I added, however, that I didn't consider it hard work. "It's fun," I said, "it's entertainment."
Not to be outdone, she said, "That's why you're so good."
A little later, another friend said he was motorcycling down to Myrtle Beach tomorrow. I said that was great, "Maybe you'll have such a good time at the beach you won't even want to come back on Monday."
"I never want to come back on Monday," he said.
It occurred to me that the "it's fun" philosophy might be expressed in terms of always wanting to come back on Monday.
Life is a bowl of fruit, isn't it?
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| Photo taken with my Motorola Droid (cropped and "negativized" there too) |
One might conclude from this that you're canceling your plans to retire.
ReplyDeleteKen, good day, and a lovely one to hear from you.
ReplyDeleteOne might conclude that I had changed my mind, but I think that I will come back equally or even more enthusiastically to a retired Monday at home.
Reframing (note the "psychology" label at the bottom of the post) can be applied to virtually any situation, as the sad individuals of whom we have heard who find themselves bored with retirement would do well to remember.
By the way, the image at the top of the post is the negative of the photo shown at the bottom. It matters where you end up.
It is a lovely day. California has had a very mild (and mostly dry) winter. I saw that you were here for a while and sampled the sunshine.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the value of reframing. There would be no adaptive behavior without it.
No culturally adaptive behavior, at any rate, unless a case could be made that biological adaptation is a sort of reframing? Interesting question.
DeleteMy choice of "culturally" has come to seem to me to be short-sighted, in view of several things: (1) One of this blog's premises is that culture is an artifact of Nature, which is materialistic, biological. (2) "Cultural adaptation" is possible because Nature evolved brains capable of culture, so that cultural adaptation is only by a remove or two not biological. (3) Sam Harris has been arguing lately, cogently, for [The Illusion of Free Will].
DeleteThe last point implies that whether we "choose" to reframe or not is largely out of our control. Here is a very interesting question indeed: Are those "sad individuals" who find themselves bored with retirement (or always not wanting to go back to work on Monday) actually capable of reframing their situations?
You're at the boundary of a new thread, Morris, and the subject is so weighty that it could deserve a blog of its own. I agree with Harris that free will is an illusion, but one that we cannot live without. It's essential to our emotional health. The thought that each of us has a script that we are compelled to play out would strip us of drive and self-esteem should it ever take hold. That is, until we realize that drive and self-esteem are part of the script! And then where are we? How does this realization differ from the illusion?
ReplyDeleteKen, I agree that the subject deserves a lot more than a comment on Thursday's post, but I'm not sure I could write it. I've not even read Harris's publication on the subject, only the short article I linked to on his blog. I think I can fairly say, though, that the statement that "we have a script" probably misrepresents the case, there are so many branches at virtually every point, and what anyone does at any moment is influenced by a world of random events that impinge on one.
DeleteAnd, as I've discovered by "watching myself to see what I do next," it's actually pretty exciting to give up the conceit that I'm in charge.
In fact (and I wasn't expecting to think of this), I'm reminded of one of the themes of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, which I finished reading only in the last week: various mystics' reporting that "surrendering oneself to God" brings surpassing joy. Like James, I don't agree that this "God" is a personal saviour or anything like that. Rather it's the "something much, much more" in which we're all (rather obviously) immersed, be it Nature, or Gaea (Planet Earth as a sort of organism), or The Universe.
The mystics were onto something. And it might be the answer to your next-to-last question. Letting oneself "be compelled" can be rather...liberating. It's quite a relief to realize that you don't have to try so hard.
Thanks for provoking this line of thought, by the mention of adaptive behavior. Providing seminal material among the random events that you cause to impinge on me is something that you do often, and I'm grateful for it.
Since I am now the curmudgeon...maybe we are just slaves to our DNA and all the rest is just ego.
ReplyDelete"All the rest"...of what? Sounds (if you're serious) as though you have something here that deserves to be articulated. At any rate, I'm curious and would like to know. Thanks in advance. (And good to have you back here commenting; you've been missed!)
ReplyDeleteAll the rest...of us. As I reach ever further into those years where I have more to look back on, and as I learn more about my ancestry and that of friends my age and think about our paths in life, I see that much of who we are and the way we think today could have been predicted by our genetic background. Which has led me to wonder if any of us are the great thinkers and self-made individualistic personalities we like to think we are, or if we are just mostly slaves to our DNA.
ReplyDelete