep inside us tells us that the people who love us most touch us most.What does hugging have to do with worry, the core of the quote? Quite a bit, as you will see.
Worry has no positive side. It's all negative. Worry has never solved anything, but it has destroyed lives and relationships. What's more, people worry mostly about things that never happen. It's like an addiction. How can a person stop worrying if he or she is a worrying kind of person?
How about a hug? No one can give and receive a decent hug and worry at the same time. But hugs last only a few seconds, so how can a person stop themselves from resuming their ingrained habit of worrying?
One hug will not suffice for anyone. Eighteen a day will. Every day. (What? Is he joking?) If you can't imagine hugging someone you love 18 times every day, you need other forms of loving touch to substitute in for the hugs you can't perform.
You will find it extremely hard to worry when someone you love and who loves you hugs you or touches you in a loving way 18 times every day. Can't fit that in? Can't imagine someone who loves you finding time? That's like saying you can't find time to put gas into your car. You can find time if it matters. Love matters, at least if you want to keep it.Do you have trouble coping with your problems sometimes? Maybe most of the time? The biggest part of a coping deficit is confusion. The easiest way to alleviate confusion in your life is to have lots of love in it. How do you get that? Right, hugging and loving touch. (See? You have been paying attention.) Your mind will be better prepared to cope with problems in your life if it doesn't get bogged down in its search for love.
Your mind will be clear and your problems seem small if you don't feel a lack of love. And how will you know if you have enough love in your life? For one thing, you won't be worrying about your problems. For another, you will feel loved. Yes, it really is that simple.Leo Buscaglia was loved by everyone he knew. At least by everyone he hugged. And who hugged back. I have seen two documentaries that showed two women who lived alone, in different cities (they may both have been widows) who knew they needed hugs but could no longer get them in the way they formerly could. Each one went out onto a main street in their city and asked total strangers if they wanted a hug. In each case, more than half of the strangers said they did want a hug. They got one. None complained. Some came day after day for more helpings.Love, hugging, lack of worry and having the ability to cope with our problems all help our immune systems to function at their best. Studies have shown that immune systems are compromised by worry over problems and lack of love.
How do you get love if you don't have enough or someone to give you more hugs? Love has a secret. Just as hugging requires at least two people, love works best with two or more. However, while a hug usually requires equal participation by all parties, love does not. Give love and you will get back more than you gave. You may not get back more from everyone, but the extra from some will more than make up for it.
Who should you give your love to? Turn it around and ask yourself if you would refuse an offer of love from anyone. But...love? Sometimes love is shown simply by caring for others. Care for someone who has no one to care for them.
Care about others who need your help. They will perceive it as love. You will feel good.
Now go and practice what you have learned. Just do it. Prove to yourself that it works.Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, teachers and anyone who wants to learn the basics of what everyone should know about life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Love and Happiness: Good Advertising Words, Not Real Emotions
Love and Happiness: Good Advertising Words, Not Real Emotions
Oh, threats of hell and hopes of paradise!
One thing at least is certain -- this life flies;
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
- Omar Khayyam, Persian polymath, poet, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and physician (1048-1131)
Love, happiness. Nice words. What does "nice" mean? Well, "positive." Except sometimes, such as when "What a nice outfit!" hides enough sarcasm to drown a rat.
How about the other words? Love. What does love mean? Again, it's positive, of that we can be certain. But is it? How positive would you consider love to be if a man loves his neighbour's young son? Don't stalkers love the movie stars or ex-lovers they follow around everywhere?
What does the word "love" even mean? A wife and husband may love each other, but their love always differs one from the other. In fact, on close examination, every case of love is different from every other. The word usually takes more space in dictionaries than any other word in the English language. How can we love if we don't know for certain what the word means? We do know that most of the time we like hearing it when others tell us they love us. It's a warm fuzzy with no substance behind it.
What is happiness? Most people have an idea, until you try to pin them down to words to describe it. The first dictionary I checked had this as its first meaning: "state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy." The dictionary uses a description that isn't definite. Characterized by a range of emotions. A range? Even the dictionary won't pin itself down to a meaning we can all latch onto.
I submit that love and happiness are not emotions at all. Religions use words such as "God" and "mother" to elicit warm feelings in their followers. Advertisers use "love" and "happiness" to arouse similar feelings, which people then associate with their product or service.
"Love" and "happiness" are advertising and entertainment lingo that mean little, but that make people feel good and want to buy products or watch movies. Have doubts? Watch a few television commercials and see how many have people who are obviously "happy" or "in love." Broad smiles that make people look beautiful as well as happy are so common in advertising today that it's impossible to land a gig in a magazine ad or a television spot unless you have perfect pre-whitened teeth you are prepared to show off in a big grin the way women used to show off certain parts of their bodies to sell product.
I know, I am presenting good ideas in a coarse manner. I want you to understand how you are manipulated into believing things by comforting words that give you warm feelings but that have virtually no verifiable meaning.
In religion, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of what God (presented as male) will do for you is what a devoted mother would do. If you are old enough to have left the home of your mother, no problem, as God will look after you. All you have to do is to believe, to have faith that God is with you always.
I'm not saying there is no God. There is, I have experienced God and have sufficient evidence that I could convince any jury in a court of law. But I have evidence of God, whereas most religions have no evidence that is irrefutable. I don't look for followers of my religious ideas because I have no intention of profiting from their donations. Religions do. Advertisers and advertising agencies do. They are professionals and they are good at what they do.
You need to know when you are being swindled, hoodwinked. If you don't, it will cost you money and emotional energy, a part of your life. The science that studies these sorts of things is sociology. The people who use their knowledge and skills to twist minds--including those behind the leaders of major political parties--are essentially propagandists and brainwashers. They understand human nature and take advantage of those who don't.
I won't ask you to believe what I have said, because of what I have learned over many years in sociology and education. Learn for yourself. As I said, I don't want to make money off you or convince you of anything you can learn for yourself.
So, learn it. Then you will see how easily people around you are manipulated into thinking and believing what certain experts want them to believe. They believe what they are told to believe. The more often they are told they should believe a message, the more likely they are to believe it. Now you know why the same commercials appear so often on television on the same night, for example. Tell people something often enough and a certain percentage of them will believe it as fact. Even if the message is an outright lie.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to understand all the ways children need to develop, not just the limited amount they learn in school. If you know kids with problems, you know kids who have not developed in all ways. They can be fixed, but it's better to prevent them from having problems in the first place by knowing what they need. The book tells you how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Oh, threats of hell and hopes of paradise!
One thing at least is certain -- this life flies;
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
- Omar Khayyam, Persian polymath, poet, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and physician (1048-1131)
Love, happiness. Nice words. What does "nice" mean? Well, "positive." Except sometimes, such as when "What a nice outfit!" hides enough sarcasm to drown a rat.
How about the other words? Love. What does love mean? Again, it's positive, of that we can be certain. But is it? How positive would you consider love to be if a man loves his neighbour's young son? Don't stalkers love the movie stars or ex-lovers they follow around everywhere?
What does the word "love" even mean? A wife and husband may love each other, but their love always differs one from the other. In fact, on close examination, every case of love is different from every other. The word usually takes more space in dictionaries than any other word in the English language. How can we love if we don't know for certain what the word means? We do know that most of the time we like hearing it when others tell us they love us. It's a warm fuzzy with no substance behind it.
What is happiness? Most people have an idea, until you try to pin them down to words to describe it. The first dictionary I checked had this as its first meaning: "state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy." The dictionary uses a description that isn't definite. Characterized by a range of emotions. A range? Even the dictionary won't pin itself down to a meaning we can all latch onto.
I submit that love and happiness are not emotions at all. Religions use words such as "God" and "mother" to elicit warm feelings in their followers. Advertisers use "love" and "happiness" to arouse similar feelings, which people then associate with their product or service.
"Love" and "happiness" are advertising and entertainment lingo that mean little, but that make people feel good and want to buy products or watch movies. Have doubts? Watch a few television commercials and see how many have people who are obviously "happy" or "in love." Broad smiles that make people look beautiful as well as happy are so common in advertising today that it's impossible to land a gig in a magazine ad or a television spot unless you have perfect pre-whitened teeth you are prepared to show off in a big grin the way women used to show off certain parts of their bodies to sell product.
I know, I am presenting good ideas in a coarse manner. I want you to understand how you are manipulated into believing things by comforting words that give you warm feelings but that have virtually no verifiable meaning.
In religion, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of what God (presented as male) will do for you is what a devoted mother would do. If you are old enough to have left the home of your mother, no problem, as God will look after you. All you have to do is to believe, to have faith that God is with you always.
I'm not saying there is no God. There is, I have experienced God and have sufficient evidence that I could convince any jury in a court of law. But I have evidence of God, whereas most religions have no evidence that is irrefutable. I don't look for followers of my religious ideas because I have no intention of profiting from their donations. Religions do. Advertisers and advertising agencies do. They are professionals and they are good at what they do.
You need to know when you are being swindled, hoodwinked. If you don't, it will cost you money and emotional energy, a part of your life. The science that studies these sorts of things is sociology. The people who use their knowledge and skills to twist minds--including those behind the leaders of major political parties--are essentially propagandists and brainwashers. They understand human nature and take advantage of those who don't.
I won't ask you to believe what I have said, because of what I have learned over many years in sociology and education. Learn for yourself. As I said, I don't want to make money off you or convince you of anything you can learn for yourself.
So, learn it. Then you will see how easily people around you are manipulated into thinking and believing what certain experts want them to believe. They believe what they are told to believe. The more often they are told they should believe a message, the more likely they are to believe it. Now you know why the same commercials appear so often on television on the same night, for example. Tell people something often enough and a certain percentage of them will believe it as fact. Even if the message is an outright lie.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to understand all the ways children need to develop, not just the limited amount they learn in school. If you know kids with problems, you know kids who have not developed in all ways. They can be fixed, but it's better to prevent them from having problems in the first place by knowing what they need. The book tells you how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Monday, January 19, 2009
When You Want to Get Rid of an Enemy
One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
- E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)
Having an enemy requires a similar amount of time to having a spouse. The commitment must be the same as well. The amount of emotional energy consumed in maintaining the enmity may be even greater than that required for having a loving spousal relationship.
A person who maintains another as an enemy is Obsessive-Compulsive (OC). It makes no sense logically to expend so much energy on someone from whom you get little in return. It's like having a hobby you can't tear yourself away form, a hobby that is destructive rather than constructive.
Having an enemy is selfish and self-centred. While the OC enemy holder believes the focus is on the other person, the reverse is usually true. The person who maintains an enemy seeks to satisfy a dark internal need of his or her own making.
The enemy maker may be delusional. Often the perceived enemy has no knowledge of how devoted the other is to hatred of him. Nor does he care. The expenditure of energy on the enmity is almost always one way. It is not exchanged mutually, as love is.
Having an enemy is a more advanced form of holding a grudge, which is equally draining emotionally and produces nothing positive. Holding a grudge is a more polite way of saying you have an enemy.
A person who has an enemy (real or perceived) is so committed to the relationship that he or she has little time or emotional energy to devote to a positive relationship with another person. The enemy relationship takes all the emotional energy a person has.
Having an enemy is like bullying yourself. You have no one to blame for your own hurt but yourself.
Breaking off an enemy relationship is easier than breaking off a relationship based on love. To stop having an enemy, you simply refuse to acknowledge any longer that the other person is an enemy. If an enemy is real rather than perceived, most of the time what the enemy wants more than anything else is to cause fear, worry and emotional exhaustion to the other person. A real enemy relationship is another form of bullying. As with any bullying, you can't be intimidated unless you allow yourself to be intimidated. You have a choice.
Ending an enemy relationship may be easy because it requires making a decision to "end it," but the emotional commitment that is lost may be as hard as losing a loved one.
Does this sound as if love and hatred of an enemy have much in common? They do. They both require emotional commitment, devotion, even fidelity. No one can have a good relationship with an enemy if the other person could up and find someone else to be enemies with at any moment.
Is love, then, also Obsessive-Compulsive? In some ways, yes. Romantic love that grows into a more lasting friendship is healthy, whereas romantic love that does not get beyond the romance stage is doomed to failure. Romance is self satisfying, whereas friendship is more about satisfying the needs of the other person. Romance is selfish, as is having an enemy. But if it evolves into a healthy friendship, it has long term benefits for both. On the other hand, having an enemy has no benefits over the long term.
Each of us can choose to accept another as an enemy or to reject the possibility and ignore the other as much as possible. The love-hate relationships of childhood and adolescent friends testifies to how awkward it can be to establish a healthy relationship instead of an unhealthy one.
Most of us opt for the healthy kind.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to give children the skills they need to have healthy relationships with others instead of allowing the trial-and-error method teach life lessons the hard way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)
Having an enemy requires a similar amount of time to having a spouse. The commitment must be the same as well. The amount of emotional energy consumed in maintaining the enmity may be even greater than that required for having a loving spousal relationship.
A person who maintains another as an enemy is Obsessive-Compulsive (OC). It makes no sense logically to expend so much energy on someone from whom you get little in return. It's like having a hobby you can't tear yourself away form, a hobby that is destructive rather than constructive.
Having an enemy is selfish and self-centred. While the OC enemy holder believes the focus is on the other person, the reverse is usually true. The person who maintains an enemy seeks to satisfy a dark internal need of his or her own making.
The enemy maker may be delusional. Often the perceived enemy has no knowledge of how devoted the other is to hatred of him. Nor does he care. The expenditure of energy on the enmity is almost always one way. It is not exchanged mutually, as love is.
