High Sensitivity

High sensitivity

Trust

the truth about Trust?

Positive Psychology exercises

I wonder if you would like to try these positive psychology exercises?  They're pretty low-key and might be interesting.

Martin Seligman and Positive Psychology

I've had students in the speech class who made little gratitude journals for us. I used mine for awhile. 
It seems to me to be a practice reliant on cognitive behavioral psychology, which (as we have discussed and you know), I find quite compelling.

Ubuntu

from the South African writer Zakes Mda:

     When we black children of South Africa were growing up, we were taught by our parents, but especially our grandparents, that we were not fully human until someone made us human. Humanity, our elders believed, was not something you were born with. Rather, it was endowed by other people. You were therefore a person because of other people. They called this philosophy Ubuntu in the Nguni languages and Botho in the Sotho languages. And how do others endow you with humanity? By giving you bounties of compassion and generosity... When you thanked someone who had been compassionate and generous to you, you uttered the words: "You have made me into a person." As a beneficiary of ubuntu you had to make others into people, too, by showering them with compassion and generosity. Through deeds of compassion and generosity you could attain a high level of humanity."

The Natural

You are of course right in saying that 'natural' is a concept that's been heavily abused over the course of history, and personally I have enormous fun whenever I find an example of how perceptions change in time (the most recent I remember being blue and pink colour for girls and boys respectively before WWII); it's at the same time mind boggling and expanding exercise and anytime I would advise anyone to try and give it a thought.

What we need to do though, is define what we mean when we say 'natural'. You've mentioned the possible meaning of 'good'. The two that come to my mind are 'as it is, untouched' and the widely (and perhaps sadly) accepted usage that denotes 'accepted by the society'. If it takes society as a reference point it is already influenced by it, therefore: not natural in the former meaning, but cultured. I wouldn't perhaps call it an ideology, at least not always, because I think more often than not that influence - or training - is not recognized by the speaker. 

Anyone who visited a foreign country knows that for different countries different things are considered natural. There are plenty examples from Japan, but there's hardly any need to look so far. Even 'sandwich' means something different in the States and Poland. It follows that 'natural' is a word just as relative as 'this', 'that', 'they', 'here' or 'there'. It has different meaning based on the frame of reference which basically boils down to personal experience. Remember our talk on being foreigners to everyone else in the world? I think it's the same with being natural. One of my favourite quotes, from Juanot Diaz is 'If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know (...)'. That, or the experience of Adult Children - that's all connected; it all clearly shows how what feels natural is shaped as one grows up, perhaps in early childhood. What is the extent of this training into 'natural' and how far back could we trace trying to find the original, 'truely uninfluenced' natural? Attempts were allegedly made to discover a natural language, the proto-language, by raising children in a controlled environment, under the care of foster-nurses that would not speak a word to them. These language deprivation experiments produced children like Kipling's Mowgli, unable to speak, to come up with their own language (cross-reference), leading to the conclusion that language is assimilated up to a certain 'critical age' - but not innate. Similarily, I believe that we'd eventually come to the conclusion that 'natural' is largely a social construct, but that there ARE some fundamental, universal needs common to human beings across all cultures: (from the list of needs in NVC).

Another thing that we might want to consider is the idea of 'untoched' itself. While it's relatively easy if you consider natural look - without make-up - in the 21st century it's, as you point out, practically a futile endeavour. (I don't intend to go into the make-up debate right now.) I think we can say that anything that man does makes the product unnatural. When we think about food for me an easy division is the use of chemistry or lack thereof. But I'm much more interested in the ideological and linguistic side of natural.

Blogalogue logo

For some reason I can't edit the blog! Here: the logo. Hope it works!

How I See The World

Have a look.

Not my favourite song by far, but has a suitable title ;)

Random #1

Here's a short story by Donald Barthelme, "The School". I heard it read on New Yorker's Fiction Podcast and thought it was funny enough to share, although I haven't seen it as a satire on the schooling institutions (and liked the other story better). Follow up reading (which I've yet to read myself): Daniel Saunders, whose short story collection "The Tenth of December" got rave reviews last year, discusses it here. Why? Just because.

another personality test.

I just did this personality test. I actually found it pretty frustrating and hard to choose a question that felt true, but after all that, it feels fairly accurate. Or maybe I just like being called a "dreamy idealist."  What do you think?



