Grief’s 7 Stages Don’t Include Envy and Resentment

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/style/the-seven-stages-of-grief.html

Reading the letters we receive, I’m always struck by how much, and how quickly, people convert their pain into self-loathing. My first thought when I read your letter, Heartless, was: Oh my god — you’re in pain. Your grieving isn’t over. The public ways in which your fiancé’s mom is grieving have reawakened the more private sense of shock and paralysis you felt when your father died. Your instinctive contempt for her displays of sorrow, and how she’s been able to elicit comfort, raises questions about whether you received what you needed 10 years ago, when you were so young and less equipped to ask for support, or even understand how to grieve.

Emptying yourself tonight?

You are going to do something creative. So how do you get ready? You are hoping for some new ideas some connections.

Well suppose you are going to bake a cake the first thing that you do is what?

You have to clear a space on your work surface or table to put you your baking bowl and you have to make sure the oven is empty

The very first thing you must do is to wash up in case the cake tin all the bowls you need all there being soaked and there’s no room for anything else so you wash up up.and put these things away and now you have a space in which you can set about creating the cake of your dreams

Supposing do you want to paint a picture or write a poem.

Our mind is full of ideas,of people we’ve just seen or a unfulfilled desires thoughts about food clothing who knows jealousy envy love

Well you can’t create when your mind is full like that.

That is what Marion Milner discovered that if she said

I am nothing I have nothing I want nothing

This freed her from the buzzing cloud of flies inside my head. And then thoughts and ideas from the deeper parts of the mind can come into the consciousness.

She calls this the gesture of

Inner Poverty.

By giving up for a time all the things that occupy our thoughts we create some space for new ideas.

I can’t guarantee that they will be any good but there’s a good chance of it if we follow up a little ideas with some hard work.

I think it might be rather like the desireless that is part of Buddhism.

Saying I am nothing is not self derogatory. Nobody is nothing o and if you believe in God you will believe that everybody has a soul equal two other people’s in the eyes and God regardless of your wealth or status. It’s it’s moving away from constant occupation with egocentric concerns which can impede perception.

Because these concerns are a barrier to our vision.

This is just one way of looking at perception and creativity

Statistics and Stan

Stan and the standard deviation

Stan was teaching social statistics to a group of elderly neighbours.Since he was 101 it gave much hope to them to see him demonstrating his prowess with various techniques on the overhead projector,.He was planning to do some logic and some philosophy too.Annie was sitting by the door so she could answer the bell if any paramedics turned up for tea or supper…
I’m not going to calculate the standard deviation he murmured.”I just want you to grasp the general purpose.”
“Deviations,they’re not normal are they?” enquired his neighbour Henry,an ex-English teacher.”So how can they be standard.It’s utterly confusing..”
“Are you thinking of deviants?” Stan enquired calmly yet nervously
”Certainly not,at my age I’m long past that!”
” Still it adds a bit of excitement to the class.” he thought silently
How do words in ordinary language relate to those in Statistics?”asked Henry kindly.
“They are just more precisely defined in statistics.To say someone is a deviant is a rather vague term.”
“No,it’s not!My neighbour is a deviant.He always dresses entirely in yellow.”
“Well,that must be hard to do.Certainly unusual.” Stan agreed boldly.
“But in another country that might be the norm.So it’s a matter of context.In statistics it’s more prosaic..There’s a formula.It’s totally independent of context.Have you ever wondered why so many mathematicians have a touch of Asperger’s syndrome?”
“No,it’s not something that meanders through my mind much”replied Henry wittily.
A shudder passed through the audience on hearing the word “formula“,which perhaps they considered something of a deviant word. Anything with letters and numbers mixed together is certainly not welcome in many people’s minds, along with their more unusual sexual tastes, desires and inclinations which were kept secret even from themselves in many cases.So Lacan appeared to think.As I am unable to understand his writing myself,I cannot be sure if he was right or even half right.
“Time for tea,” called Annie,hoping to divert their attention to the everyday realm of food and drink.She carried in a platter of mouse [mice?] sandwiches kindly donated by the local ambulance service and some iced Victoria sponges she and Stan had made the day before in her new naga oven.
“Just a quick word about next week.We’ll take a look at ratios and proportions and maybe see how that relates to the concept of rationality.”
“That sounds fun!” Annie called encouragingly
.Henry decided to act on a deviant desire and fell onto her lap
”Oh,dear!” she gasped loudly as the chair collapsed under her.
”Why can’t you be deviant at home?”
“My wife won’t let me!” He kindly answered.And it’s impossible truly.
“And look,” Stan continued,”we’ll have to ring 999.This chair is in fragments.I thought for one day we’d be able to avoid calling them out!”
“Well,life is not controllable.” said a quiet but fierce looking lady with sharp green eyes.”That’s what makes it tolerable“
She then greedily consumed a large piece of iced sponge cake .
“I can stand the thinking if the cake is good” she whispered to her shy friend Amy.
”That’s rather a feeble argument,”Amy retorted.”You can’t really compare cake and statistics.”
“I’ll compare anything I like!” the green-eyed woman snarled loudly.
“You do what you like but you must keep a sense of proportion!”As we all know….
“Now then,have you rung 999?” Stan queried of Annie.”Yes,here they are,and they’ ve got a stretcher for the chair!”
“Well,that’s certainly unusual,even deviant“,Stan thought anxiously to himself.
”Where do they get their funding? Is there a fund for distributing money to help chairs which are not normal?