Having an enemy is a more advanced form of holding a grudge, which is equally draining emotionally and produces nothing positive. Holding a grudge is a more polite way of saying you have an enemy.
A person who has an enemy (real or perceived) is so committed to the relationship that he or she has little time or emotional energy to devote to a positive relationship with another person. The enemy relationship takes all the emotional energy a person has.
Having an enemy is like bullying yourself. You have no one to blame for your own hurt but yourself.
Breaking off an enemy relationship is easier than breaking off a relationship based on love. To stop having an enemy, you simply refuse to acknowledge any longer that the other person is an enemy. If an enemy is real rather than perceived, most of the time what the enemy wants more than anything else is to cause fear, worry and emotional exhaustion to the other person. A real enemy relationship is another form of bullying. As with any bullying, you can't be intimidated unless you allow yourself to be intimidated. You have a choice.
Ending an enemy relationship may be easy because it requires making a decision to "end it," but the emotional commitment that is lost may be as hard as losing a loved one.
Does this sound as if love and hatred of an enemy have much in common? They do. They both require emotional commitment, devotion, even fidelity. No one can have a good relationship with an enemy if the other person could up and find someone else to be enemies with at any moment.
Is love, then, also Obsessive-Compulsive? In some ways, yes. Romantic love that grows into a more lasting friendship is healthy, whereas romantic love that does not get beyond the romance stage is doomed to failure. Romance is self satisfying, whereas friendship is more about satisfying the needs of the other person. Romance is selfish, as is having an enemy. But if it evolves into a healthy friendship, it has long term benefits for both. On the other hand, having an enemy has no benefits over the long term.
Each of us can choose to accept another as an enemy or to reject the possibility and ignore the other as much as possible. The love-hate relationships of childhood and adolescent friends testifies to how awkward it can be to establish a healthy relationship instead of an unhealthy one.
Most of us opt for the healthy kind.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to give children the skills they need to have healthy relationships with others instead of allowing the trial-and-error method teach life lessons the hard way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Why Everyone Should Celebrate Christmas
No matter what religion people subscribe to, or which ones they steadfastly avoid and ignore, everyone seems to have an opinion about Christmas and its celebration. This article will attempt to shed light on truths about Christmas while steering clear of emotional arguments.
People celebrate Christmas for two fundamental reasons. One, the purely secular reason, has been going on in some form likely since the early days of human civilization thousands of years ago. The winter solstice has just passed in the northern hemisphere, where a large majority of earth's human population lives. Days will get more hours of sunlight as the weeks pass and the promise of the renewal of plant life and the return of migrating birds sustains people through long, cold and often snowy days of winter weather.
The Romans adopted the earlier celebration of this turning point in the natural year, calling it Saturnalia. While Saturnalia is well known today for its extended periods of sexual promiscuity--early autumn was a good time to give birth, best for both mother and child--and heavy consumption of alcohol, it was also a time for eating heartily, gathering with friends and family, exchanging of gifts and having fun in favourite ways.
We continue a similar tradition of celebrating the Christmas period today, with less emphasis on sex. The secular component of the event lives today as much as it has for thousands of years. The "over commercialization" of Christmas is nothing more than businesses meeting well expressed and traditional needs of people to have a festive period during the days of few hours of daylight, too much cold weather and too much snow.
Those who believe that Christmas has been taken over by industries to peddle their wares believe more in a religious celebration of Christmas. Christians may consider Christmas a somber time when they should consider the birth of Jesus of Nazareth some 2012 years ago. They consider Jesus to have been the founder of their religion.
He wasn't, and therein lies a cause for confusion.
Jesus was a Jew. He never claimed to be anything but a Jew. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which seem to reflect the teachings of Jesus--in many cases word for word as recorded in the Bible--have recently been proven to be the work of a group of Jewish monks known as Essenes. If Jesus could quote Essene works so accurately, it's likely he spent at least some of his "missing years' in an Essene monastery. In his time, the Essenes were ascetics, living simply and sparsely. Considering how Jesus lived during his years of teaching, his life too was simple and sparse.
Jesus never claimed to be THE Son of God. He wouldn't because he believed that every man and woman has the potential to join the Kingdom of God, whose members are each a child of God. In fact, whose members are each a part of the universal whole of existence, thus part of God. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus taught, is here and now, not after death. He taught that God is within each of us--not up in some mysterious heaven--and may be found by searching within. He told people to follow his ways, which meant to do as he did to achieve the mystical experiences he had. He wanted people to find God today, not live for some promised reward later.
Jesus never spoke a word to suggest that he intended to found a church. In the fourth century C.E. several religious books were rewritten to then form what Christians know as their Bible and that version called Peter the founder and first leader of a new church. In fact, we now know that the real Peter was a rough and coarse fisherman who was unlikely to be either a leader or a good speaker. James the brother of Jesus was more likely to be the one to continue the work of Jesus after the crucifixion. And Mary of Magdala, whose work was buried by the Christian church in the fourth century and whose reputation was disparaged in the sixth century when the pope called her the unnamed whore in one of the Bible stories, but whose real work and value are recorded in the Nag Hamadi's so-called Gnostic Gospels.
Judaism considers Jesus of Nazareth to have been one of its prophets. Islam mentions both Jesus and his mother, Mary, in the Qu'ran and considers Jesus one of the prophets in the history of its religion. In fact, Islam does not downplay the significance of Jesus at all, it only values the words of Mohammed (570-632 C.E.) higher because he was the most recent prophet.
Jesus was a man of peace and love. His teachings were all about both peace and love. Didn't he destroy the tables of the merchants outside the temple in Jerusalem, suggesting that he had hidden violence within him? Unlikely. That story is almost certainly a tale added well after the death of Jesus to make him look more powerful in the world of his time. Can you even imagine someone wreaking the destruction Jesus supposedly did outside the temple and not being punished for it? According to the story, he was neither arrested nor imprisoned for this blatant act against his own church. Supposedly he just walked away and the incident forgotten. Not likely.
"Love they neighbour as thyself" and "Peace on earth" are the two statements most often attributed directly to Jesus. Few other words are associated with Jesus as his words are only recorded in some 24 instances in the Bible. Everything else is hearsay and folk tales invented after his death to make him seem greater than a normal man.
The non-commercial celebration of Christmas is, in fact, more a celebration of the words of Jesus than about the birthday of the founder of Christianity. As calculations based on words of the Bible would put his actual birth date around September 24, December 25 is more symbolic than actual.
December 25 is a day set aside to recognize the dual messages of Jesus--peace on earth and love thy neighbour--not to recognize the birth of a man we know precious little about. Other than what has been invented about him by Christianity and other religions.
Those who value the concepts and want to see the coming to pass of peace on earth and love of others will set aside some time around the Christmas season to give them some thought. We remember the words of Jesus, that are now over two millennia old. They won't die. However, they can only come to fruition when more of us practise them in our lives.
Christmas is about gift giving. It's also about peace and love. We're big enough to be able to give them all.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children all the lessons of life, not just the ones in school curriculum.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
People celebrate Christmas for two fundamental reasons. One, the purely secular reason, has been going on in some form likely since the early days of human civilization thousands of years ago. The winter solstice has just passed in the northern hemisphere, where a large majority of earth's human population lives. Days will get more hours of sunlight as the weeks pass and the promise of the renewal of plant life and the return of migrating birds sustains people through long, cold and often snowy days of winter weather.
The Romans adopted the earlier celebration of this turning point in the natural year, calling it Saturnalia. While Saturnalia is well known today for its extended periods of sexual promiscuity--early autumn was a good time to give birth, best for both mother and child--and heavy consumption of alcohol, it was also a time for eating heartily, gathering with friends and family, exchanging of gifts and having fun in favourite ways.
We continue a similar tradition of celebrating the Christmas period today, with less emphasis on sex. The secular component of the event lives today as much as it has for thousands of years. The "over commercialization" of Christmas is nothing more than businesses meeting well expressed and traditional needs of people to have a festive period during the days of few hours of daylight, too much cold weather and too much snow.
Those who believe that Christmas has been taken over by industries to peddle their wares believe more in a religious celebration of Christmas. Christians may consider Christmas a somber time when they should consider the birth of Jesus of Nazareth some 2012 years ago. They consider Jesus to have been the founder of their religion.
He wasn't, and therein lies a cause for confusion.
Jesus was a Jew. He never claimed to be anything but a Jew. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which seem to reflect the teachings of Jesus--in many cases word for word as recorded in the Bible--have recently been proven to be the work of a group of Jewish monks known as Essenes. If Jesus could quote Essene works so accurately, it's likely he spent at least some of his "missing years' in an Essene monastery. In his time, the Essenes were ascetics, living simply and sparsely. Considering how Jesus lived during his years of teaching, his life too was simple and sparse.
Jesus never claimed to be THE Son of God. He wouldn't because he believed that every man and woman has the potential to join the Kingdom of God, whose members are each a child of God. In fact, whose members are each a part of the universal whole of existence, thus part of God. The Kingdom of God, as Jesus taught, is here and now, not after death. He taught that God is within each of us--not up in some mysterious heaven--and may be found by searching within. He told people to follow his ways, which meant to do as he did to achieve the mystical experiences he had. He wanted people to find God today, not live for some promised reward later.
Jesus never spoke a word to suggest that he intended to found a church. In the fourth century C.E. several religious books were rewritten to then form what Christians know as their Bible and that version called Peter the founder and first leader of a new church. In fact, we now know that the real Peter was a rough and coarse fisherman who was unlikely to be either a leader or a good speaker. James the brother of Jesus was more likely to be the one to continue the work of Jesus after the crucifixion. And Mary of Magdala, whose work was buried by the Christian church in the fourth century and whose reputation was disparaged in the sixth century when the pope called her the unnamed whore in one of the Bible stories, but whose real work and value are recorded in the Nag Hamadi's so-called Gnostic Gospels.
Judaism considers Jesus of Nazareth to have been one of its prophets. Islam mentions both Jesus and his mother, Mary, in the Qu'ran and considers Jesus one of the prophets in the history of its religion. In fact, Islam does not downplay the significance of Jesus at all, it only values the words of Mohammed (570-632 C.E.) higher because he was the most recent prophet.
Jesus was a man of peace and love. His teachings were all about both peace and love. Didn't he destroy the tables of the merchants outside the temple in Jerusalem, suggesting that he had hidden violence within him? Unlikely. That story is almost certainly a tale added well after the death of Jesus to make him look more powerful in the world of his time. Can you even imagine someone wreaking the destruction Jesus supposedly did outside the temple and not being punished for it? According to the story, he was neither arrested nor imprisoned for this blatant act against his own church. Supposedly he just walked away and the incident forgotten. Not likely.
"Love they neighbour as thyself" and "Peace on earth" are the two statements most often attributed directly to Jesus. Few other words are associated with Jesus as his words are only recorded in some 24 instances in the Bible. Everything else is hearsay and folk tales invented after his death to make him seem greater than a normal man.
The non-commercial celebration of Christmas is, in fact, more a celebration of the words of Jesus than about the birthday of the founder of Christianity. As calculations based on words of the Bible would put his actual birth date around September 24, December 25 is more symbolic than actual.
December 25 is a day set aside to recognize the dual messages of Jesus--peace on earth and love thy neighbour--not to recognize the birth of a man we know precious little about. Other than what has been invented about him by Christianity and other religions.
Those who value the concepts and want to see the coming to pass of peace on earth and love of others will set aside some time around the Christmas season to give them some thought. We remember the words of Jesus, that are now over two millennia old. They won't die. However, they can only come to fruition when more of us practise them in our lives.
Christmas is about gift giving. It's also about peace and love. We're big enough to be able to give them all.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children all the lessons of life, not just the ones in school curriculum.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, August 09, 2008
A Jealous Lover Is A Bad Choice
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
The concept of jealousy may be misunderstood as often and the concept of love. Love itself is confusing because we have so many forms of it that it requires one of the longest explanations in most dictionaries.
Love, like jealousy, is an emotion. Both are basic emotions, ones that are powerful enough to take control of a person to the extent that the person's best interests or the best interests of the loved one may be compromised. If not compromised, at least the best interests of the loved one are altered by being loved as much as by being the object of jealousy.
Let's try to define love in a way that everyone can understand and that helps to avoid confusion. Love is what we give. At its best, love is altruistic, it demands nothing in return. If given love is not appreciated by the receiver, we have unrequited love. But the love is still given by one person, whether or not it is returned by the other. Those who love for real don't quit.
Jealousy, on the other hand, is not giving in nature, but taking. Jealousy is selfish. Jealousy measures what is coming in to a person from another. What is incoming may be compared with what is outflowing, but this comparison is not necessarily a part of jealousy.
Jealousy is about "me," about "what I'm getting," about "what belongs to me." Jealousy, therefore, may be about objects as much as about people. A man may be jealous of his car, not wanting others to drive it, to touch it, maybe not to do anything but admire it. The admiration is necessary because that is the part of the concept that is incoming where objects are concerned. The objects themselves can't give back whatever the possessor wants, whereas an admirer can. The jealous lover expects a return directly from the other person.
Another word for love might be generosity. The Christian Bible now often translates the word as used in the King James version as "charity" into "love." Wherever and however these words are used, their contexts have similarities.
