I just slept in today instead of going to Bikram. I compensated by doing a long walk. For the second time, I saw an elderly lady struggling on her walk up the hill. I spoke to her. Her name is Ginny, and she is 90. I wouldn’t have guessed that much; she was doing pretty well. She was walking slowly but taking on a pronounced incline. She moved here recently to live with her youngest son, who didn’t want her living alone anymore. I think she’s my kind of lady. Among other things, she is looking for a yoga studio.
When I got home, I worked on the plumbago, just about finished pulling it off the fence. Then I showered and went to school to tutor my three students.
K. admits, reluctantly, that she is reading better. She doesn’t want to give anyone any points, oh no. She finally gave a two thumbs up, but she still had that terrible feeling when she makes a mistake in reading. I did some EFT with her. “Even though I still make mistakes when I read, I know that I am safe,’ was the setup, and I used Pat Carrington’s format for the tapping. Her SUDS level dropped from a 10, distressed to a 4, where she felt safe.
With D, I worked on his auditory processing. His short-term memory was good; he can repeat a sentence correctly, but then he has trouble with long term memory. I showed him a better spot for short-term auditory memory and how to encode and decode from long term memory. He practiced this recall skill, using those spots, for the rest of the class.
B. says his reading is much improved. He says his mother recognizes that but no jumping up and down for joy. What a shame. It’s not that he is doing grade-level work, but improvement should always be recognized, as well as effort Pushing beyond previous limits should always be celebrated. He still does not stop to write down and process the words he doesn’t know. I think the first step is getting him to recognize that he doesn’t know and stop the wild guessing based on the first letter of the word. That would be a good start. When he does write them down and go through the procedure I recommend, he usually gets them on the first try. When he doesn’t get them on the first try, he shifted a sound from the front to the back of the word or vice versa or intruded another sound. When he does the cross body blending, that problem is eliminated. I can’t get him to do this on his own so far. Oh, well. Just a few moves at a time. I see improvement in his use of context clues to figure out the word when his pronunciation is slightly off. He wasn’t doing that at all when we started. He didn’t even understand that was what he was supposed to do it.
I left school a bit earlier than I more normally do. I had an appointment with the acupuncturist at two and then with the chiropractor at three. I still see no change in the hot flashes with the needle treatments and the Chinese herbs. The problem isn’t that I have them; they have become private downpours over the last few years. The acupuncturist recommended ‘cooling’ foods.: asparagus, watermelon. I stopped off at Safeway to snag those two before I went home. When I got home after those two treatments, I slept.
Yvette and I had a dinner date. It was three slices of Kona Crust Pizza, two for me, one for her. We ate in the library so we would be alone. Kathrin would have left the house if I had asked her, but I didn’t. The library worked just fine. I like that we are making an effort to connect more.
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Musings:
Toni Morrison wrote an article for the Book Review section of the NY Times for September 8 dealing with the question of goodness and altruism. She reports that she found a bewildering number of conflicting definitions for both terms. She wrote, “Thinkers, of whom none was as uninformed as I was, have long analyzed what constitutes goodness, what good is good, and what its origins are or maybe.”
I give a lot of thought to these topics. I find simplistic answers tough to bear. I have only vague ideas as to why this is so upsetting to me. She listed the diverse interpretations of altruism. What is the term when you read something that supports your opinion and latch on to it as evidence of validation? That’s what I’ve done here. To that end: different “interpretations, contrary analyses, and doubt. A few of these arguments posited wildly different interpretations:
1. Altruism is not an instinctive act of selfness, but a taught and learned one.
2. Altruism might actually be narcissism, ego enhancement, even a mental disorder made manifest in a desperate desire to think well of oneself to diminish self-loathing.
3. Some of the most thought-provoking theories came from scholarship investigating the DNA, if you will, seeking evidence of an embedded gene automatic firing to enable the sacrifice of oneself for the benefit of others; a kind of brother or sister to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.””
Do I need to tell you who know me that I think all three can play a role? I have at least one more to add to the list: Once someone has decided that they want to live a life caring and protecting others, they practice it daily. With that practice, as with any form of behavior practiced, soccer, table manners, reading, etc., the response can become automatic. Therefore, when someone finds themselves in a situation calling for an immediate response, they have programmed themselves to give that response of self-sacrifice, even of life. Yes, I think that it is part of self-image, “I am a good person.” But no, I don’t believe this is always an indication of a mental disturbance. When the genetic component of altruism hasn’t been disturbed or downright destroyed, combined with social input on the value of caring for others and practicing something, or better yet someone, good may come out of it.
Many years ago, I heard a lecture on self-image. The speaker said most people need to be seen as good people. Even serial killers will argue they are not bad people; they only did something bad. This is another nagging question: when do we say someone is not a good person?
My speculation on the ‘genetic’ source is that being seen as good by our group was essential to our survival. Anyone who wasn’t seen as good was threatened with expulsion from the group and certain death.
While the need to see ourselves and be seen by others as good people may be universal, I am particularly suspicious of those who match the second definition of altruism, see above. I think I can tell who they are because they keep insisting that they never think of themselves. Yikes! I think they are downright dangerous for anyone they come in contact with. But then, aren’t we all? All we can hope for is to do the least damage possible without having to wipe ourselves out totally. We humans face quite a challenge.