High Force

Mother, it is great to be up North
Can we take a trip to see High Force?
I don’t think we can manage that,I said
Why ever not,I need to leave my bed
Well,I can’t drive for I can’t see so well
He looked at me with pity, it was hell
Shall we take a cab, he questioned me
I don’t think they can get there before tea
We can take a flask and your fruit cake
I knew his mother well, and could she bake!
I did not like to say it is too far
Two hundred miles or more from where we were
He asked again about my honeymoon
Did you find it over all too soon?
I felt a blush spread over my fair skin
He was my husband, I spent it with him
But yet I could not take away his joy
He loved his mother much when a small boy.
Judging by the smile on his dear face
Freud was right, he wished to me embrace.
Is it wrong to let a man mistake
His wife for his late mother, that is fake.
But since he was so sick and suffered long
I had to keep him going with her songs
She sung in her church choir the hymns of praise
To overcome that strange weekend malaise
So valiant as ever in my work
I sang O Praise the Lord as in the Kirk
I sang Oh, little town of Bethlehem
Of course there was no wall there way back when
He still read the paper every day
And in the night when sleepless he would pray.
I would have lifted rocks and cut through steel
If I could have made his heart valves heal
Yet still our masquerade was to him real
He held my hand and smiled with great appeal.
Then he said he’d like to go to bed
With his own mother, what could I have said?
I made some tea and he smiled even more
I guess that’s why he lived to 94.

My life was ruled by panic attacks. Here’s my seven-point guide to tackling anxiety

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/22/my-life-was-ruled-by-panic-attacks-how-tim-clare-learned-to-cope-with-anxiety?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Writing can have unexpected benefits

Clearly, if writing were therapeutic, authors would be the happiest, calmest people on earth. It turns out that the type of writing matters. Gratitude journals are often pushed by the Positive Psychology movement as one of its most robustly evidenced interventions, but multiple meta-analyses have found their supposed benefits to be weak to non-existent. At best, they may have a small placebo effect on mood.

On the other hand, research into writing about traumatic experiences suggests it can boost subjective wellbeing, health, immune response and even the healing rate of a 3mm punch biopsy wound. Crucially, psychologist James W Pennebaker told me, you have to connect details about the event with your feelings then and now. Ironically, in the process of writing down my experiences for the book, I may have blundered into a powerful, free means of engaging with our challenging memories and emotions.

Talk honestly about how you feel

Want to find fulfilment? Here’s what my years as an agony aunt have taught me

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2023/oct/08/want-to-find-fulfilment-heres-what-my-years-as-an-agony-aunt-has-taught-me?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

The day my voice broke: what an injury taught me about the power of speech

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jan/19/vocal-polyps-injury-singing-john-colapinto-steven-zeitels?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Red leaves in sun

The red leaves in the sunshine seem to smile
A pale blue sky, a silver aeroplane
I’m happy,I am warm, in your arms coiled

I have no heater but the kettle boiled
I made us coffee then my parcel came
My face in the small mirror had a smile

My love is deep, you never were on trial
If we quarrel, we both share the blame
I’m happy,I am warm, in your arms coiled

Our sorrow is, we have not made a child
Jesus cursed the fig tree in its shame
Yet red leaves in the sunshine seem to smile

Sorrow need not madden nor make bold
We do not know the purpose nor the game
I’m happy,I am warm now as I toil

We need old fashioned virtues like restraint
We don’t see the whole as life we paint
The red leaves in the sunshine seem to smile
I’m happy,I am warm, the sea sings wild

Walk in ferny woods. exchange a glance

Wasting life when we would like to dance
Walk in ferny woods. exchange a glance
Can we have a decent person at our head?
Jesus Christ,no b*gger understood

Why be happy when you could feel mad?
Glad that Donald Trump is not your dad
Don’t let logic, reason or plain thought
Sell you something Mother never bought

Why not let the police take all control?
They know how to score a self made goal
They can kill a man and wound a child
Yet kneel down in Church along the aisle

Holding a black Bible in one hand
Will not take you to the Promised Land
Cain and Abel,Jacob and Esau
Does he hopen to start another War?