Love is about giving. Jealousy is about taking, no matter whether what the jealous person wants to take or receive is deserved or not. Love is outgoing. Jealousy is incoming. A loving person cares more about the person she loves than about herself. A jealous person cares more about what he gets (gender switch noted, though not intended to make a specific point) than about what he gives or about whether or not what he wants is deserved, needed or even necessary.
Now let's put the two together and watch the sparks fly. When two people supposedly love each other, is a little jealousy a healthy thing? That's a little like the hostess taking an extra piece of dessert, the last one on the plate, after everyone has been served, without asking if anyone else would like it after finishing their own piece, because she was the one who made the dessert. In a social context, that's greediness. Jealousy is a form of greediness.
If a person has a jealous lover, that may give some satisfaction to the person, but only because of the attention received because of the jealousy. The jealous person demonstrates selfishness and attention to the other, not love. Someone who gives love to a sufficient degree will not be jealous because he or she will know that the object of the affection has received his or her best.
A person who gives all the love of which he or she is capable and still loses the lover to another had a relationship with the wrong person.
We have nearly seven billion people on our planet today. To believe that "There is only one person for me" is not just naivety, it's self deception. Finding the "love of your life" is a matter of taking a large survey and continuing to look until that person shows up. Along the way, the seeker must give of himself or herself to many people in order to test their response.
My wife claims that she knew that I was the man she wanted to marry after our first meeting. I believe I had a good inkling before I even met her, when I had only read a letter she had written. Was that love at first sight? Or read? No, we had both done enough searching over the years to know that we had found a very special person, one who could and would give without demanding a certain minimum in return.
One of the tests for a potential mate should be a past history of jealousy or of love. A jealous person treats the other like a chattel, one that is not too smart at that. One that is prepared to be "owned." When a jealous person has had a mate for a long period of time, he takes the other for granted so much that he may even leave the relationship or cheat on her because she is so stupid, or so he perceives. It's not so much a matter of growing apart from each other as losing respect for each other, or one (the jealous one) losing respect for the other.
People who are capable of jealousy should come with warning labels. They don't. On the other hand, it would be dishonest and harmful to test the "jealousy gene" of a new lover by giving attention to still another. That's why learning about the past history of the potential new lover is important. In general, people are today what they have been in the past.
If you want to be sure that you are never the jealous one, learn about love. Learn about what love is, how to give it, how to show it, and how to recognize it when it is shown by someone else. Often jealous people don't really know what love is because they may not have experienced it, even within their own families.
A jealous person can change, but it's not an easy task to undertake to teach a jealous lover how to be a real lover. It takes years and more patience than most people can afford.
Why is love, arguably the most important emotion we have, a subject we don't teach in schools? We have so many problems that relate somehow to love, yet we do nothing about teaching it to children. We literally have some children growing up believing that love is a business relationship on a personal level.
Business relationships eventually end. Love doesn't. Anyone who believes that love can end likely does not have a clear idea about what love really is.
Now you know what to look for. Now you know what to give. Learn how.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know about love, how to recognize it from others and how to give it themselves. Most kids learn this from birth, but many kids get it beaten out of them as they grow, through bad experiences.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
The concept of jealousy may be misunderstood as often and the concept of love. Love itself is confusing because we have so many forms of it that it requires one of the longest explanations in most dictionaries.
Love, like jealousy, is an emotion. Both are basic emotions, ones that are powerful enough to take control of a person to the extent that the person's best interests or the best interests of the loved one may be compromised. If not compromised, at least the best interests of the loved one are altered by being loved as much as by being the object of jealousy.
Let's try to define love in a way that everyone can understand and that helps to avoid confusion. Love is what we give. At its best, love is altruistic, it demands nothing in return. If given love is not appreciated by the receiver, we have unrequited love. But the love is still given by one person, whether or not it is returned by the other. Those who love for real don't quit.
Jealousy, on the other hand, is not giving in nature, but taking. Jealousy is selfish. Jealousy measures what is coming in to a person from another. What is incoming may be compared with what is outflowing, but this comparison is not necessarily a part of jealousy.
Jealousy is about "me," about "what I'm getting," about "what belongs to me." Jealousy, therefore, may be about objects as much as about people. A man may be jealous of his car, not wanting others to drive it, to touch it, maybe not to do anything but admire it. The admiration is necessary because that is the part of the concept that is incoming where objects are concerned. The objects themselves can't give back whatever the possessor wants, whereas an admirer can. The jealous lover expects a return directly from the other person.
Another word for love might be generosity. The Christian Bible now often translates the word as used in the King James version as "charity" into "love." Wherever and however these words are used, their contexts have similarities.
Love is about giving. Jealousy is about taking, no matter whether what the jealous person wants to take or receive is deserved or not. Love is outgoing. Jealousy is incoming. A loving person cares more about the person she loves than about herself. A jealous person cares more about what he gets (gender switch noted, though not intended to make a specific point) than about what he gives or about whether or not what he wants is deserved, needed or even necessary.
Now let's put the two together and watch the sparks fly. When two people supposedly love each other, is a little jealousy a healthy thing? That's a little like the hostess taking an extra piece of dessert, the last one on the plate, after everyone has been served, without asking if anyone else would like it after finishing their own piece, because she was the one who made the dessert. In a social context, that's greediness. Jealousy is a form of greediness.
If a person has a jealous lover, that may give some satisfaction to the person, but only because of the attention received because of the jealousy. The jealous person demonstrates selfishness and attention to the other, not love. Someone who gives love to a sufficient degree will not be jealous because he or she will know that the object of the affection has received his or her best.
A person who gives all the love of which he or she is capable and still loses the lover to another had a relationship with the wrong person.
We have nearly seven billion people on our planet today. To believe that "There is only one person for me" is not just naivety, it's self deception. Finding the "love of your life" is a matter of taking a large survey and continuing to look until that person shows up. Along the way, the seeker must give of himself or herself to many people in order to test their response.
My wife claims that she knew that I was the man she wanted to marry after our first meeting. I believe I had a good inkling before I even met her, when I had only read a letter she had written. Was that love at first sight? Or read? No, we had both done enough searching over the years to know that we had found a very special person, one who could and would give without demanding a certain minimum in return.
One of the tests for a potential mate should be a past history of jealousy or of love. A jealous person treats the other like a chattel, one that is not too smart at that. One that is prepared to be "owned." When a jealous person has had a mate for a long period of time, he takes the other for granted so much that he may even leave the relationship or cheat on her because she is so stupid, or so he perceives. It's not so much a matter of growing apart from each other as losing respect for each other, or one (the jealous one) losing respect for the other.
People who are capable of jealousy should come with warning labels. They don't. On the other hand, it would be dishonest and harmful to test the "jealousy gene" of a new lover by giving attention to still another. That's why learning about the past history of the potential new lover is important. In general, people are today what they have been in the past.
If you want to be sure that you are never the jealous one, learn about love. Learn about what love is, how to give it, how to show it, and how to recognize it when it is shown by someone else. Often jealous people don't really know what love is because they may not have experienced it, even within their own families.
A jealous person can change, but it's not an easy task to undertake to teach a jealous lover how to be a real lover. It takes years and more patience than most people can afford.
Why is love, arguably the most important emotion we have, a subject we don't teach in schools? We have so many problems that relate somehow to love, yet we do nothing about teaching it to children. We literally have some children growing up believing that love is a business relationship on a personal level.
Business relationships eventually end. Love doesn't. Anyone who believes that love can end likely does not have a clear idea about what love really is.
Now you know what to look for. Now you know what to give. Learn how.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know about love, how to recognize it from others and how to give it themselves. Most kids learn this from birth, but many kids get it beaten out of them as they grow, through bad experiences.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The Secret Law of Abundance
The secret of the law of abundance is this: In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give.
- Norman Vincent Peale, inspirational writer and speaker (1898-1993)
I confess that I have never heard of the "law of abundance" other than in this quote. The number of citations on Google is so great I conclude that many authors and speakers have used it for their own particular objectives, to lend greater credence to their arguments. The fact that Dr. Peale calls this law "secret" is nothing more than hyperbole.
However, the weakening of the first part of the quote takes nothing away from the second and more significant part. " In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give."
This sounds counterproductive to anyone who was raised in a strongly capitalist society, where "Pay yourself first" is the prime rule for entrepreneurs and "Take as much as you can get" is the general rule for both business and personal lives.
Surely it doesn't make sense to give away what you have earned in order to get more of "the good things of life." That's true. At least it's true if you believe that the most important things in life--the "good things"--are either money or what can be bought with money.
Can money buy happiness? This debate has been ongoing for so long that it bores most people. No, many people say, but I'd like to suffer with more of that kind of unhappiness.
Does tickling a child make that kid happy? Does laughter alone give evidence of happiness? The feeling we get when someone tickles us comes from the same source as pain, from the same nerves, along the same pathways. Tickling and pain are essentially the same sensation, only pain is felt with greater intensity. If tickling and pain come from the same source, then the laughter from tickling by someone cannot be misconstrued as happiness. Happiness and pain/tickling must be different.
The joy people have from getting money, from keeping money and from spending money are all like tickling. They are all transient, all insubstantial, all subject to change in a flash. As with the sensation from tickling, the joy of money stops in a flash when the motivation stops.
A close friend expressed grief to me recently, explaining how much his "nest egg" investments in the stock markets had dropped so much in value as a result of the recession in the US. Not a single other factor in his life has changed except for the current value of his investments, but he has lost sleep over it. The fact that history shows that stock markets always recover and move to greater values means nothing to him because the value of his stocks today is much lower than it was a year ago. The tickle he felt a year ago has become his pain of today.
That's not happiness. Nor should it rightly be considered worthy of unhappiness, pain or grief.
Money is no more one of the good things in life than the shirt you are wearing right now. You might miss your shirt if you lost it or it wore out, but you know that you can get another. You can always make arrangements to get more money as well, though it might take longer than buying a new shirt.
Dr. Peale said that "you must first give." That involves at least one person other than yourself. Giving to yourself is like emotional masturbation. You must give to others in order to receive and appreciate the good things of life. We even enjoy sex more when we work to make it more enjoyable for the other person. That benefit takes thought and effort, but it shouldn't cost money.
No one understands why the "law of abundance" works this way--give in order to receive more in return. It likely has something to do with our fundamental nature as social creatures. We must need each other and depend on each other to feel secure, even though logically it would seem that someone who doesn't need anyone else should be more secure. Those who feel the most secure need at least one other person, depend on at least one other person and strive to meet the needs of at least one other person.
They are happy when others around them are happy, have been made happy by something they have done themselves. That happiness returns to them, with interest.
The more we work to make others happy--not with money or what it will buy, but with love and effort--the more happy the others will be and the happier we will be in return.
The Christian Bible says "Give and ye shall receive." Now you know why. Though places of worship want money, what the Bible wants you to give is love. Give love and you will receive love in return.
No, you can't count that kind of love. But you don't have to pay tax on it either. It has no real value in monetary terms.
Have you given love in the past, but not had it return to you by the one you loved? It's highly likely that the other person was so steeped in the value of money that he or she couldn't understand the value of love. That's not your fault. Find someone else who does value the love and the happiness you have to give.
For those who believe in the value of money as the value of life, every relationship is a business relationship. Business relationships come and go based on the value that each party offers constantly and uninterruptedly to the other. That's the core of the throwaway economy.
Love should not be thrown away. True love cannot be thrown away, but business love is disposable.
Find someone who can appreciate and enjoy what you have to give of yourself. You will find it comes back to you. Over time, that joy and appreciation will increase if both parties understand and work at what Dr. Peale calls the law of abundance.
Love thy neighbour as thyself. Sound familiar? Christians will recognize it as the prime commandment of Jesus. But the same advice exists in every religion, even if the words differ slightly.
Give and you will receive. But you must give first and you must give freely, not depending on what you will receive in return. If you are looking for return, you are basing your love on the business model of love. The easy come, easy go, disposable kind.
Real love makes you feel superhuman. The best the business kind of love can make you feel is powerful. Real love helps you to understand why so many people in every culture of the world believe that there is more to existence than these body vessels we inhabit during our lifetimes. The business kind of lovers will never understand, never appreciate, never enjoy the real good things of life, either here or in some future existence.
But they may appreciate a good tickle.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can understand and appreciate the real good things of life, not just what they learn in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Norman Vincent Peale, inspirational writer and speaker (1898-1993)
I confess that I have never heard of the "law of abundance" other than in this quote. The number of citations on Google is so great I conclude that many authors and speakers have used it for their own particular objectives, to lend greater credence to their arguments. The fact that Dr. Peale calls this law "secret" is nothing more than hyperbole.
However, the weakening of the first part of the quote takes nothing away from the second and more significant part. " In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give."
This sounds counterproductive to anyone who was raised in a strongly capitalist society, where "Pay yourself first" is the prime rule for entrepreneurs and "Take as much as you can get" is the general rule for both business and personal lives.
Surely it doesn't make sense to give away what you have earned in order to get more of "the good things of life." That's true. At least it's true if you believe that the most important things in life--the "good things"--are either money or what can be bought with money.
Can money buy happiness? This debate has been ongoing for so long that it bores most people. No, many people say, but I'd like to suffer with more of that kind of unhappiness.
Does tickling a child make that kid happy? Does laughter alone give evidence of happiness? The feeling we get when someone tickles us comes from the same source as pain, from the same nerves, along the same pathways. Tickling and pain are essentially the same sensation, only pain is felt with greater intensity. If tickling and pain come from the same source, then the laughter from tickling by someone cannot be misconstrued as happiness. Happiness and pain/tickling must be different.