My Personality Type: The Dreamy Idealist

Taking time (cross-posted from fail-better-blog)

I've been reading the little blog posts and magazine articles here and there for years: multitasking doesn't work. Doing too many things at once hurts overall productivity.  Etc etc.
I've known that stuff for years, heard student speeches about it while teaching, and suffered through three years of dissertating, which was the hardest, most straight up depressing thing I've ever done where I was buffeted constantly with self-doubt, procrastination, and discouragement. And despite all that, all that stop-multitasking stuff didn't really feel like it was relevant to me.

The Natural

We were talking about the natural and the artificial. Which might be dangerous territory for you because I think about that stuff a lot.
I think that the "natural" is a very complicated and dangerous ideological concept. Our western culture(s) have been really obsessed with what is natural and what is artificial for a long time, but the problem with that is that while the "natural" is used as a weapon or a means of determining good and bad, right and wrong, it is simultaneously a totally unstable concept. It means what the person using it wants it to mean. It does not have a steady connection to a single true meaning.

For example, beauty magazines talk about achieving a "natural look" with makeup-- this is an illusion that one isn't wearing makeup, but is instead "naturally" beautiful. But we don't even know what women without makeup on look like anymore-- we compare the actually "natural" unmade-up face with natural looks that were in fact painstakingly created with multiple products and techniques. In the commercial food and cosmetic world, at this point it's an open secret that using the word "natural" on a product is totally meaningless--manufacturers and marketers slap it on there because they know it has positive ideological value without meaning anything at all to the actual product. What I'm arguing here is that the "natural" isn't actually a form of truth but actually functions as an ideology and an aesthetic. That is, it is contingent on outside factors whether something is deemed "natural" or not-- it's not an innate quality.

People are called "unnatural" not when they do things that other animals "in nature" wouldn't do but when societies have decided that what they are doing shouldn't be done.  For example, homosexuality has been constantly called "unnatural" because it involves non-procreative sex. Or certain kinds of crimes, like a mother murdering her child, have been called "unnatural" [abortion and infanticide get this accusation a lot] which is somehow then even worse than when a big strong man kills, say, someone in a bar fight-- because that seems more on the order of "natural" to us. And yet, zoologists confirm that nature is full of same-sex action between animals and that parent animals very often kill their young. So why do we call those things "unnatural"? Because we have a societal, cultural ideal of what is right and true, we believe that it should come without thinking or negotiating from "human nature."

Claiming something as natural is a means of claiming a kind of truth. Claiming something to be fundamental, pure, unmediated. It's almost impossible for me to think of more adjectives-- I keep wanting to say "natural"-- that is, the "natural" is for us practically fundamental in the great list of binaries that mean for us GOOD. The natural stands for a kind of good that we think should be automatic, that should not require thinking or reasoning, because it comes from somewhere before us or above us.

So, I prefer to try to avoid such broad, complicated, and contested words like "natural." Natural and unnatural are words that have been used very very often over history to control and oppress people, especially women and ethnically or racially marked people in ways that they can't win either way. Women have been considered "closer to nature" and therefore less rational, less civilised and unfit to participate in society at the same time they're reprimanded and derided for being "artificial" or superficial by using fashion, make-up, and so on. People have insisted that women should be "natural," condemned them if they're unnatural, and yet it is precisely their association with "nature" which guarantees that they could never be considered equal to rational men. This prejudice remains in small and insidious ways today when we accuse women of being "too emotional" or at the mercy of their hormones and therefore unable to be fully rational. The paradox of women's appearances being mercilessly critiqued at the same time they are criticised as artificial if they do too much to enhance their beauty is another way that the ideology of the natural is both itself socially contrived and negotiated and used to control people.

I don't think that the ideology of the natural pertains only to women, but it's easy to come up with many examples of how it affects them. I think all of us are surely both susceptible to the romantic draw of the natural (I know I love to buy organic vegetables, go into the outdoors, and all kinds of other things that could be easily labelled with the natural over the artificial) and potentially limited by the ways in which the natural gets tied to many other ideological directives and values. This is surely why ideologies keep on working-- because they do offer something we value or desire or enjoy, but I want to find ways to value those things without accidentally subscribing to things I think are damaging at the same time.  I want to have my all-natural cake and eat it too.

oh look. A video.  Heavy handed, but there it is.

Free fun

I've been feeling poor, and one thing I've been thinking about is making a list of all kinds of things I could be doing for free or cheap. But somehow it can be hard to think of them when I need one.

Here's some ideas:

-scrapbooking
-watching my huge back catalogue of movies and tv
-reading a novel
-journalling/blogging!
- write a letter