I was up at the usual time and went through the usual routine, plus 2 kettles of boiling water for the weeds. I received my car registration renewal the other day. I must have put it somewhere sensible, but now I can’t find it. Off to Bikram.
When we were on the floor in the long savasana, I followed my neck into that peculiar position where it frequently goes. I believe it is the position I was in in the uterus the day I was born. I had a ventral presentation. A regular presentation is with the baby facing the mother’s back and not their stomach. I had to turn or be turned. Either way, I was banged into my mother’s hip for three hours. I came out with my nose smooshed against my face. In those days, dads were not in the delivery room. They were out in the waiting room. When my dad did get to see me, he said my nose was still bright red and smashed into my face. It was assumed that my body wouldn’t be permanently damaged. Somewhere in my twenties, some boyfriend was playing with my nose and pointed out that it wasn’t normal. My nose bone was permanently rearranged. As a result, I have a nose unique to my family. My face is somewhat more asymmetrical, without being wildly so; I am at the far end of the normal range. No one birthed vaginally has an entirely symmetrical face. I assume a neck problem is one of the outcomes of the event. After my neck released from the spasm, I stayed in savasana to allow my body to adjust. I had worked hard up to that point with the regular asanas; now, I focused on unwinding.
When I got home, I prepared for delivering some items to Habitat for Humanity the next day. I took pictures of Christmas items in my car trunk so I could make a record of them, and also recorded items on the coffee table that had to go and put them in the car.
I showered and did MELT for my feet and my hands. I noticed I could get complete contact between the outside edge of the left foot with the ground.
I left at 11 for my haircut appointment at 11:30. Randee agreed my hair seems shorter than usual. We had made the appointment for only 5 weeks. A good schedule if I was dependent on my image for work or wellbeing. But that not being the case; we need to make it at least 6 weeks. We did.
Then I headed off to Habitat to drop off items for donation. I got a receipt, but it only says Christmas items. One of the employees helped me unload those items but hadn’t been aware of the other items I brought in.
When I got home, I was tired and went down for a nap. I awoke several times as it rained and then poured, aware that I had my Bikram items on the outside line. I woke again at 4. I went to the bathroom. I was still tired and went back to sleep.
A healing client had asked to postpone his telephone appointment for a week. I texted him concerned. In fact, he was postponing because of depression. I talked/texted with him and convinced him this would be a perfect time to do a session. It was fairly easy to get him back into balance. He said he noticed that he was getting hyper the night before, but had no idea what triggered it. I suggested that he used hyperness as an antidote for depression and depression as an antidote to his hyperness. All I had him do is describe the feeling in his head. The swirling. He said it felt like water was sloshing back and forth from one side of his head to the other, but in an unbalanced way, sloshing more to the right than the left. Just observing it calmed him. Thank you, Buddha (Using mindfulness with equanimity to heal body and mind was his idea.). He said the motion didn’t stop, but his reaction to it stopped. Then he told me that the wave action had calmed down.
After the healing session, I sat down to play FreeCell and then work on the blog. Elsa and I did our walk. She’s doing something new. For the past few nights, she turns around halfway through our walk and heads home. She’s not injured or tired. She’s perfectly good at chasing balls in the house.
Coming into the driveway, I noticed flowers that I asked to have planted. Of course, they are doing poorly. They either died, or there is one scrawny plant hanging on for dear life. The gardeners had originally planted this type of flowers as part of their own design. Those are doing just fine. This particular plant is hard to get because they grow like weeds, and many people don’t want them. I love them. They are increasing between the other plantings at the edge of the driveway, their red flowers peeking out between and among the other plantings, except for the ones that I asked to have planted. There’s something weird between me and the plant world. I’m an excellent weeder, though. Need something killed, ask me.
I ate dinner on the lanai and read more, and then I went into the library to continue the cataloging of Mike’s books. I walked Elsa before going to bed, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. Good night, Elsa, Goodnight, Mike.
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Musings: I’m putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
More on Brooks: His examples of second mountain people are confirmed saints. They are people who surrender their whole beings to the service of others. These are all extreme examples of people who focus on the needs of others. Most of us are not prepared to take such drastic steps. While the world needs saints that stand out as unusual, most of us want to be seen as somewhere in the range of normal. We want little lives, and we want to be good people within that context. So far, I have seen very little in his book tells me how to live within the parameter of normal and be a good person. Really?
Presenting second mountain people as extreme personality types convinces us that being good people is simply out of our reach. It sounds utterly counterproductive if you are hoping your book will convince people to become better people. (I assume that’s at least one of Brooks’s goals in writing this book.)
It reminds me of similar arguments I have heard about the nature of creativity. Shankar Vedantam had a discussion on the subject of creativity on the NPR program Hidden Brain. There was one expert who defined creativity as a product that had a profound impact on society. That would mean that if van Gogh’s work had never been seen by the public, he could not be considered creative. It sounds like an utterly dysfunctional definition.
I define creative thinking as any thought that is not a mere reflection of something you have seen someone else do or heard then say, even if everyone else in the world has seen it and knows it. That means that anytime we do or say anything that we have never seen someone do or heard someone say that we are exhibiting some degree of creativity.
I formulated a theory that we can see personalities as on a continuum moving in two directions from a center point: one side represents the creative act, and the other side represents the imitative act. Retardation, or whatever it is called today, manifests as one extreme or the other. Someone who is entirely imitative can only perform actions that have been modeled explicitly for them. Someone who is altogether creative can never merely copy what they have seen someone else do; they have to develop a ‘new’ procedure for every occasion in their lives. They can’t even repeat something they did previously.
I envisioned an X-axis on a graph. One side of the graph represents a person’s creativity; the other side represents a person’s imitativity (have I just coined a new word?). The +/- numbers have no more significance than they would have on any other X-axis.
-4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4
Imitative creative
Let’s say someone is more creative than they are imitative; they are a +4 on the creative side and a -1 on the imitative side. That’s quite an imbalance. If they intentionally expand their imitative side, let’s say, to a -2, they can expand their creative side without losing balance. As I teach students to follow this model, their output improves. If they are very creative, they complete more tasks, finish the job down to the final details. If they are imitative, they can learn to recognize their own capacity to be creative and expand their horizons.
I would say that someone who is more imitative than creative has a better chance of survival. I believe that our hunter-gatherer ancestors required conformity, which demands an imitative intelligence. They may have provided outlets for creativity: weaving projects, face painting, but all these activities would have had clear limits. In today’s world, the conceptual leaps between two people can be enormous, even within single families. We’re all faced with our own uniqueness and not given instruction on how to cope with it.
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