The joy people have from getting money, from keeping money and from spending money are all like tickling. They are all transient, all insubstantial, all subject to change in a flash. As with the sensation from tickling, the joy of money stops in a flash when the motivation stops.
A close friend expressed grief to me recently, explaining how much his "nest egg" investments in the stock markets had dropped so much in value as a result of the recession in the US. Not a single other factor in his life has changed except for the current value of his investments, but he has lost sleep over it. The fact that history shows that stock markets always recover and move to greater values means nothing to him because the value of his stocks today is much lower than it was a year ago. The tickle he felt a year ago has become his pain of today.
That's not happiness. Nor should it rightly be considered worthy of unhappiness, pain or grief.
Money is no more one of the good things in life than the shirt you are wearing right now. You might miss your shirt if you lost it or it wore out, but you know that you can get another. You can always make arrangements to get more money as well, though it might take longer than buying a new shirt.
Dr. Peale said that "you must first give." That involves at least one person other than yourself. Giving to yourself is like emotional masturbation. You must give to others in order to receive and appreciate the good things of life. We even enjoy sex more when we work to make it more enjoyable for the other person. That benefit takes thought and effort, but it shouldn't cost money.
No one understands why the "law of abundance" works this way--give in order to receive more in return. It likely has something to do with our fundamental nature as social creatures. We must need each other and depend on each other to feel secure, even though logically it would seem that someone who doesn't need anyone else should be more secure. Those who feel the most secure need at least one other person, depend on at least one other person and strive to meet the needs of at least one other person.
They are happy when others around them are happy, have been made happy by something they have done themselves. That happiness returns to them, with interest.
The more we work to make others happy--not with money or what it will buy, but with love and effort--the more happy the others will be and the happier we will be in return.
The Christian Bible says "Give and ye shall receive." Now you know why. Though places of worship want money, what the Bible wants you to give is love. Give love and you will receive love in return.
No, you can't count that kind of love. But you don't have to pay tax on it either. It has no real value in monetary terms.
Have you given love in the past, but not had it return to you by the one you loved? It's highly likely that the other person was so steeped in the value of money that he or she couldn't understand the value of love. That's not your fault. Find someone else who does value the love and the happiness you have to give.
For those who believe in the value of money as the value of life, every relationship is a business relationship. Business relationships come and go based on the value that each party offers constantly and uninterruptedly to the other. That's the core of the throwaway economy.
Love should not be thrown away. True love cannot be thrown away, but business love is disposable.
Find someone who can appreciate and enjoy what you have to give of yourself. You will find it comes back to you. Over time, that joy and appreciation will increase if both parties understand and work at what Dr. Peale calls the law of abundance.
Love thy neighbour as thyself. Sound familiar? Christians will recognize it as the prime commandment of Jesus. But the same advice exists in every religion, even if the words differ slightly.
Give and you will receive. But you must give first and you must give freely, not depending on what you will receive in return. If you are looking for return, you are basing your love on the business model of love. The easy come, easy go, disposable kind.
Real love makes you feel superhuman. The best the business kind of love can make you feel is powerful. Real love helps you to understand why so many people in every culture of the world believe that there is more to existence than these body vessels we inhabit during our lifetimes. The business kind of lovers will never understand, never appreciate, never enjoy the real good things of life, either here or in some future existence.
But they may appreciate a good tickle.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can understand and appreciate the real good things of life, not just what they learn in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Why You Lost At Love
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person.
- Margaret Anderson
In one line we have a summary of the difference between two very important kinds of love in our life.
With romantic love, we want something from the other person, something incoming from the other person (whom we desire) for ourselves. With real love, we want the best of ourselves outgoing to the one we love. By "the other person's good" Anderson means the welfare of the other person.
Can the two exist within one person, between two people? It's possible and many claim to have succeeded, but the feat is so difficult as to be highly unlikely.
Romantic love is a hormonal attraction, a primal instinct we have to spread our genetic material (DNA) to future generations, though this gets sidetracked by birth control methods and with same-sex relationships. The feelings are there even if the objective is something other than having babies.
Romantic love usually lasts from two months to eight months, though exceptions see it lasting two years or longer in rare cases. Romantic love is very energy demanding. As with mating rituals of other species, romantic love with humans requires great production of hormones and huge demands on the metabolism, which over a long term could negatively impact the immune system. In other words, romance is hard work on the body.
Real love, as Anderson calls it, requires commitment, which involves a very different set of requirements on the body, specifically on the brain. Interestingly, Margaret Anderson's real loves were of others of the same gender as her. Her romantic loves, if she had any even with other women, would have been brief and relatively insignificant to her compared with her real loves, two women with whom she shared her life (monogamously) for many years (one was the widow of the great tenor Enrico Caruso).
It would be very hard to have your own best interests at heart (romantic love) and the best interests of the love of your life at heart (real love) simultaneously. The push-pull would tear a person apart emotionally.
Why do so many relationships end in heartbreak and divorce? When the romantic period ended, the two people were not prepared to give more of themselves when they had got used to receiving from the other. Heartbreak occurs when the romantic period ends for one party while it still continues in the other.
In a relationship such as marriage, breakup and divorce brings a slightly different kind of heartbreak. Both kinds of heartbreak, however, involve grieving for the loss of the other. That is, the person with the heartache regrets the loss of what he or she was receiving from the other, not the fact that he or she will not be able to give of themselves to the other any longer.
Heartache, like any other kind of grieving, is both personal and selfish. Few people believe, deep down, in the saying "If you love someone, let them go. If they return, it's love, if they don't, it never was."
Both romantic phases of relationships (or the potential to have one) and real love fail mainly because one or both parties don't know the skills, the requirements and the commitment involved with keeping a relationship going. More romantic relationships never happen because one of the parties is socially ignorant of critically important social skills than because of inadequacies in the looks department. It's hard to fall in love with someone who doesn't know how to be romantic. Men may like to look at dumb blondes, for example, but few want to marry one.
On the other hand, two beautiful people may fall deeply in love, with hormones rushing like the Kentucky Derby, but the relationship may fall apart if one or both lack the skills necessary to keep the non-sexual part of the relationship going.
That often happens with real love too. Couples who "drift apart" don't just develop different interests. One or both lose track of the giving part of the relationship, the part where they both have to constantly have the best interests of the other at heart at all times.
Love, the most powerful emotion we have and the greatest of bonds we can have with another person, is not a simple business. Few people are prepared to love another person who has little idea about what is needed to sustain real love. It would be like allowing someone who has just passed a first aid course to do brain surgery on you. It ain't gonna happen.
In good relationships, people want another person with the same levels of skills and knowledge as themselves. Someone with more knowledge and skills is a bit intimidating. Someone with fewer skills is dull and inept.
In a relationship where the person with the greater knowledge and skills wants it to work, that person must bring the other up to speed or the whole thing will fizzle.
Someone who knows he or she lacks social knowledge and skills about dating, marriage and the whole issue should go to the trouble to read up on the subject. Most of it can be learned from books borrowed from a library. Or by taking a course at a college or private school that may offer it, if one is available (they are scarce). Or by befriending someone who has the skills and pumping that person to give what they know.
There's nothing pretty about ignorance. In any relationship, almost no one wants to have a lover who doesn't know what they are doing. And the odd one who does, I wouldn't trust.
There's no shame in being ignorant about love. The shame is in knowing you are ignorant and doing nothing about it, then blaming others for being so "cold."
In something as important as love, whether it be of the romantic variety or the "real" kind, it pays to find out what you should know before setting out. Otherwise you may as well wear your ignorance on your forehead. Loser!
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teaches who want to grow children who know how to have good, sound relationships because they know what they need to know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Margaret Anderson
In one line we have a summary of the difference between two very important kinds of love in our life.
With romantic love, we want something from the other person, something incoming from the other person (whom we desire) for ourselves. With real love, we want the best of ourselves outgoing to the one we love. By "the other person's good" Anderson means the welfare of the other person.
Can the two exist within one person, between two people? It's possible and many claim to have succeeded, but the feat is so difficult as to be highly unlikely.
Romantic love is a hormonal attraction, a primal instinct we have to spread our genetic material (DNA) to future generations, though this gets sidetracked by birth control methods and with same-sex relationships. The feelings are there even if the objective is something other than having babies.
Romantic love usually lasts from two months to eight months, though exceptions see it lasting two years or longer in rare cases. Romantic love is very energy demanding. As with mating rituals of other species, romantic love with humans requires great production of hormones and huge demands on the metabolism, which over a long term could negatively impact the immune system. In other words, romance is hard work on the body.
Real love, as Anderson calls it, requires commitment, which involves a very different set of requirements on the body, specifically on the brain. Interestingly, Margaret Anderson's real loves were of others of the same gender as her. Her romantic loves, if she had any even with other women, would have been brief and relatively insignificant to her compared with her real loves, two women with whom she shared her life (monogamously) for many years (one was the widow of the great tenor Enrico Caruso).
It would be very hard to have your own best interests at heart (romantic love) and the best interests of the love of your life at heart (real love) simultaneously. The push-pull would tear a person apart emotionally.
Why do so many relationships end in heartbreak and divorce? When the romantic period ended, the two people were not prepared to give more of themselves when they had got used to receiving from the other. Heartbreak occurs when the romantic period ends for one party while it still continues in the other.
In a relationship such as marriage, breakup and divorce brings a slightly different kind of heartbreak. Both kinds of heartbreak, however, involve grieving for the loss of the other. That is, the person with the heartache regrets the loss of what he or she was receiving from the other, not the fact that he or she will not be able to give of themselves to the other any longer.
Heartache, like any other kind of grieving, is both personal and selfish. Few people believe, deep down, in the saying "If you love someone, let them go. If they return, it's love, if they don't, it never was."
Both romantic phases of relationships (or the potential to have one) and real love fail mainly because one or both parties don't know the skills, the requirements and the commitment involved with keeping a relationship going. More romantic relationships never happen because one of the parties is socially ignorant of critically important social skills than because of inadequacies in the looks department. It's hard to fall in love with someone who doesn't know how to be romantic. Men may like to look at dumb blondes, for example, but few want to marry one.
On the other hand, two beautiful people may fall deeply in love, with hormones rushing like the Kentucky Derby, but the relationship may fall apart if one or both lack the skills necessary to keep the non-sexual part of the relationship going.
That often happens with real love too. Couples who "drift apart" don't just develop different interests. One or both lose track of the giving part of the relationship, the part where they both have to constantly have the best interests of the other at heart at all times.
Love, the most powerful emotion we have and the greatest of bonds we can have with another person, is not a simple business. Few people are prepared to love another person who has little idea about what is needed to sustain real love. It would be like allowing someone who has just passed a first aid course to do brain surgery on you. It ain't gonna happen.
In good relationships, people want another person with the same levels of skills and knowledge as themselves. Someone with more knowledge and skills is a bit intimidating. Someone with fewer skills is dull and inept.
In a relationship where the person with the greater knowledge and skills wants it to work, that person must bring the other up to speed or the whole thing will fizzle.
Someone who knows he or she lacks social knowledge and skills about dating, marriage and the whole issue should go to the trouble to read up on the subject. Most of it can be learned from books borrowed from a library. Or by taking a course at a college or private school that may offer it, if one is available (they are scarce). Or by befriending someone who has the skills and pumping that person to give what they know.
There's nothing pretty about ignorance. In any relationship, almost no one wants to have a lover who doesn't know what they are doing. And the odd one who does, I wouldn't trust.
There's no shame in being ignorant about love. The shame is in knowing you are ignorant and doing nothing about it, then blaming others for being so "cold."
In something as important as love, whether it be of the romantic variety or the "real" kind, it pays to find out what you should know before setting out. Otherwise you may as well wear your ignorance on your forehead. Loser!
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teaches who want to grow children who know how to have good, sound relationships because they know what they need to know.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The Secret Of Love
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
- François Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), letter to Count Schomberg, August 1769
As admirable as Voltaire's reasoning ability was and as impressive his observations about human nature, I wonder how he reached the conclusion that animals know nothing of the power of life.
An avowed dog person for most of my life, I became servant to a household cat some 18 years ago. Since then my wife and I have had two other cats, one of which has epilepsy and has gone deaf.
The most impressive--dare I say shocking--lesson I have learned in my years of observing the behaviour of cats is that they are remarkably similar to humans in their needs. I don't mean just the needs for food, shelter and security, which all living things share.
Our cats do hear our grandmother clock strike because it gongs on the hour and half-hour. It means nothing to them because neither the ticking of the clock nor the gong itself serve any purpose toward satisfying their needs.
What does a clock add to our lives? At most it serves as a reminder that we must perform actions, usually in the service of others. Cats can be altruistic at times, but they are clearly not into servitude. Cats would have disappointed Pavlov.
Our cats know when they want to be fed because they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't care if food is available to them or not. They don't overeat, nor do they eat in front of the television. They will, however, eat as a form of comfort, if their problem is not of a severely emotional nature.
They clearly know when they need to be touched (petted). Not only do they make their needs known to the petters, they allow little to stand in the way of their satisfying that need when they have it, if humans are around. They prefer petting from the humans they know, but will accept it from strangers who happen around at the right time.
Humans do not do that. We seldom know when we need to be touched by another, even though it's a need so fundamental to us that regular lack of touch can alter our personality.
Children almost never come to mommy demanding to be held. They may come, but they don't ask in words. The closest they come to asking is when they hurt themselves. Being held by mommy when they hurt does nothing to help the hurt, it's a way of (an excuse for) demanding to be touched without using words (we don't use words to express that need, sad to say).