As the old man fell towards his death
They offered us a handrail for the bath
I was so shattered by their wilful lies
I could not speak, my saliva had all dried

He was walking albeit slowly when at home
When they took him off I heard the groan
Lost inside his head, no wife nearby
Even Satan would have wept that night

Gabriel and Satan, hand- in -hand
Neither one will ever understand
We humans waste so much,we’re almost blind
Full of envy,hate and so unkind

The rituals

The still, small voice no longer can be heard.
The sacred, silent space unoccupied
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word.

We centre our whole self on the absurd
For iPads cannot pass through any eye
The still, small voice no longer can be heard.

God no longer feels inclined to share.
The golden cloud of angels cannot fly
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word.

The altar’s stripped, the rituals turned nightmare.
The ancient priest says Mass and wonders why
The still, small voice no longer can be heard.

A virtual wall stops grace from being shared.
Jesus is made flesh and silent dies
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word.

No one is an island, John Donne cried
But now there is no truth to satisfy
The still , small voice no longer can be heard.
No burning bush nor tempest speak The Word.

Late

But now it is what McCall Smith calls “late”

Sometimes when bereft I’d love a snail
Though it might wet my bed with silvery trails
Would snails be lonely living in my house?
Shall I be but fit to love one louse?

I hugged a rowan tree but now it’s dead
The council said they’ll give me oak instead
It stood upon the pavement by the gate
But now it is what McCall Smith calls “late”

I wonder if self massage is the thing
Some perfumed lotion stolen on the wing.
I stroked my arms with Cream E45
Now they say I’m not allowed to drive!

I was sad but now I am at peace

I recommend an electric heated fleece

The inherent violence of photography

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not monitoredlike being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads — as an anthology of images.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/16/susan-sontag-on-photography-social-media/

My Sister Did Me Wrong in Secret. Should I Tell Her I Know?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/magazine/secret-wronged-resentment-ethics.html

We’re entitled, absent special considerations, to feel and to express resentment when we are wronged. Indeed, you aren’t treating people as responsible for their acts if you don’t respond to them with the appropriate “reactive attitudes,” as the philosopher Peter Strawson called feelings like resentment. Your elder sisters, you note, grew up without the financial stability you enjoyed and experienced the kind of corporal punishment that was once the norm and that you were fortunately spared. Yet these historically commonplace circumstances aren’t known to turn people into devious schemers. So your resentment is merited. If your aim is simply, as we say, to get it off your chest, there’s no moral reason

How to Daydream

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/how-to-daydream.html

Health Concerns:

Daydreaming is contagious. All traffic jams are a result of one person daydreaming, which spreads from car to car. “Do you want me to stab you in your lungs right here on this highway?” is a phrase closely associated with daydream pandemics, which typically occur when two lanes are merging near construction sites.

What to Daydream:

“I want to daydream more, but I don’t know what to daydream about,” a lot of people probably say. For that reason, they keep rehashing the same old daydream scenarios:

THE LOTTERY You aren’t going to win the lottery. Stop fantasizing about the cars you’ll buy, the vacations you’ll take, the house you’ll build. Stop imagining quitting your job, the speech you’ll make while systematically destroying office property. You wouldn’t have the guts to do that even if you did win, which you most certainly will not. What you need to be doing is daydreaming about better ways to do your current job. If you weren’t spending so much time incorrectly daydreaming, you’d probably have earned that promotion by now.

SEX By all means, have sexual fantasies. Sleep with better-looking people. Have intercourse in trees. But under no circumstances should you daydream about fornicating with nearby co-workers. Colleagues can tell when you’ve been daydreaming about having sex with them, and it’s an unprofessional way to spend company time. Some whiz kid is probably months away from inventing an app that can decipher whether you’re fantasizing about co-workers, or whether you’re just fantasizing about normal people who will never have sex with you.

CELEBRITIES Stop it already. Celebrity cameos are just the kind of infantile escapism that gives daydreaming a bad rap. “I bet George Clooney and Brad Pitt and I would have a great time on a cross-country road trip,” you might have daydreamed. Well, they wouldn’t. They would be totally freaked out that you’re sitting around daydreaming about driving them around the country when you’re supposed to be working.

HEROICS This is a tricky area of daydream ethics. Society needs everyday heroes, but most heroic daydreams are about scoring the winning touchdown, or hitting the home run. If the daydream is not sports-related, it’s terrorist-related — tackling the suicide bomber, defeating a terrorist cell in a shootout using your iPhone Call of Duty training. But no one daydreams about donating blood, or volunteering for Meals on Wheels. We’re a nation of extremes and it’s infected our daydreams.

