In the early 1900’s Freud and his colleagues were developing new and radical ideas about the psychological makeup of humans. It may not seem so today, but their ideas on love were on target.
They theorized what we believe about love is based on our early experience with our main caretakers. Freud and his colleagues said these early events determine, on an unconscious level, what we experience as love.
OH, NO! The groundhog saw his shadow, and there will be six more weeks of bad weather. This is just awful. How am I going to survive? I am so sick of this weather, the rain, the overcast days and the cold. I just hate the cold. I don’t want to go out of my house. I don’t even want to leave long enough to do something fun, much less something like exercise. This is such bad news.
How many ways can we distract ourselves? There is a plethora of ways. Are all our distractions a waste of time? No. In fact, some of the most engaging ways to distract ourselves are useful and at times, important. Distraction can be a way to fill time, enable us to zone out and not think about or be aware of time passing.
Being distracted plays an important role in many people’s lives. The purpose of distraction varies according to one’s needs at any moment. I call the many ways of distracting ourselves the good, the bad and the ugly.
“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” James Joyce.
Currently, mindfulness is a very popular idea: 60 Minutes had a segment covering it, there are TED Talks on it, and videos abound on YouTube. It seems new, yet it has been around for 1500 years. What is new is our ability to map the brain and see how it is affected by practicing mindfulness.
Mindfulness is defined as a way to intentionally pay attention to the present moment without being caught up in judgment and criticism. It is both a meditation form and a life style. It means staying awake, aware and paying attention to your thoughts, feelings and body sensations without passing judgment on what you are experiencing. It is about gathering information about yourself and your experiences. Your personal auto-pilot runs your life with old ideas and thoughts. Mindfulness is a way to begin to turn off your auto-pilot and make choices about your life.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led an extraordinary life. At 33, he met with President John F. Kennedy to advocate for civil rights. When he was 34, he stirred the nation with his “I Have a Dream” speech. At 35, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, and at 39, he was assassinated.
The same year he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, he also led a non-violent march in Birmingham, Alabama. He was arrested, and from his jail cell wrote the famous and inspiring, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
The movie Selma tells the story of Dr. King’s historic journey to attain voting rights for all people. In the movie, he meets with President Lyndon Johnson, and is told that the voting rights issue must wait. There are those who say the film takes liberties with the facts, but what we know for certain is this: Dr. King was told on many occasions to wait for voting rights, and was criticized for taking action. He wrote “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” to address a statement by clergymen that called his activities “unwise and untimely.” Dr. King believed after years of waiting, many broken promises, and laws unheeded*, that it was no longer time to wait. He said,
“Wait, has almost always meant never…We know through painful experience that freedom is never given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”