Voltaire says that animals have no idea of death. I disagree. When our epileptic cat has a petit or grand mal seizure, he wants to be alone in an enclosed area, secure that he won't explode all over the place. However, for days before and after the seizure, he seeks touch and comfort many times each day. He knows when he will have a seizure, days ahead. He seeks the security he wants and needs ahead of time.
People seldom know they are about to have an epileptic seizure until it happens, or maybe just a brief period before. Cats are more sensitive to their bodies. Most of the time they do what they must to heal themselves. Only their owners insist upon taking them to vets.
For months before our oldest cat died, she came to me many times each day, to sit on my lap or to cuddle in the crook of my arm as I lied in bed napping. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for that cat, though it isn't for the epileptic one now. I don't doubt that they would know when the end of their life is near. Maybe they don't dream of heaven, but who knows?
Voltaire's reference to the clock striking, of course, refers to the death knell, not to the regular striking of a gong or ticking of the pendulum. His point is that we make much of a charade of death, most of which serves no real purpose but to make the grieving ones feel worse.
My point differs from Voltaire's in that I want us to pay attention to the characteristics and needs of animals that we share with them, but that they do better than us.
We know that dogs and cats love to be petted. We call them pets for that reason. They need touch and they demand it from those who can best provide it. To a dog or cat, brushing the fur is nothing more than another way for them to be touched.
We need to recognize our own need for touch. Life without touch is not easy and life with a decreasing amount of touch from a loved one is even harder because we feel the lack of touch and our increase in need. The death of a spouse may be hardest on those who benefitted most from loving touch from the dead mate for many years.
Hospitals (not all) and nursing homes have found the benefits of having people with pets visit so that patients can touch them. Nurses stroke their patients and touch them more than ever in the past because it helps the patients to feel better, even to heal faster in some cases.
Voltaire's quotation was not about animals after all, but about satisfying our own real needs instead of trying to play act unnecessary stuff while ignoring what is really important.
Now, while you think about it, go give someone you love a hug. Do it several times a day if you can. Don't miss a day.
One of the mysteries of love is that we can't measure it. Think not? Most of us, without being aware of it, measure how much others love us by the amount of loving touch we receive from them.
Remember, it's not just the amount of touch we receive from others that's important. It's just as important to those we love that we give loving touch to them so that they can keep track of how much we love them. It works both days. We measure love by the amount of touch we receive, they measure love by the amount they receive.
Now you can understand why the so-called Empty Nest syndrome of parents whose children have grown and left home can be so severe. And why people who consider divorce do so because their partners and they have "grown apart."
Love is an emotional word we use to describe our basic need for loving touch. Celibate nuns and priests receive little human touch, but when they devote their lives to God and to prayer the parts of their brains that trigger the feel-good response activate the same way that ours does when we are hugged by a loved one. Loving God fully can give people the same physical effect as receiving loving touch.
So, have you hugged someone yet?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow balanced and well loved children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- François Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), letter to Count Schomberg, August 1769
As admirable as Voltaire's reasoning ability was and as impressive his observations about human nature, I wonder how he reached the conclusion that animals know nothing of the power of life.
An avowed dog person for most of my life, I became servant to a household cat some 18 years ago. Since then my wife and I have had two other cats, one of which has epilepsy and has gone deaf.
The most impressive--dare I say shocking--lesson I have learned in my years of observing the behaviour of cats is that they are remarkably similar to humans in their needs. I don't mean just the needs for food, shelter and security, which all living things share.
Our cats do hear our grandmother clock strike because it gongs on the hour and half-hour. It means nothing to them because neither the ticking of the clock nor the gong itself serve any purpose toward satisfying their needs.
What does a clock add to our lives? At most it serves as a reminder that we must perform actions, usually in the service of others. Cats can be altruistic at times, but they are clearly not into servitude. Cats would have disappointed Pavlov.
Our cats know when they want to be fed because they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't care if food is available to them or not. They don't overeat, nor do they eat in front of the television. They will, however, eat as a form of comfort, if their problem is not of a severely emotional nature.
They clearly know when they need to be touched (petted). Not only do they make their needs known to the petters, they allow little to stand in the way of their satisfying that need when they have it, if humans are around. They prefer petting from the humans they know, but will accept it from strangers who happen around at the right time.
Humans do not do that. We seldom know when we need to be touched by another, even though it's a need so fundamental to us that regular lack of touch can alter our personality.
Children almost never come to mommy demanding to be held. They may come, but they don't ask in words. The closest they come to asking is when they hurt themselves. Being held by mommy when they hurt does nothing to help the hurt, it's a way of (an excuse for) demanding to be touched without using words (we don't use words to express that need, sad to say).
Voltaire says that animals have no idea of death. I disagree. When our epileptic cat has a petit or grand mal seizure, he wants to be alone in an enclosed area, secure that he won't explode all over the place. However, for days before and after the seizure, he seeks touch and comfort many times each day. He knows when he will have a seizure, days ahead. He seeks the security he wants and needs ahead of time.
People seldom know they are about to have an epileptic seizure until it happens, or maybe just a brief period before. Cats are more sensitive to their bodies. Most of the time they do what they must to heal themselves. Only their owners insist upon taking them to vets.
For months before our oldest cat died, she came to me many times each day, to sit on my lap or to cuddle in the crook of my arm as I lied in bed napping. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for that cat, though it isn't for the epileptic one now. I don't doubt that they would know when the end of their life is near. Maybe they don't dream of heaven, but who knows?
Voltaire's reference to the clock striking, of course, refers to the death knell, not to the regular striking of a gong or ticking of the pendulum. His point is that we make much of a charade of death, most of which serves no real purpose but to make the grieving ones feel worse.
My point differs from Voltaire's in that I want us to pay attention to the characteristics and needs of animals that we share with them, but that they do better than us.
We know that dogs and cats love to be petted. We call them pets for that reason. They need touch and they demand it from those who can best provide it. To a dog or cat, brushing the fur is nothing more than another way for them to be touched.
We need to recognize our own need for touch. Life without touch is not easy and life with a decreasing amount of touch from a loved one is even harder because we feel the lack of touch and our increase in need. The death of a spouse may be hardest on those who benefitted most from loving touch from the dead mate for many years.
Hospitals (not all) and nursing homes have found the benefits of having people with pets visit so that patients can touch them. Nurses stroke their patients and touch them more than ever in the past because it helps the patients to feel better, even to heal faster in some cases.
Voltaire's quotation was not about animals after all, but about satisfying our own real needs instead of trying to play act unnecessary stuff while ignoring what is really important.
Now, while you think about it, go give someone you love a hug. Do it several times a day if you can. Don't miss a day.
One of the mysteries of love is that we can't measure it. Think not? Most of us, without being aware of it, measure how much others love us by the amount of loving touch we receive from them.
Remember, it's not just the amount of touch we receive from others that's important. It's just as important to those we love that we give loving touch to them so that they can keep track of how much we love them. It works both days. We measure love by the amount of touch we receive, they measure love by the amount they receive.
Now you can understand why the so-called Empty Nest syndrome of parents whose children have grown and left home can be so severe. And why people who consider divorce do so because their partners and they have "grown apart."
Love is an emotional word we use to describe our basic need for loving touch. Celibate nuns and priests receive little human touch, but when they devote their lives to God and to prayer the parts of their brains that trigger the feel-good response activate the same way that ours does when we are hugged by a loved one. Loving God fully can give people the same physical effect as receiving loving touch.
So, have you hugged someone yet?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow balanced and well loved children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, April 13, 2008
A Tribute To Collected Wisdom
While I always have a book on my bedside table, waiting to be to read before I go to sleep, rarely do I have one that so absorbs my mind that sleep eludes me while I continue to turn pages. Richard Paul Evans' novel The Gift is one.
The Gift is admirable not just for its inspiring story, but also for the collected wisdom he puts into excerpts from the journal of Nathan Hurst, the story's protagonist, observer of life and receiver of "the gift" that makes him feel his life has value and meaning. (Before that he listened to others who treated him as a murderer.)
You can learn more about The Gift and the many other best sellers by this multi-award winning author from his web site at http://richardpaulevans.com
What I want to tweak your interest with is a few of those journal excerpts, one of which begins each chapter of the book. They stand on their own. As you read them, take a moment to consider each after allowing it to imprint on your brain. Each has a special value that deserves your consideration.
Having completed your read, consider that Richard Paul Evans has Tourette's syndrome and chronic tic disorder. Tourette's is "an inherited neurological disorder characterized by physical and vocal tics." The fact that Evans is a much sought after public speaker gives evidence that he has overcome a great deal.
........................
I don't believe society has ever grown more tolerant. It just changes targets.
........................
It's one thing to order an execution, it's a whole different matter to swing the axe.
.........................
I feel like I've been handed a prize orchid. And I can't make a weed grow.
.........................
Sometimes I think all I have ever known are McRelationships.
.........................
The most important story we will ever write in life is our own--not with ink, but with our daily choices.
.........................
I just want to get through life without ending up as a cautionary tale.
.........................
I struggled to get out of bed this morning. I think I had an emotional hangover.
.........................
Sometimes I wonder if it's not so much that we intend to do harm as we don't intend not to.
.........................
Today Addison [Hurst's love interest] told me she loves me. I wasn't sure how to respond. I haven't much experienced with that sort of thing.
.........................
To the thief, everyone's a crook. To the liar, everyone's a fraud. The curse of all sin is the mirror of false perception it traps us in.
.........................
Heroes rarely look the way we draw them in our minds: attractive, imposing figures with rippling muscles and strong chins. More times than not they are humble beings: small and flawed. It's only their sprits that are beautiful and strong.
.........................
I believe that the difference between Heaven and Hell is not so much the climate as the company. Living in a world populated by people like themselves would, for many, be Heaven. And for others, it would, indeed, be Hell.
..........................
It is one thing to take joy in a child's achievements and quite another to aggrandize ourselves through them. It is emotional incest to live vicariously through a child's success.
..........................
Small kindnesses often, unintentionally, produce the biggest payoffs.
..........................
I feel spiritually cleansed and happy just reading these.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach life lessons to children before they need them, instead of trying to fix broken adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
The Gift is admirable not just for its inspiring story, but also for the collected wisdom he puts into excerpts from the journal of Nathan Hurst, the story's protagonist, observer of life and receiver of "the gift" that makes him feel his life has value and meaning. (Before that he listened to others who treated him as a murderer.)
You can learn more about The Gift and the many other best sellers by this multi-award winning author from his web site at http://richardpaulevans.com
What I want to tweak your interest with is a few of those journal excerpts, one of which begins each chapter of the book. They stand on their own. As you read them, take a moment to consider each after allowing it to imprint on your brain. Each has a special value that deserves your consideration.
Having completed your read, consider that Richard Paul Evans has Tourette's syndrome and chronic tic disorder. Tourette's is "an inherited neurological disorder characterized by physical and vocal tics." The fact that Evans is a much sought after public speaker gives evidence that he has overcome a great deal.
........................
I don't believe society has ever grown more tolerant. It just changes targets.
........................
It's one thing to order an execution, it's a whole different matter to swing the axe.
.........................
I feel like I've been handed a prize orchid. And I can't make a weed grow.
.........................
Sometimes I think all I have ever known are McRelationships.
.........................
The most important story we will ever write in life is our own--not with ink, but with our daily choices.
.........................
I just want to get through life without ending up as a cautionary tale.
.........................
I struggled to get out of bed this morning. I think I had an emotional hangover.
.........................
Sometimes I wonder if it's not so much that we intend to do harm as we don't intend not to.
.........................
Today Addison [Hurst's love interest] told me she loves me. I wasn't sure how to respond. I haven't much experienced with that sort of thing.
.........................
To the thief, everyone's a crook. To the liar, everyone's a fraud. The curse of all sin is the mirror of false perception it traps us in.
.........................
Heroes rarely look the way we draw them in our minds: attractive, imposing figures with rippling muscles and strong chins. More times than not they are humble beings: small and flawed. It's only their sprits that are beautiful and strong.
.........................
I believe that the difference between Heaven and Hell is not so much the climate as the company. Living in a world populated by people like themselves would, for many, be Heaven. And for others, it would, indeed, be Hell.
..........................
It is one thing to take joy in a child's achievements and quite another to aggrandize ourselves through them. It is emotional incest to live vicariously through a child's success.
..........................
Small kindnesses often, unintentionally, produce the biggest payoffs.
..........................
I feel spiritually cleansed and happy just reading these.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach life lessons to children before they need them, instead of trying to fix broken adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, April 11, 2008
An Important Life Lesson
God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
- The Qu'ran
The greatest opposition that most people face about changing themselves is from themselves.
The greatest deterrent to social change resides with those who want social change but are not willing to do anything to advance the cause.
The most severe reason why our world's worst problems continue and often get worse is because people complain about them but refuse to work together to make anything different.
Why this reluctance? We want to look after ourselves and to protect or secure what we know as our greatest priority.
Nothing in the world changes unless and until humans change it. Excluding climate and weather, of course, which have the ability to change themselves as consequences of outside influences (usually from the sun).
Why do we not want things to change? Most of us face too much change around us every day. We have equipment that breaks down, commitments that get delayed because others didn't keep theirs to us, a bill we forgot to pay on time, upsets with loved ones, weather and illness that prevents us from doing what we had planned. The list of factors that affect our lives is endless and most of them we have little or no control over.
