Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, but it makes it a lot easier to remember: everyone can tell you what comes after “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright …” If you can rhyme, people will also forgive you for not making sense; after all what is a “forest of the night”? Never start a poem with a line ending in a word that doesn’t rhyme. You may have enjoyed your holiday immensely, but don’t start the subsequent poem with the line, “Across the sky skimmed the wide-bodied Airbus”. You’re then limited to dodgy spelling – “packing your hairbrus” – or
Many mistakenly think that if they make efforts to avoid their feelings for long enough these unpleasant emotions will be kept at bay or fade away, when in actuality deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts often make them more likely to surface. Avoidance is a large factor in the development and maintenance of anxiety.
Bandura was drawn into the public debate and testified before congressional committees and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, a task force created after the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
His research did not sit well with the broadcast industry. His findings were criticized in articles commissioned by the networks, and the Television Information Office, part of the National Association of Broadcasters, sent its sponsor stations elaborate rebuttals to his findings. After Dr. Bandura and several other social scientists were excluded from a committee that the surgeon general had asked to evaluate the effects of television violence, Dr. Bandura later wrote, he discovered that broadcast networks had been allowed to veto the nominations of committee members.
“I began to feel a kinship with the battered Bobo doll,” he wrote.
In the end, his work won out, his findings becoming even more relevant in a world where social media and a 24-hour-a-day news cycle have afforded violence models far greater reach.
The Bobo doll experiment became a staple of psychology classes around the world. People mailed Bobo dolls to Dr. Bandura requesting autographs and knocked on his office door in Stanford’s Jordan Hall, hoping to have their photograph taken with the famous psychologist.
In an interview for this obituary in 2018, Dr. Bandura said he had once received an email from some high school students.
“Professor Bandura,” they wrote, “we’re having a huge fight in our class and you’re the only one who can answer it: Professor Bandura, are you still living?”
He wrote the students back: “This email is being sent from the other side. We have email there, but not Facebook.”
Albert Bandura was born on Dec. 4, 1925, in the prairie town of Mundare, about 50 miles east of Edmonton, Alberta. His parents, like most of the settlement’s 400 residents, were immigrants from Eastern Europe, his father from Krakow, Poland, his mother from Ukraine. His father, Joseph Bandura, laid track for the trans-Canada railway and turned a heavily wooded homestead into a working farm. His mother, Justyna (Berezanski) Bandura, ran a delivery service, transporting goods from the railway station to the store.
In the summers, Dr. Bandura helped his father on the farm or worked in other manual labor jobs. When he
it turns out, learning to fail is a skill like any other. Which means it takes practice. Here’s how you can approach a setback so that — to paraphrase Cardi B — when you’re knocked down nine times, you can get up 10.
Life didn’t unfold quite that way. Instead of having a literary career, she married, took a teaching job and raised three children. She wrote off and on, mostly for herself. But when she retired in her late 50s, “words came tumbling out of closets and drawers, leaking from rusty faucets and reappearing as character actors,” said Ms. Shulklapper, now 80. She began sending out poems and short stories, and published her first book of poetry in 1996, when she was 60.
Since then, she has published four chapbooks, which are typically small editions of 40 pages or so, and a fifth is in progress. And in January, Guardian Angel Publishing released Ms. Shulklapper’s first children’s book, “Stuck in Bed Fred.”
“I am living beyond my dreams,” said Ms. Shulklapper, a widowed grandmother of six who lives in Boca Raton, Fla. “I feel as though it’s my baby. A long pregnancy and now its delivery, all 10 toes and fingers.”
Conventional wisdom holds that if you do not write your “Farewell to Arms,” paint your “Starry Night,” start the next Twitter or climb Mount Everest by young adulthood, or
Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of the market. What you’re experiencing is the invisible hand of art, the desire to pursue a life of creativity. That’s beautiful. But it’s unlikely to lead to financial security, at least in the short term, which is important to you because of your mother’s experiences. So you have to do what every artist does: find a patron. It might help to think of your accounting gig as that patron, at least for now. It will underwrite your apprenticeship, and help you uncouple your artistic aspirations from financial expectation, so you can write what you feel called to write without worrying about whether it will make money. It’s worth thinking, too, about the role you want writing to play in your life and what you’re willing to sacrifice to make that happen. I realize this doesn’t sound very romantic, but there is a practical aspect to the pursuit of our dreams. You have to ask yourself a few candid questions about what you consider essential, whether it’s a decent car or a nice place to live or enough financial security to keep anxiety at bay. The last thing you want is for writing to become a source of stress, because you’ll come to resent it as you do your current job.
