Two more days before what would have been Mike's eightieth birthday. Oh, boy.
I slept reasonably well, waking up at my usual time and getting out of bed at 6. It's Sunday, and no driveway yoga; I can sleep in. After my morning walk, I did about 10 NYTimes Mini Crossword Puzzles. I'm not up for the real ones. My mother-in-law loved them.
I put off doing work on the PowerPoint presentation I was compiling for my video presentation. I am an excellent procrastinator. I finally sat myself down and modified the PP using Dorothy's recommendations. Then I sent it to Dorothy and Judy for review.
I reread the article I wrote on my reading method. It's been sitting on the coffee table for more than a month. I was shocked by all the errors. Some of it didn't even make sense. How is it that my first readers ignored that? By the time I got through working on it, I was heading toward clinical depression.
I called Jean, my friend, but I only got her voicemail. I put the phone down and then heard Dorothy's voice. I had butt-dialed her. I hung up and then called her back. I told her I was down. She talked to me about her goings-on.
I was still working when I heard a woman's voice call me from the driveway. Judy? Paulette? Yvette? I went to the door. It was Darby asking me if I was going for a walk. She always cheers me up. She told me I could call whenever I needed to. Another fantastic source of contact. Ah!
I continue watching Hinterland. Yes, it's melancholic, but it's soothing, and the countryside scenes are a visual treat.
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Musings:
Some people disagree with my view of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. Some take offense. They believe the current theories, introduced through neuroscience, that we make most decisions unconsciously and our conscious mind's role is 'minor' are dead wrong.'
It's the opposite; the role of the conscious mind versus the unconscious mind is minor. It is tiny and comes in late in any decision-making. The research shows that we are often in action before our conscious minds even come online. Then do we have free will? I argue, yes. But our self-control is limited by our ability and willingness to acknowledge the role of the unconscious mind in our everyday decisions and actions.
How can we have free will if our unconscious minds play a major role in our daily decisions and actions? The conscious mind's role is to observe and say "yes!" or "no." It is the conscious mind that stops an action in progress. Think of all the times you have changed your mind about something, pulled your arm back from an action, either trivial or momentous.
Also, think of all the times you have approached something new with hesitation, even trepidation, and it is your conscious mind, with direct access to the outside world, that says, "Yes, I will try something new, unfamiliar."
The unconscious mind deserves its reputation. It is designed to override our conscious mind and drive actions. That can be good, and it can be bad. The override function is for our survival. You don't want to stand there and contemplate options if you're being chased by a lion. You want to get the hell out of there.
I have experienced that unconscious mind's override of my conscious mind. It resulted in a comic moment, fortunately. I was fifteen years old at a summer camp in Vermont. In their wisdom, the counselors organized a game of 'tag.' We were a bunch of adolescents aged 13 through 16, dividing us into two teams, Cowboys and Indians. Each one of us was given a piece of cloth to tuck into the top of our jeans.
I was a Cowboy; I had zero interest in this game, zero. The Indians had gone out and hidden in the surrounding landscape, New England drum and kettle. The Cowboys received a signal to go when the Indians were in their hiding places. My team walked down the road surrounded by trees on both sides. I was talking to a friend. I was not going to participate in the game in any serious way.
The trees ended abruptly. The landscape opened to a grassy field with this drum and kettle formation. This means the landscape was dotted with these low hillocks. From behind these hillocks, my campmates rose, whooping and hollering.
I jumped, made 180-degree turn mid-air, and started running back to 'safety." I don't know how many strides it took for my conscious mind to kick in and register what was going on. When it did, I started laughing at the ludicrousness of my situation, but I could not stop running. I didn't have the physical strength to counter my adrenaline-driven run. I finally got back to the home base. I stopped myself from running by throwing myself onto a raised bit of land. I was still laughing when an "Indian" came along a snatched my cloth out of my waistband.
There are less dramatic ways our unconscious mind can hijack our conscious minds. I recently had the privilege of addressing this phenomenon with parents terrified for their five-year-old child with a speech problem. They allowed me to tell them that their fear is for their child's life. There's a historical reason why their brains responded that way, but it does not apply to our current situation. Once they accepted that their extreme fear was driven by inappropriate concerns in their current situation, they relaxed.
Our unconscious minds function at a primate level, much as our dogs do. Elsa barks at the mailman. "Thank you, Elsa. He's okay." And she quiets down. I function as her' conscious mind.' When fear is triggered, our unconscious mind always interprets it as a life-threatening danger. That's its default programming. It is how we were designed. No, it is often not appropriate for our current lives. (Hopefully, that will continue to be true in the coming years.) However, we do want the default program of our unconscious lives to be concerned about saving our lives.
The question is how to relate to our unconscious mind. Hating it doesn't work. Suppressing it works in the short run but not in the long run. I argue we must respect and love this powerful instrument that is such a presence in our lives. We are not just our conscious minds.
I'm a democratic, lower-cased. I believe in negotiating. I think there is value in the push and pull of various points of view- if you can get to the core of each one. If either one of them, the conscious or the unconscious mind, is given too much power, it generally winds up a disaster.
As much as we have to respect the unconscious mind's drives, we have to respect the value of the conscious mind's storytelling gift and knowledge of the current reality. The two forces must work together in the framework of a moral overview.
I know, be careful what you wish for. Moral overview??? What does that mean?
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