We don't want to have to change ourselves because too much is changing around us already that we can't control. So, what's he big deal? Why are we so focussed on ourselves that we're prepared to ignore problems we could solve elsewhere?
Somebody told us that we should be able to control our lives. Somebody led us to believe that we would one day reach a plateau where we would have mastered enough skills and have enough control that only minor things could go wrong. Somebody told us that one we day we could "have it made." Somebody told us we could have the perfect job and the perfect mate.
Those happened when we were kids. Those same people, trying to be encouraging and helpful, neglected to tell us that we are fallible, that we have weaknesses, that we would inevitably trust people who would lie to us and break our trust, that nobody is perfect including us, that our hearts would be broken. That sometimes life gets us down so much we think it sucks.
They also didn't give us the information we needed to understand that mistakes and failures are inevitabilities of life. Or the skills to be able to cope with life's downturns that sometimes make impending disaster seem certain.
They didn't teach us that worrying produces nothing and only does harm. Worry never solves anything, absolutely nothing. It not only wastes time, it harms our health and often our relationships with those closest to us. We worry when we think something might happen. We worry for ages, though what we worry about almost never happens.
This is the base from which we approach each new day. Change? Who the hell wants change when the world is swirling around us at a pace we can't keep up with?
Here's a suggestion. Let's teach kids the lessons that we wish we had been taught ourselves. Let's give them the tools they need to avoid the pitfalls we have faced and overcome in our lives. They won't avoid the pitfalls and failures, but they will be able to recover from them faster and with less grief.
Let's do that.
That's change though, isn't it? Yet a painless way to change.
While we're at it, teaching our kids, let's teach them about love. Not lust, not love of money (greed), not hero worship or domination, not abuse or addictive behaviour. These things masquerade as love in some places. Let's teach our kids about real love.
We may have to find out what real love is ourselves before we teach it. For those of us who grew up without love in our lives, finding real love is extremely hard. But doable.
That's painless. The lessons have to be searched out for many of us because they aren't taught commonly to all kids.
Let's teach our kids to have self respect and to respect others. If they love themselves, they won't have trouble respecting others. That's easy. And painless.
But it is change. And it won't happen by itself.
A saying I learned as a child went "God helps those who help themselves. And God help those who are caught helping themselves." It was a kind of ironic joke.
I like the version in the holy book better: God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
What's to argue? It costs nothing. It will ease the pain of life's miseries.
Eventually it will make for a happier, more loving, more charitable and more peaceful world.
It's worth a little of your time.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that provides the means to make social change without upset or revolution. It's a peaceful way to make changes in ways that will not defy any political ideology or religion.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- The Qu'ran
The greatest opposition that most people face about changing themselves is from themselves.
The greatest deterrent to social change resides with those who want social change but are not willing to do anything to advance the cause.
The most severe reason why our world's worst problems continue and often get worse is because people complain about them but refuse to work together to make anything different.
Why this reluctance? We want to look after ourselves and to protect or secure what we know as our greatest priority.
Nothing in the world changes unless and until humans change it. Excluding climate and weather, of course, which have the ability to change themselves as consequences of outside influences (usually from the sun).
Why do we not want things to change? Most of us face too much change around us every day. We have equipment that breaks down, commitments that get delayed because others didn't keep theirs to us, a bill we forgot to pay on time, upsets with loved ones, weather and illness that prevents us from doing what we had planned. The list of factors that affect our lives is endless and most of them we have little or no control over.
We don't want to have to change ourselves because too much is changing around us already that we can't control. So, what's he big deal? Why are we so focussed on ourselves that we're prepared to ignore problems we could solve elsewhere?
Somebody told us that we should be able to control our lives. Somebody led us to believe that we would one day reach a plateau where we would have mastered enough skills and have enough control that only minor things could go wrong. Somebody told us that one we day we could "have it made." Somebody told us we could have the perfect job and the perfect mate.
Those happened when we were kids. Those same people, trying to be encouraging and helpful, neglected to tell us that we are fallible, that we have weaknesses, that we would inevitably trust people who would lie to us and break our trust, that nobody is perfect including us, that our hearts would be broken. That sometimes life gets us down so much we think it sucks.
They also didn't give us the information we needed to understand that mistakes and failures are inevitabilities of life. Or the skills to be able to cope with life's downturns that sometimes make impending disaster seem certain.
They didn't teach us that worrying produces nothing and only does harm. Worry never solves anything, absolutely nothing. It not only wastes time, it harms our health and often our relationships with those closest to us. We worry when we think something might happen. We worry for ages, though what we worry about almost never happens.
This is the base from which we approach each new day. Change? Who the hell wants change when the world is swirling around us at a pace we can't keep up with?
Here's a suggestion. Let's teach kids the lessons that we wish we had been taught ourselves. Let's give them the tools they need to avoid the pitfalls we have faced and overcome in our lives. They won't avoid the pitfalls and failures, but they will be able to recover from them faster and with less grief.
Let's do that.
That's change though, isn't it? Yet a painless way to change.
While we're at it, teaching our kids, let's teach them about love. Not lust, not love of money (greed), not hero worship or domination, not abuse or addictive behaviour. These things masquerade as love in some places. Let's teach our kids about real love.
We may have to find out what real love is ourselves before we teach it. For those of us who grew up without love in our lives, finding real love is extremely hard. But doable.
That's painless. The lessons have to be searched out for many of us because they aren't taught commonly to all kids.
Let's teach our kids to have self respect and to respect others. If they love themselves, they won't have trouble respecting others. That's easy. And painless.
But it is change. And it won't happen by itself.
A saying I learned as a child went "God helps those who help themselves. And God help those who are caught helping themselves." It was a kind of ironic joke.
I like the version in the holy book better: God changes not what is in people, until they change what is in themselves.
What's to argue? It costs nothing. It will ease the pain of life's miseries.
Eventually it will make for a happier, more loving, more charitable and more peaceful world.
It's worth a little of your time.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that provides the means to make social change without upset or revolution. It's a peaceful way to make changes in ways that will not defy any political ideology or religion.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, April 04, 2008
For Those Who Resent Others
If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.
- Barbara De Angelis, relationships coach
The first part of the quotation sounds like the basic material of any relationships coach. The second part, the part that most omit from the equation, allows the whole thing to make sense. It drives home the part about loving yourself.
I relate to most of the quotes I use because they conform so well to my own experience, either personally or through observation of others. This one describes much of my life.
My childhood was totally without love. It was without hate or rancor too. It could better be described as a business arrangement between my parents. One set of grandparents--the ones I saw often--exemplified the same business arrangement. My other grandmother, a widow, loved her children and grandchildren, but lacked the means or skill to express her love, so it went largely unnoticed.
When I married the first time, I made the best business decision I knew how to make, based on my experience growing up. My wife, who left me and our two children a decade later so that she could further her career, succeeded in the teaching profession, reaching the position of school principal before she died of cancer caused by excessive and persistent overwork.
Not long after her death, my new wife and I suffered a huge financial loss, so were unable to provide my now-twentyish kids with what their mother had led them to believe they deserved from me, in the sense of financial benefits. In turn, they made the best business decision they could, they dissociated themselves from me totally. I have not seen them for 15 years, or my grandchildren ever.
Working my way through my grief at being alienated (albeit illegally and by lying to their own kids about my being dead) I learned a very important lesson, how to love myself. That lesson showed me that I have value and worth as a human being, something I had not recognized before as everyone who knew me treated me as a business contact. That's how it works, people who treat others like business associates gather friends who treat them the same way.
Knowing how to love and respect myself gave me the insight to be able to love others. Lo and behold, I no longer resented others because of the love they withheld from me. They wanted to love me because I loved them.
What's more, the more love I gave to others, the more I received back. It was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Only the gold turned out to be love, not financial wealth.
My conclusion is that the resentment I had for others I should love--perhaps including my own children, but I'm not certain--vanished when I learned to love myself. I thought I loved them but maybe they sensed resentment. I certainly didn't know how to show them love very well then.
As a side benefit to my new life, I no longer feel lonely, even when I am alone for a long period of time. As another benefit, people come to me with their offerings of love because they know what they will get in return. It's a good deal both ways.
Now I see a world of lonely people who have business arrangements as relationships, who don't know how to give or receive love fully, who have troubled children even though they tried their best to raise them well, who can't keep a marriage or "significant other" relationship for long because "the business" changes.
Money is the most important thing in their lives, though they tend to think of it in terms of possessions--"he who has the most toys when he dies, wins." They think I'm simple because I'm happy without being rich. They don't even appreciate that they are rich without being happy.
I don't know how to explain it to them.
No one should have to go through hell to get to heaven, as I did.
There are important lessons to learn and we need to teach them. Those of us who know. We may fail with some, but we will succeed with many if we keep trying to teach them. We will regret our failures, but only until we consider our successes, those we love and who love us in return because of what they have learned and received from us.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow happy, loved and successful children into happy, loved and successful adults and parents of their own children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Barbara De Angelis, relationships coach
The first part of the quotation sounds like the basic material of any relationships coach. The second part, the part that most omit from the equation, allows the whole thing to make sense. It drives home the part about loving yourself.
I relate to most of the quotes I use because they conform so well to my own experience, either personally or through observation of others. This one describes much of my life.
My childhood was totally without love. It was without hate or rancor too. It could better be described as a business arrangement between my parents. One set of grandparents--the ones I saw often--exemplified the same business arrangement. My other grandmother, a widow, loved her children and grandchildren, but lacked the means or skill to express her love, so it went largely unnoticed.
When I married the first time, I made the best business decision I knew how to make, based on my experience growing up. My wife, who left me and our two children a decade later so that she could further her career, succeeded in the teaching profession, reaching the position of school principal before she died of cancer caused by excessive and persistent overwork.
Not long after her death, my new wife and I suffered a huge financial loss, so were unable to provide my now-twentyish kids with what their mother had led them to believe they deserved from me, in the sense of financial benefits. In turn, they made the best business decision they could, they dissociated themselves from me totally. I have not seen them for 15 years, or my grandchildren ever.
Working my way through my grief at being alienated (albeit illegally and by lying to their own kids about my being dead) I learned a very important lesson, how to love myself. That lesson showed me that I have value and worth as a human being, something I had not recognized before as everyone who knew me treated me as a business contact. That's how it works, people who treat others like business associates gather friends who treat them the same way.
Knowing how to love and respect myself gave me the insight to be able to love others. Lo and behold, I no longer resented others because of the love they withheld from me. They wanted to love me because I loved them.
What's more, the more love I gave to others, the more I received back. It was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Only the gold turned out to be love, not financial wealth.
My conclusion is that the resentment I had for others I should love--perhaps including my own children, but I'm not certain--vanished when I learned to love myself. I thought I loved them but maybe they sensed resentment. I certainly didn't know how to show them love very well then.
As a side benefit to my new life, I no longer feel lonely, even when I am alone for a long period of time. As another benefit, people come to me with their offerings of love because they know what they will get in return. It's a good deal both ways.
Now I see a world of lonely people who have business arrangements as relationships, who don't know how to give or receive love fully, who have troubled children even though they tried their best to raise them well, who can't keep a marriage or "significant other" relationship for long because "the business" changes.
Money is the most important thing in their lives, though they tend to think of it in terms of possessions--"he who has the most toys when he dies, wins." They think I'm simple because I'm happy without being rich. They don't even appreciate that they are rich without being happy.
I don't know how to explain it to them.
No one should have to go through hell to get to heaven, as I did.
There are important lessons to learn and we need to teach them. Those of us who know. We may fail with some, but we will succeed with many if we keep trying to teach them. We will regret our failures, but only until we consider our successes, those we love and who love us in return because of what they have learned and received from us.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow happy, loved and successful children into happy, loved and successful adults and parents of their own children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Ode To An Empty Heart
In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.
- Antonio Porchia, Italian poet (1885-1968)
A full heart makes room for everything, then expands to accommodate additions, as needed. An empty heart allows nothing to breach its lack of trust, thus nothing earns it an emotional investment.
The empty heart--known elsewhere as a cold heart--wants for nothing because it doesn't allow for the possibility that it is not already complete.
The empty heart carries no baggage. Neither does it earn true friendship or love along the way because it thinks of nothing more than its own best interests.
The empty heart dies believing that it lived life the way it should, which to the full heart would be meaninglessness.
The empty heart can be changed. But the investment by another to accomplish change in the empty heart requires so much time and intensive effort, punctuated by repeated failures and fall-backs, that almost no one is prepared to make that investment.
The empty heart stands as the worst failure of humanity. Yet it rejects even the slightest effort to help it to fill.
The empty heart makes you glad that human bodies are recycled after death, for it has added nothing to the sum total of progress of humankind.
The empty heart cares nothing for the damage it does through psychological abuse, believing that everyone else should suffer as it has in the past. And as it does with each passing day.
The empty heart believes that it is superior to everyone else.
The full heart believes it will never have enough, so keep adding love and goodwill as it gives to and receives back from others.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow full hearts from small children.Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Antonio Porchia, Italian poet (1885-1968)
A full heart makes room for everything, then expands to accommodate additions, as needed. An empty heart allows nothing to breach its lack of trust, thus nothing earns it an emotional investment.
The empty heart--known elsewhere as a cold heart--wants for nothing because it doesn't allow for the possibility that it is not already complete.
The empty heart carries no baggage. Neither does it earn true friendship or love along the way because it thinks of nothing more than its own best interests.
The empty heart dies believing that it lived life the way it should, which to the full heart would be meaninglessness.