CS In asking these questions, you’re undoing some of the ideas you absorbed that led you down the wrong career path, C. P. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to be doing at this moment in your life
Paying too much attention to your emotional state can make you miserable
Photo: Vince Fleming/Unsplash
Ifyou want to feel slightly less happy right this minute, there’s an easy way to make that happen: Ask yourself how happy you’re feeling.
“The moment you check in — how happy am I now? — you feel happiness less,” says Iris Mauss, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “The very question interferes with happiness.”
Mauss has spent years studying a phenomenon that some have termed the “happiness paradox.” The paradox is that when people try hard to be happy — when they make feeling happy a goal — their well-being tends to suffer for it.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Some appear to be cultural. Some have to do with the ways we define and pursue happiness.
But an overriding lesson from the happiness research is that the more you obsess about your emotional state — the more significance you assign your feelings, and the more you try to steer them — the more likely you are to get into emotional and psychological trouble.
Recently, Mauss and her research collaborators asked people to define happiness.
“We found a huge variety in how people answered,” she says. “Some people said happiness meant having good feelings, which is maybe the most intuitive response.” But when asked what good feelings they were talking about, some mentioned “excitement” or “joy” while others said “peacefulness.”
Some people didn’t talk about feelings at all. “They defined happiness in terms of knowledge — the knowledge that their life was meaningful, or the knowledge that they were a better person than they were five years ago,” she says. Others admitted their idea of happiness was acquiring more material possessions.
‘In the U.S., happiness is a relatively individualistic enterprise.’
The fact that we can’t even agree on what happiness is may partly explain why cultivating more of it is a challenge.
However, Mauss and her colleagues found that a person’s definition of happiness, whatever that definition was, tended to correlate with improved measures of well-being. Excitement and peacefulness and the knowledge that your life is meaningful — that’s all good stuff.
There was one big exception. “When people defined happiness in terms of material possessions, that was associated with worse well-being,” she says.
Mauss uncovered more useful insights while working on a 2015 study that appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. For that project, she and her colleagues examined how people in different cultures around the world think about and pursue happiness.
“We found that in the U.S., happiness is a relatively individualistic enterprise,” she says. The Americans in her study tended to focus on their personal emotional experiences and how best to ameliorate them. And once again, valuing happiness in this way was associated with lower well-being.
But in East Asia, where notions of happiness are more social and collectivist, rather than self-oriented, these patterns reversed. The more a person valued happiness, the greater their well-being.
There, Mauss and her group found that the pursuit of happiness looked different than it does in America. Happiness often involved helping others or spending more time with friends and family. People also tended to associate happiness with sentiments such as “seeing that other people are content” or “making the people I care about feel good.”
Another way to put it, in these East Asian cultures, happiness looked outward, not inward. And that seemed to make all the difference.
One of the unwelcome byproducts of prioritizing happiness — one that’s easy to overlook — is that you end up spending a lot of your time monitoring and judging your feelings.
How am I right now? Am I hopeful? Anxious? Ambivalent? Angry? Whatever answer you come up with, Mauss says that this sort of emotional self-scrutiny can have unhappy consequences.
If your emotions are pleasant, pausing to examine them can reduce their positivity by pulling you out of the moment. The experience of “flow” — of being wholly immersed in something — is a hallmark of many activities that people value or enjoy. Checking in on your emotional state disrupts that flow; it rips some of your attention away from the pleasurable experience.
Assessing your emotional state disrupts that flow; it rips some of your attention away from the pleasurable experience.
On the other hand, if your emotional check-in reveals that you’re not happy, you’re likely to see this as a problem to be remedied.
How my heart sings 