Joseph's Prayer

Joseph, my 17 year old grandson,  is a Special Needs student at Shawnee Heights High School. . .

The Vacation Wendell Berry

The Vacation

BY WENDELL BERRY

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

On Being Yourself

E.E. Cummings once put it: “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

The Power of Friendship Networks

From David Brooks' column Kansas City Star  July 16, 2014

". . .our decisions (about career paths)  are shaped  by the networks of people around us more than we dare realize.     . . .First there is contagion.  People absorb memes, ideas and behaviors from each other the way they catch a cold. . .if your friends are obese, you're likely to be obese.  If your neighbors play fair, you are likely to play fair.  . . .

. . .People with vast numbers of acquaintances have more job opportunities than people with fewer but deeper friendships.

Finally, there is the power of the extended mind.  There is also a developed body of research on how much our consciousness is shaped by the people around us.   Let me simplify it with a classic observation:  Each close friend you have brings out a version of yourself that you could not bring out on your own."

Brooks goes on to compare life to a soccer game as opposed to baseball. . .controlling your personal space is essential to success.  

Teen-Agers Employed in Fast Food Places

As we ate breakfast at McDonald's this morning, it was clear that some of their teen-age help had not shown up for work.    I was reminded of the years I worked as a therapist with teen-age foster kids when   I came to the conclusion that fast food places play an important role in the employment education of teen-agers.    

First of all, show up.      Periodically, someone would say "I am just too upset or depressed to work today, I am calling in sick."       No, we counseled, the best place for you when you have things on your mind is to be at work. . .concentrating on the tasks at hand and keeping busy.    To the contrary, if you stay home and think all day, your problems will seem much worse.

I was constantly reminding my clients that it is not wise to tell your co-workers your life history and all your problems.   Too much information.   If you get angry with a co-worker or you think the work schedule is unfair, it is best to keep it to yourself.   Emotional outbursts in the workplace do not recommend you as a good worker.  

Then, too, there was always the dilemma of the kids being asked to do things they did not want to do.
"If you want that mess cleaned up, do it yourself!" an inexperienced young employee would say to the boss.  

 "So, what have you learned from getting fired?"

Sometimes kids have to get fired more than once before they get the big picture.   My sympathy goes  to the management.

Joseph and His Quilt

Cynicism and Dementia

A study by the University of Eastern Finland determined that cynical people were three times as likely as optimists to get dementia.    Put on your rose colored glasses!

Neovonen, Elisa et al. "Late-life cynical distrust, risk of incident dementia, and mortality in a population-based cohort." 28 May 2014. Neurology. 29 May 2014. http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2014/05/28/WNL.0000000000000528.short  

"Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it.   Because cynics don't learn anything.

Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.  Cynics always say no.  But saying 'yes' begins things.   Saying 'yes' is how things grow. 

Saying 'yes' leads to knowledge."    Stephen Colbert  2006 Commencement Address   Knox College

              Above information from an article by Cindy Hoedel in the Kansas City Star June 8, 2014

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