The empty heart can be changed. But the investment by another to accomplish change in the empty heart requires so much time and intensive effort, punctuated by repeated failures and fall-backs, that almost no one is prepared to make that investment.
The empty heart stands as the worst failure of humanity. Yet it rejects even the slightest effort to help it to fill.
The empty heart makes you glad that human bodies are recycled after death, for it has added nothing to the sum total of progress of humankind.
The empty heart cares nothing for the damage it does through psychological abuse, believing that everyone else should suffer as it has in the past. And as it does with each passing day.
The empty heart believes that it is superior to everyone else.
The full heart believes it will never have enough, so keep adding love and goodwill as it gives to and receives back from others.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow full hearts from small children.Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Life Is Worth Living
"Cancer isn't about dying, it's realizing that life is worth living."
- Adrian Welsh
How could one young man have touched so many lives so deeply, have garnered the love of everyone he knew?
Adrian Welsh died after a four year battle with cancer on March 13, 2008. He had celebrated his twenty-third birthday just a few days before.
One week after his death hundreds of people jammed into the community centre in the hamlet where he lived for a Celebration of Life. The double auditorium filled with chairs, dozens of people had to stand through the entire service. They did so willingly, without a thought for their discomfort.
They came not out of curiosity, as is often the case with funerals or memorial services, especially of one so young or someone who died in a tragic event. They came out of love, first of all, and secondly out of respect.
Adrian Welsh was special.
Many of the comments given in person and in the souvenir program for the event noted that he died before he had a chance to live his life. They were wrong. Adrian lived more life in 23 years than most people do in 80.
He wasn't wild and crazy. He was daring, refusing to give in to fears and doubts.
Adrian believed that life is about having fun with whatever you do. Everyone wants that, but few manage it. His desire for fun was different.
He believed that for him to have fun doing whatever he was doing, the people he was with had to enjoy themselves too. That was his prime objective in life. He put the welfare and enjoyment of those he was with ahead of his own.
For a guy who was basically shy, Adrian made a huge number of friends, a few of them very close and special friends. He accomplished this by helping everyone to enjoy their life, whatever they were doing.
Nine years ago, at age 14, he began his first job as a part time dishwasher in the restaurant of a resort. He gained an interest in cooking by watching the chefs who prepared meals in fine dining styles. Two years ago, at age 21, Adrian became the head chef for that restaurant.
The daily newspaper in the city nearest where Adrian lived posted two pictures with the half page feature celebrating the life of this young man, a rare tribute to anyone. One of those photos showed him and a friend paddling a canoe, the feeding tube through the front wall of his abdomen visible on his bare chest.
Adrian never allowed circumstances to prevent him from enjoying himself and from having fun with whoever he was with.
Everyone who knew Adrian Welsh has their own special memories of him. There is one memory that each one of them shares.
Adrian had an infectious smile. He smiled at everyone, whether he knew them or not. Everyone within the range of his smiles felt immediately comfortable, at home, no matter where they were.
More than anything else, Adrian's smile and his caring attention to those around him will be a legacy that will last for a very long time.
He passed that legacy to me, as one who barely knew him.
Now that you know how, you can build your own legacy in the same way. It won't cost you a thing. Thanks to Adrian.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow to be happy, confident and lovable adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Adrian Welsh
How could one young man have touched so many lives so deeply, have garnered the love of everyone he knew?
Adrian Welsh died after a four year battle with cancer on March 13, 2008. He had celebrated his twenty-third birthday just a few days before.
One week after his death hundreds of people jammed into the community centre in the hamlet where he lived for a Celebration of Life. The double auditorium filled with chairs, dozens of people had to stand through the entire service. They did so willingly, without a thought for their discomfort.
They came not out of curiosity, as is often the case with funerals or memorial services, especially of one so young or someone who died in a tragic event. They came out of love, first of all, and secondly out of respect.
Adrian Welsh was special.
Many of the comments given in person and in the souvenir program for the event noted that he died before he had a chance to live his life. They were wrong. Adrian lived more life in 23 years than most people do in 80.
He wasn't wild and crazy. He was daring, refusing to give in to fears and doubts.
Adrian believed that life is about having fun with whatever you do. Everyone wants that, but few manage it. His desire for fun was different.
He believed that for him to have fun doing whatever he was doing, the people he was with had to enjoy themselves too. That was his prime objective in life. He put the welfare and enjoyment of those he was with ahead of his own.
For a guy who was basically shy, Adrian made a huge number of friends, a few of them very close and special friends. He accomplished this by helping everyone to enjoy their life, whatever they were doing.
Nine years ago, at age 14, he began his first job as a part time dishwasher in the restaurant of a resort. He gained an interest in cooking by watching the chefs who prepared meals in fine dining styles. Two years ago, at age 21, Adrian became the head chef for that restaurant.
The daily newspaper in the city nearest where Adrian lived posted two pictures with the half page feature celebrating the life of this young man, a rare tribute to anyone. One of those photos showed him and a friend paddling a canoe, the feeding tube through the front wall of his abdomen visible on his bare chest.
Adrian never allowed circumstances to prevent him from enjoying himself and from having fun with whoever he was with.
Everyone who knew Adrian Welsh has their own special memories of him. There is one memory that each one of them shares.
Adrian had an infectious smile. He smiled at everyone, whether he knew them or not. Everyone within the range of his smiles felt immediately comfortable, at home, no matter where they were.
More than anything else, Adrian's smile and his caring attention to those around him will be a legacy that will last for a very long time.
He passed that legacy to me, as one who barely knew him.
Now that you know how, you can build your own legacy in the same way. It won't cost you a thing. Thanks to Adrian.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow to be happy, confident and lovable adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Can We Manage On Love Alone?
All You Need Is Love, according to the Beatles song. What does that mean?
We can't eat love. The sexual version provides a limited amount of exercise, though better if done in bright sunlight so we can absorb UV rays that our bodies can convert to vitamin D. We can't wear it, though love may put a relaxed look on the face of a receiver. We can't buy anything with love.
What can we do with love? Martina McBride sings a song called Love's The Only House Big Enough to Hold All The Pain In The World. It's a good song, but I can't wrap my head around what it could possibly mean.
Can love be everything that is important in life? John Lennon thought so, though he tended to enjoy his drugs (when he wrote the song) so much that we might want to question the value of his judgment.
When we are in pain we do tend to turn to those who love us. But that kind of loving doesn't stick. It's like the bathtub drain loving the feel of water running through it.
Can we ever get enough love that all the pain we might have to endure in life would be dulled or not affect us? Maybe, but I'm thinking of that bathtub again.
Let's see what some famous people have said about love.
"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it." Martin Luther King Jr.
"Wherever there are jars [shocks in your life], wherever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love." Mohandas K. (The Mahatma) Gandhi
"It's not how much we do but how much love we put in the thing. It's not how much we give but how much love we put in the giving." Mother Teresa
Mr. King, the Mahatma and the Mother were well known for their inspiring speeches. These quotes inspire, but they may be difficult to translate into action.
Let's look at what the recently dubbed richest man in the world has to say. Given that rich people tend to focus more on gaining money than on improving their people skills, we may approach this one with skepticism.
"There's nobody I know who commands the love of others who doesn't feel like a success. And I can't imagine people who aren't loved feel very successful." Warren Buffett
Though Mr. Buffett uses language as we might expect a rich man to use and he has twisted the meaning so it came out backward, I believe he has a more important point to make than the others.
How can we command the love of others? He should have said "have ready access to the love of others." That's what he meant. Love cannot be commanded, in the usual sense of the word.
There is only one way to have access to the love of others without having that unstable bathtub scenario. To get love, we have to give it. That's the kind of love that lasts, that doesn't drain away leaving us empty after the "event."
Despite what some have said, love is not the only thing you have to give away to get more. That's true of most emotions. If we give anger, we will get back anger or fear, for example.
As accepted as this concept of giving in order to get more is among those who know the real value of love, it's not taught to every child.
We assume that every mother loves her children, no matter what. Or we believe that, despite some evidence to the contrary, such as a mother who suffers from severe post partum depression who may seem to want to kill her baby. We assume that every child loves its parents, though evidence is mounting that this is not the case in every family.
These assumptions about love are wrong. Love may be a natural emotion for us, but it has to be taught. If a child does not learn about love in its fullest sense before it's prime learning years are past (by age six, to a lesser extent age 11), then that person will always have a problem giving love as an adult even if he or she learns how to give it and to receive it.
Like an addict who spends the rest of his life "recovering" from his addiction, an adult who learn about love in adolescence or later will have to be regularly reminded about what love is, how to give it and how to receive it.
Our need for love is the part of love that's natural. Knowing how to give it and to receive it in a socially acceptable form is not part of our natural makeup. It must be taught if we want and expect people to know it.
In order for love to be taught to children, their parents must understand how love works before their children are born. Otherwise they may learn to late to teach their kids, then the kids may have problems the parents don't understand and will have no idea how to cope with them.
Given that the rate of divorce in developed countries hovers around the 50 percent mark, meaning that roughly half the couples who have children will separate and half or more of the single mothers and their children will live in poverty, we need to get teaching about love soon. The divorce rate proves that not many newly married couples know about love, even if they do know about romance.
It's all very well to have goals for children of being professionals or corporate CEOs, but if they don't know, understand and appreciate love, they will not have a full life. They could be rich, but not successful at life.
Even the world's richest man knows that. I'll bet Warren Buffett had a very loving mother.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers to learn what kids need in terms of their social and emotional development, including how to love and to receive love.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
We can't eat love. The sexual version provides a limited amount of exercise, though better if done in bright sunlight so we can absorb UV rays that our bodies can convert to vitamin D. We can't wear it, though love may put a relaxed look on the face of a receiver. We can't buy anything with love.
What can we do with love? Martina McBride sings a song called Love's The Only House Big Enough to Hold All The Pain In The World. It's a good song, but I can't wrap my head around what it could possibly mean.
Can love be everything that is important in life? John Lennon thought so, though he tended to enjoy his drugs (when he wrote the song) so much that we might want to question the value of his judgment.
When we are in pain we do tend to turn to those who love us. But that kind of loving doesn't stick. It's like the bathtub drain loving the feel of water running through it.
Can we ever get enough love that all the pain we might have to endure in life would be dulled or not affect us? Maybe, but I'm thinking of that bathtub again.
Let's see what some famous people have said about love.
"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it." Martin Luther King Jr.
"Wherever there are jars [shocks in your life], wherever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love." Mohandas K. (The Mahatma) Gandhi
"It's not how much we do but how much love we put in the thing. It's not how much we give but how much love we put in the giving." Mother Teresa
Mr. King, the Mahatma and the Mother were well known for their inspiring speeches. These quotes inspire, but they may be difficult to translate into action.
Let's look at what the recently dubbed richest man in the world has to say. Given that rich people tend to focus more on gaining money than on improving their people skills, we may approach this one with skepticism.
"There's nobody I know who commands the love of others who doesn't feel like a success. And I can't imagine people who aren't loved feel very successful." Warren Buffett
Though Mr. Buffett uses language as we might expect a rich man to use and he has twisted the meaning so it came out backward, I believe he has a more important point to make than the others.
How can we command the love of others? He should have said "have ready access to the love of others." That's what he meant. Love cannot be commanded, in the usual sense of the word.
There is only one way to have access to the love of others without having that unstable bathtub scenario. To get love, we have to give it. That's the kind of love that lasts, that doesn't drain away leaving us empty after the "event."
Despite what some have said, love is not the only thing you have to give away to get more. That's true of most emotions. If we give anger, we will get back anger or fear, for example.
As accepted as this concept of giving in order to get more is among those who know the real value of love, it's not taught to every child.
We assume that every mother loves her children, no matter what. Or we believe that, despite some evidence to the contrary, such as a mother who suffers from severe post partum depression who may seem to want to kill her baby. We assume that every child loves its parents, though evidence is mounting that this is not the case in every family.
These assumptions about love are wrong. Love may be a natural emotion for us, but it has to be taught. If a child does not learn about love in its fullest sense before it's prime learning years are past (by age six, to a lesser extent age 11), then that person will always have a problem giving love as an adult even if he or she learns how to give it and to receive it.
Like an addict who spends the rest of his life "recovering" from his addiction, an adult who learn about love in adolescence or later will have to be regularly reminded about what love is, how to give it and how to receive it.
Our need for love is the part of love that's natural. Knowing how to give it and to receive it in a socially acceptable form is not part of our natural makeup. It must be taught if we want and expect people to know it.
In order for love to be taught to children, their parents must understand how love works before their children are born. Otherwise they may learn to late to teach their kids, then the kids may have problems the parents don't understand and will have no idea how to cope with them.
Given that the rate of divorce in developed countries hovers around the 50 percent mark, meaning that roughly half the couples who have children will separate and half or more of the single mothers and their children will live in poverty, we need to get teaching about love soon. The divorce rate proves that not many newly married couples know about love, even if they do know about romance.
It's all very well to have goals for children of being professionals or corporate CEOs, but if they don't know, understand and appreciate love, they will not have a full life. They could be rich, but not successful at life.
Even the world's richest man knows that. I'll bet Warren Buffett had a very loving mother.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers to learn what kids need in terms of their social and emotional development, including how to love and to receive love.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Life After A Near-Death Experience
One realizes the full importance of time only when there is little of it left. Every man's greatest capital asset is his unexpired years of productive life.
