In life, you have as much room to be as your environment grants you.
Room as in elbow room…
The environment you are in, at home, at work, at the pub, at the club, in the community van…
My brother has a lot of room to be when he is with his friends. He is funny, he is smart, maybe even glib… that is the only place anywhere he has some room to be. Maybe he had room to be at work… he is retired now. Everywhere else he is under the “thumb” of someone… under the tyranny of someone. He should be different, do different… never OK, never enough, never the one… except maybe his grandkids? still adoring him… for how long?
I left Hungary to have more room to be someone more than who I felt the environment all
The narrative ((narrative:
* 1.a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.
* 2.a book, literary work, etc., containing such a story.
* 3.the art, technique, or process of narrating, or of telling a story: Somerset Maugham was a master of narrative.
* 4.a story that connects and explains a carefully selected set of supposedly true events, experiences, or the like, intended to support a particular viewpoint or thesis: to rewrite the prevailing narrative about masculinity; the narrative that our public schools are failing.))
A student of mine, after listening to my last Sunday call recording, asked why Jews turned to a different strategy than the slaves from Africa. Or Native Americans.
Parents want to help, but instead they push you deeper into the bull’s ear.
The expression, came from a student’s father, ((I found a meme that is running my life and I know where it comes from… wohooo.
“I have to prove: “what I know”, “what I can”, “that I am smart”, “that I work hard” etc. To show off.
As I can see it, this context was created by my father. As long as I remember he has been telling me this in Kurdish: “You are in the ears of the bull”. Meaning, not aware, not intelligent, do not amount for anything or being like a donkey.
No matter what I did, got a degree, was not dependent on them like my younger brother and sister, was one of the best in the military, started to make a living.
Your behavior is always consistent with what you see.
And what you see depends 100% of your available capacities.
You don’t even look… because you know what is there… you know there is nothing to see.
The difference between a blind person and you is that the blind person knows she cannot see.
Why can’t you see? For two reasons:
1. your prejudices and cognitive biases
2. no one demanded that you actually see. The school system, your family, even the places where you work expect you to be blind, stupid, waiting to be told… and you don’t disappoint.
The few of you that can see are called trouble makers, or simple “trouble”.
We live as if things never changed. Even though we hear, read, that the only thing that is constant in life is change.
And yet, our minds, the machine-like part of us that cannot learn, won’t learn, and fancies itself YOU… our minds tell us, moment to moment, that life will remain the way it is in that moment.
Is that crazy or what?
When something bad happens, the reaction is not to the bad thing, but to the idea that the results of the bad thing are life-long.
When something good happens, the reaction is not to the good thing. It is to the idea, to the notion, to the ce
Everything you ever wanted is available to you, if…
… if you are willing to look at see what is so about you and your life.
The truth. Naked. Ugly. Often shameful.
Here is a correspondence I had with a client today:
She said: “I’m interested in changing my context since it’s part of what keeps me stuck.”
“… answering the questions: what am I doing? Why am I doing it?
Unless you have done the work of identifying what you have been doing, and why you have been doing it, no way you can shift the context. You cannot catch what you can’t see. And you cannot change what you can’t catch.”
To the degree you are able and willing to do that, to the same degree you can change your life. ((
Both are context words. Neither talks about the stuff that is inside the context… inside the wrapper. The wrapper tells you how to look at the content.
It has nothing to do with the stuff, or the quantity of it. It can be great, it can be plenty… the context, scarcity or abundance will tell you what to feel, what to think, what to do.
Why? Because context is decisive.
You can have plenty inside the context of scarcity, and feel that you don’t have enough. Enough time, enough stuff, enough happiness, enough whatever…
…or the opposite, you can have little, but inside the context of abundance, you have what you have, and what you have is enough.
How to Get Your Mind to Read ((article by Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.” Republished from the New York Times
Photo: Credit Lilli Carré))
Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.
We throw about big words, and we pretend that we know them. Even “scientists” just pretend. If they didn’t, they would be explaining, clarifying the words, but they don’t.
In the Starting Point Measurements the vocabulary number is what indicates this. I originally intended to call this clarity, but then I decided that if it refers to words, then maybe it can be instructive.
It hasn’t been.
So this article will be, mostly, about words.
Whenever we say conscious awareness, we are talking about words. No words, no conscious awareness.
Whatever you don’t have words for, whatever you mislabel, whatever you just have feelings or emotions about, no accurate words… are not conscious awareness.
In life, you have as much room to be as your environment grants you.