Efficient Daydreaming:

Daydreaming about being a better person, or positive things happening to loved ones, or flying through the office on a dragon that thinks one of your co-workers has stolen her dragon things — these are all dynamic mental breaks that can prepare you for an afternoon of cheerfully cleaning lint out of your keyboard. To become an efficient daydreamer, you needn’t dwell on quantum mechanics or solve complex algorithms; you simply need to blow off a little steam so you don’t get overstressed and have a nervous breakdown in front of your computer screen.

What type of fast food will the aliens prefer when they arrive and will it be the ultimate undoing of their civilization? If you were living in a world of all puppets, could you just assume you would be in charge because you’d be smarter and stronger and all fleshy? Or would you be ridiculed because of your minority non-puppet status? What if someone invents a machine that can read trees’ thoughts, and it turns out they spend the day laughing at us? These are some solid, intellectual quandaries for your next daydreaming stint.

Conclusion:

In closing, do not daydream about the problems in your life, the evil in the world, the troubles around the next bend. That is what real life is for. Instead, daydream about things that make you smile. No summer workday is complete without a grown person staring at the wall, just laughing.

Jon Methven is the author of the novel “This Is Your Captain Speaking.”

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A little collection

Belshazzar saw the writing on the wall
The words predicted death and so it came
The mightiest king is not preserved from falls

Is there wisdom in the deep that calls
True scholarship is hard , to name unnamed
Belshazzar saw the writing on the wall

Even blatant evil, none appals
We have no reverie, we have no time
The mightiest king ‘s no safer with his gold

Counted,weighed,divided, aren’t we all?
The words in Aramaic were no rhyme
Belshazzar saw the grave there on his wall

Once old ladies smiled knit infants shawls
They had joy though death came wandering by
The King of Babylon deserved his fall

Being alive seems near to a great crime
God may die yet love burns its small flame
Belshazzar learned the writing on the wall
The humbler people are, the less the fall6th Dec 2019Posted inethics, poetry, reflections, Thinkings and poems, villanelle Leave a commenton We have no reverie, we have no time EditWe have no reverie, we have no time

Problem pupils

What shall I do with a dilated pupil?

a) Send them to the Headmaster

b} Give them a shrinking glance

c) Look away

d) Go to an Eye Clinic

e} is she having a baby? How can you see her cervix? Are you a doctor?

My glasses are reading any advice?

A} You have schizophrenia

B} You are a witch

C} You need an eye test

D) They are a surveillance device.Throw them in the bin

My lenses are plastic

a} You have had cataract surgery

b} You are deluded

c} They are ruining the environment.Hide them if you can get them out of your eyes

4} You want attention.? Ask for a glass eye next time

Guernica again

My face is pale,my hair is white as snow
In my eyes is an unearthly glow

I ate some salt beef and some bread today
I tried to write a poem very gay

The Government attracted scorn and blows
The wind is in the willows with Jon Snow

Israel is getting on my mind
The deaf can’t see and all rest are blind

Come to Gaza, on the beach we play
Some children just got shot, ought we to pray?

On mountains where the prophets heard the Lord
The vultures now await the battle scarred.

The United Nations cannot speak the Word
Apartheid makes me wonder who is scared.

Jesus was a man so we are told
God sent him here, we killed him feeling bold

Would you like Guernica again?
Say the word, we’ll kill for pay.Amen

In the deserts of the human heart
Are there wells where water can be bought?

From whom come our so called Human Rights?
And by the way, what of the children’s plight?

Would you take a break on the West Bank?
We have some Bedouin Tents,and many tanks

Jerusalem is holy, what a shock!
You can eat ice cream right on the Rock

Women cannot wail on that great Wall
They have no height, they need to grow more tall

Golden is the dome and bright the sun
Catch an “Arab” out and have some fun

If we did not believe there was a God
He’d go away and leave us just his rod

I hate her wooden coat hangers all cracked
Give me wire and let me be abstract

I found some shoes but they have dropped apart
Think of how that hurt my Bakewell tarts

The Sacred Whore, the Holy Demon’s plight
The Holy Ghost is not inclined to fight

I have a table here on which I paint
I look so pale, will I be forced to faint?

In the bitter depths of winter night
Boil the kettle, lose your human rights

If you feel depressed then eat our bread
It will remove the skull from off your head

Are you feeling lonesome in the crowd?
Buy our lipstick then men will be cowed

Did you think ceramic hobs were best?
Come to us and have your IQ blessed

I want a pan for halogen hot plates
I’d ask the cat but it’s out on a date

Does Confession really help the damned?
God have mercy as the Devil can’

Trying lines