- P. W. Litchfield
As a group, surely those who have survived near-death experiences--such as recovering from a severe version of cancer--must be the happiest and self-fulfilled people around.
Here's one example:"Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because my illness was also my antidote: it cured me of laziness." - Lance Armstrong (US seven-time Tour De France winner, who survived testicular cancer)
What is there about surviving a dangerous event or escaping death that allows those people to appreciate every minute they have afterward?
Some consider it a "second life," but that's a euphemism for making better use of time especially showing their appreciation of and love for others. Being given "a second chance" is another way of putting it. That's not the whole answer.
These people learned a profound lesson from deep personal experience, one they didn't have the opportunity to know before.
Is that it? Do we have to survive death to live life to the fullest? Well, many people who have experienced a religious awakening (epiphany) or found what they have been looking for in terms of a religious affiliation enjoy life thereafter in much the same way.
Something changes them. Something at a deep personal level.
Note that these examples all involve adults. Can they--do they--happen as well with children? Yes, but we tend to consider these situations of the teacher-plus-student-plus-lesson format. In other words, kids learn life lessons from teachers; sometimes the teachers are their own parents.
We can influence the lives of children in profound and magnificent ways if we teach them life lessons at the right times. However, this seldom happens, or at least too infrequently.
Rarely are such important life lessons found on school curriculum. Ironically, we would never find time devoted in curriculum for tending to discipline problems either. Yet these can take a huge amount of classroom time in some schools.
I say "ironically" because the two situations are related, directly. Children and adolescents want to know about life more than they want to know how to do calculus or speak another language. They're built that way, just like the young of every other primate and mammalian species.
They want and need to know some things about life--including how to make friends and how to have the skills necessary to do the social exercises necessary to learn about finding life partners--so much so that they resent being "forced" to learn other things that mean little to them at the time. So they may misbehave, drop out or rebel as a way to express their dissatisfaction and discomfort at not receiving what they know naturally they should have from their parents or teachers.
Epiphanies may happen to those children, as adults, who have had a thorough spectrum of learning experiences with life, social and emotional development. But they may be less profound if they have learned the skills they need to find what they require in life when they were young. The results are the same, but the change less significant.
We prepare (or should prepare) children to be people, not just occupiers of jobs. Schools, in general, prepare children for jobs they will or could have as adults.
Someone--schools, parents or a religion--needs to prepare them for life. It's not happening now, at least not with many kids. We have lots of adults around who have problems and don't know how to cope with them. They take strange and even self-destructive routes to cope with their problems because they don't know what else to do.
These life lessons would be both easy and cheap to teach in schools.
We need to authorize our departments of education, our boards of education, our schools, our administrators and our teaches to meet the most important needs that our children are not having met now.
Not only would we have far fewer problems in our communities, our families and our personal lives, the taxes our governments require to deal with miscreants and criminals today would be drastically reduced in the future if such a program were implemented in schools.
One thing is for certain, no school curriculum will change on its own. It likely won't happen without your support.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers, the "missing link" in today's education process.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- P. W. Litchfield
As a group, surely those who have survived near-death experiences--such as recovering from a severe version of cancer--must be the happiest and self-fulfilled people around.
Here's one example:"Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because my illness was also my antidote: it cured me of laziness." - Lance Armstrong (US seven-time Tour De France winner, who survived testicular cancer)
What is there about surviving a dangerous event or escaping death that allows those people to appreciate every minute they have afterward?
Some consider it a "second life," but that's a euphemism for making better use of time especially showing their appreciation of and love for others. Being given "a second chance" is another way of putting it. That's not the whole answer.
These people learned a profound lesson from deep personal experience, one they didn't have the opportunity to know before.
Is that it? Do we have to survive death to live life to the fullest? Well, many people who have experienced a religious awakening (epiphany) or found what they have been looking for in terms of a religious affiliation enjoy life thereafter in much the same way.
Something changes them. Something at a deep personal level.
Note that these examples all involve adults. Can they--do they--happen as well with children? Yes, but we tend to consider these situations of the teacher-plus-student-plus-lesson format. In other words, kids learn life lessons from teachers; sometimes the teachers are their own parents.
We can influence the lives of children in profound and magnificent ways if we teach them life lessons at the right times. However, this seldom happens, or at least too infrequently.
Rarely are such important life lessons found on school curriculum. Ironically, we would never find time devoted in curriculum for tending to discipline problems either. Yet these can take a huge amount of classroom time in some schools.
I say "ironically" because the two situations are related, directly. Children and adolescents want to know about life more than they want to know how to do calculus or speak another language. They're built that way, just like the young of every other primate and mammalian species.
They want and need to know some things about life--including how to make friends and how to have the skills necessary to do the social exercises necessary to learn about finding life partners--so much so that they resent being "forced" to learn other things that mean little to them at the time. So they may misbehave, drop out or rebel as a way to express their dissatisfaction and discomfort at not receiving what they know naturally they should have from their parents or teachers.
Epiphanies may happen to those children, as adults, who have had a thorough spectrum of learning experiences with life, social and emotional development. But they may be less profound if they have learned the skills they need to find what they require in life when they were young. The results are the same, but the change less significant.
We prepare (or should prepare) children to be people, not just occupiers of jobs. Schools, in general, prepare children for jobs they will or could have as adults.
Someone--schools, parents or a religion--needs to prepare them for life. It's not happening now, at least not with many kids. We have lots of adults around who have problems and don't know how to cope with them. They take strange and even self-destructive routes to cope with their problems because they don't know what else to do.
These life lessons would be both easy and cheap to teach in schools.
We need to authorize our departments of education, our boards of education, our schools, our administrators and our teaches to meet the most important needs that our children are not having met now.
Not only would we have far fewer problems in our communities, our families and our personal lives, the taxes our governments require to deal with miscreants and criminals today would be drastically reduced in the future if such a program were implemented in schools.
One thing is for certain, no school curriculum will change on its own. It likely won't happen without your support.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers, the "missing link" in today's education process.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, February 25, 2008
How You Can Follow Your Bliss
If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of trackthat has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life youought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that,you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, andthey open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't beafraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going tobe. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn'thave opened for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell
[bliss: noun, a state of extreme happiness]
A small voice inside me wants to add "except if you are physically, intellectually, emotionally or mentally lacking the fundamental ability to achieve your goal."
Can a person who has no talent for painting follow his bliss into a life of painting, for example? Perhaps yes. Some styles of painting seem to be so simple that a child in primary grades could do them.
Is that possible? Yes. Within each brain is the ability to do something far better than most others. Savants are geniuses in one particular field, while being considered retarded in most others. A painter with no talent for painting in conventional styles may invent a new genre which would make him a creative genius of painting.
We really know very little about the brain functions that come into play in creative processes. Science is studying the brain, but scientists may have problems understanding what they learn because they have trouble appreciating what can't be hypothesized, tested and proven.
Van Gogh either sold only one painting in his life or none, depending on which story you read. By that standard, he died a failure. And he cut off part of his ear out of shame for embarrassing his friend, which makes him an insane failure to some. He also indulged liberally in absinthe, which would make him an addict.
Yet van Gogh followed his bliss. Failure though he may have been during his lifetime, we now recognize him as one of the great masters of art. During his life, most people thought what he painted was crap. For van Gogh, it was his world.
Music is another field in which a person may get lost and live a good part of a lifetime in a world that many would say doesn't exist. People who can get "lost in the music" must be mysteries to those who are unable to achieve that state.
Music exists in every culture, in every part of the world. In many of those cultures people enter trance-like states that mimic drug-induced states as their minds leave their immediate surroundings and get folded into the music that becomes a whole separate world for some period of time. This may happen while listening to music or dancing to it.
That blissful state is available to those who only listen to music as well as to those who make it. When your bliss involves music, you will be blissful participating in music at whatever level you choose to make part of your life.
Writers experience a similar phenomenon when they write. They create a world within the scenario they are writing about. To them, the rest of the world disappears like a vapour and reality forms around what their mind produces. Time means nothing. Hunger doesn't exist. Even a change of ambient temperature from comfortable to extra cold or hot may not be noticed because it plays no role in the created world of the writer's imagination.
While I can't speak from personal experience about the world of art, I am abundantly familiar with getting lost in music and writing. I can't play a musical instrument because of motor problems with my fingers. I would be an excellent conductor (have been on a few notable occasions) except that I must memorize the score because I can't read as fast as the music must go. But I can listen to and enjoy music with the best of them.
I can also say with some confidence that I can write. This may seem like a small accomplishment, but 20 years ago I was functionally illiterate, barely able to either read or write.
While my reading improved over many years of practice, my writing only improved when in 1999 I found myself with something profound to say, a message to deliver to the world. Since writing my first book I have written on hundreds of topics, each time taking me into a world of that subject as I lose track of anything happening in the "other world."
Can you follow your bliss? Definitely. Will doors magically open for you, as Joseph Campbell said? Amazingly, they do. Is it easy? Nothing worthwhile is.
When what you are doing is your bliss, hard work is part of the living of that special life that no one else understands but you. Others may appreciate it if they have had similar experiences, but they will never understand it the way you do yourself.
Following your bliss you are always alone, but never lonely. It's like being surrounded by love. Maybe you can express some of that love in painting, in music or in writing, or maybe it's just your special place alone. When you are there, your brain cooperates by splashing you with dopamine, its own special feel-good drug.
It's an addiction when you learn to use it. But one without a hangover or come-down period afterward. No one knows why or how those special doors open to you. Some attribute it to a higher power than us. Those of us with the ability to experience that bliss won't discover the source of the door opening because that requires us to alienate ourselves from the very thing that makes us whole and worthwhile in order to study it.
So, like many important things in life, bliss remains a mystery.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how parents and grandparents can guide children so that they can experience the bliss of life rather then the drudgery and fear that most adults live with daily.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Joseph Campbell
[bliss: noun, a state of extreme happiness]
A small voice inside me wants to add "except if you are physically, intellectually, emotionally or mentally lacking the fundamental ability to achieve your goal."
Can a person who has no talent for painting follow his bliss into a life of painting, for example? Perhaps yes. Some styles of painting seem to be so simple that a child in primary grades could do them.
Is that possible? Yes. Within each brain is the ability to do something far better than most others. Savants are geniuses in one particular field, while being considered retarded in most others. A painter with no talent for painting in conventional styles may invent a new genre which would make him a creative genius of painting.
We really know very little about the brain functions that come into play in creative processes. Science is studying the brain, but scientists may have problems understanding what they learn because they have trouble appreciating what can't be hypothesized, tested and proven.
Van Gogh either sold only one painting in his life or none, depending on which story you read. By that standard, he died a failure. And he cut off part of his ear out of shame for embarrassing his friend, which makes him an insane failure to some. He also indulged liberally in absinthe, which would make him an addict.
Yet van Gogh followed his bliss. Failure though he may have been during his lifetime, we now recognize him as one of the great masters of art. During his life, most people thought what he painted was crap. For van Gogh, it was his world.
Music is another field in which a person may get lost and live a good part of a lifetime in a world that many would say doesn't exist. People who can get "lost in the music" must be mysteries to those who are unable to achieve that state.
Music exists in every culture, in every part of the world. In many of those cultures people enter trance-like states that mimic drug-induced states as their minds leave their immediate surroundings and get folded into the music that becomes a whole separate world for some period of time. This may happen while listening to music or dancing to it.
That blissful state is available to those who only listen to music as well as to those who make it. When your bliss involves music, you will be blissful participating in music at whatever level you choose to make part of your life.
Writers experience a similar phenomenon when they write. They create a world within the scenario they are writing about. To them, the rest of the world disappears like a vapour and reality forms around what their mind produces. Time means nothing. Hunger doesn't exist. Even a change of ambient temperature from comfortable to extra cold or hot may not be noticed because it plays no role in the created world of the writer's imagination.
While I can't speak from personal experience about the world of art, I am abundantly familiar with getting lost in music and writing. I can't play a musical instrument because of motor problems with my fingers. I would be an excellent conductor (have been on a few notable occasions) except that I must memorize the score because I can't read as fast as the music must go. But I can listen to and enjoy music with the best of them.
I can also say with some confidence that I can write. This may seem like a small accomplishment, but 20 years ago I was functionally illiterate, barely able to either read or write.
While my reading improved over many years of practice, my writing only improved when in 1999 I found myself with something profound to say, a message to deliver to the world. Since writing my first book I have written on hundreds of topics, each time taking me into a world of that subject as I lose track of anything happening in the "other world."
Can you follow your bliss? Definitely. Will doors magically open for you, as Joseph Campbell said? Amazingly, they do. Is it easy? Nothing worthwhile is.
When what you are doing is your bliss, hard work is part of the living of that special life that no one else understands but you. Others may appreciate it if they have had similar experiences, but they will never understand it the way you do yourself.
Following your bliss you are always alone, but never lonely. It's like being surrounded by love. Maybe you can express some of that love in painting, in music or in writing, or maybe it's just your special place alone. When you are there, your brain cooperates by splashing you with dopamine, its own special feel-good drug.
It's an addiction when you learn to use it. But one without a hangover or come-down period afterward. No one knows why or how those special doors open to you. Some attribute it to a higher power than us. Those of us with the ability to experience that bliss won't discover the source of the door opening because that requires us to alienate ourselves from the very thing that makes us whole and worthwhile in order to study it.
So, like many important things in life, bliss remains a mystery.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how parents and grandparents can guide children so that they can experience the bliss of life rather then the drudgery and fear that most adults live with daily.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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