When Donkeys Fly

 

Some people thought that everything was rotten and that we ought to tear it all down and let Daddy build it back up.

When donkeys fly.

Let's take back our power by listening to that still small voice that says, "What!!!?" "What were you thinking?" 

Remember when we got excited when a President told us that we would send a man to the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade? We didn't know how in the world we were going to do that, but smartness rose to the occasion.

We had a vision.

We developed space travel when a leader told us we could. I remember when Sam Shepherd, the first man in space, did a quick up and down, only going into orbit. And I remember Shepherd while suited up and sitting in the space capsule regretted his morning coffee and needed to go to the bathroom. The crew discussed the problem and finally told him to wet his pants.

Remember when John F. Kennedy conceived the idea of the Peace Corps? 

Kennedy, arrived in Michigan at 2 am in the morning, not to speak, but to sleep. When he found himself surrounded by 10,000 students he spoke extemporaneously. Kennedy challenged American youth to devote a part of their lives to living and working in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a way to foster goodwill and peace. 

Their response was immediate: within weeks students organized a petition drive and gathered 1,000 signatures in support of the idea. Several hundred others pledged to serve. Enthusiastic letters poured into Democratic headquarters. This response was crucial to Kennedy's decision to make the founding of a Peace Corps a priority.  He executed it by executive order, and three days later appointed R. Sargent Shriver as the Director?

Maybe you don't remember, for this was March 1, 1961.

Maybe you weren't born yet--that's the reason you need old codgers like me to tell you.

 

From the podium that  March 1, 1961 came these words from President Kennedy:

 

"How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?"

 

"On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend on the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past."

 

By 2018, 141 countries had hosted more than 235,000 Peace Corp volunteers.

 I once witnessed the far-reaching arm of a Peace Corps volunteer:

I was part of a training session. One of the group, a Caucasian young man raised in Africa, was deep into his feelings of being alone. not wanted, grieving for what he had lost. He lamented that once in Africa, he knew friendship where boys would happily walk down the street with their arms around each other, and think nothing about it. He had no such friends in America.

 From the back of the room came a voice in Swahili.

 We didn't know what it said, but the boy did.

 Neither did we know we had a former Peace Corps volunteer in the group. The voice said, "Welcome, brother."

 The kid fell apart, and so did we as soon as we knew what had happened. We were leaping from our seats, hugging the kid and each other, crying and laughing all at the same time.

 

 

 

 

Once, Abraham Maslow a psychologist, said: "Stop studying the ills and look to the positive way things work."

 What a concept.

Spiritual life, as Maslow puts it, is an instinct. One hears it from the voices that arise from within. However, two forces are pulling at the individual. One pulls us toward health and self-actualization, the other towards weaknesses and sickness.

 

Geesch, big decision.

 

Self-actualization (Maslow's term) is not an endpoint or a destination.
 

It is an ongoing process in which people stretch themselves to achieve new heights of well-being, creativity, and fulfillment.

Maslow believed that self-actualizing people contained several characteristics—self-acceptance, spontaneity, independence, and the ability to have peak experiences.

Peak experiences are high points where the individual is in harmony with himself and his surroundings. Some would call that one's spirituality.

Peak experiences are moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world. They are more aware of truth, justice, harmony, and goodness.

Religious or spiritual values are not the exclusive property of any religion or group. Self-actualizes are religious in character, attitudes, and behavior.

 "Spiritual disorders" tend toward anger or a loss of meaning. Sometimes, it is grief or despair regarding the future. There is often a belief that one's life has been a waste and that finding joy or love is impossible.

I'm attempting ever so carefully to pull myself out of media whitewashing of the Present President. although tears are appearing in the fabric of his mighty plan, and people are peering through its holes. It's like:

"Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me."

I'm sorry civilization creeps along slowly. We make giant strides ahead, only to lose some. It wobbles. We oscillate between elation and depression.

It's easy to have slogans like, "Make America Great Again." All you need is a good ad writer. 

What we need is people in the trenches, like my friend Bill Fisher, the former Peace Corp volunteer, who one day called out in class to a lost boy: "Welcome Brother."

 

What We Need is a Wise Grandma

 

 

Dilip V. Jeste, a psychiatrist, decided to focus his medical career on helping the elderly age well instead of merely treating ailments. 

 

This goal led him to a commentary on wisdom.

 

After Jeste surveyed both modern and ancient texts, he found that across the globe, cultures agree on what a wise person is.

 

·        Their traits include compassion, empathy, sound social reasoning, decision-making, equanimity, tolerance of divergent values, and comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity. 

 

Although I am primarily focusing on the elders of our group, I'm praising many of today's youth, for many are stepping up to the plate and making a difference. Think of #Emma Gonzalez, a high school senior who gave an impassioned speech regarding school shootings. (Feb. 17, 2018) Excerpt:

 

"Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead, we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed, but our laws have not."…

 

"I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: 'When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.'"

 

I've heard it said that today's kids were born "Cable ready."

 

 I was drawn to write about wisdom after a blog reader submitted a blog content titled

7 Tips for Discovering Positivity and Inspiration During a Mid-Life Crisis

An old saw states, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." I was thinking of the concept of a mid-life crisis when Dilip V. Jeste's commentary on wisdom decided to appear.

 

It took me back to my college days when I learned about Abraham Maslow's Self-Actualized human being. (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970). His humanistic approach to ills diverged from Sigmund Freud's approach, which focused on unhealthy individuals engaging in disturbing conduct. 

 

Maslow's humanistic approach focused on healthy individuals.

Maslow stated that people have an inborn desire to be self-actualized. To achieve this lofty goal, however, basic needs need to be met. This includes the need for food, safety, love, and self-esteem. 

 

Here is a pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of basic needs that motivate people

 

 

 

This brings me to NOW and how we as individuals could see a mid-life crisis or the  many passages of our lives not as a road block, but as a way to grow as humane individuals. 

 

Most of us don't have a wise old grandma whose lap we can lay our heads and weep out our woes. She would stroke our hair and say, "Now honey, this too will pass. Your kids are grown, but that doesn't mean you're to be put out to pasture. It simply means a new adventure and a new contribution. Right now, your nerves are in turmoil, but remember, it wasn't much fun when puberty slapped us, either.” 

 

“We've lived through good times and bad, and we're here. You have your life ahead. You have a contribution to give, now dry your tears, and get to work. That's the reason we live past childbearing years—to see that our species continues. And be joyful, kiddo—that's the secret.”

 

And after blasting through a Netflix documentary series titled Down to Earth with Zac Efron, starring and produced by  Zac Efron and Darin Olien, a carnivore and a vegan who searched the Australian continent for sustainable living conditions. I realized that instead of bemoaning our conditions, we need to get to work. 

 

I think I will begin with composting. Adding compost to the soil will build it up. If the soil isn't healthy, it cannot give us nutritious food. And I learned from Down to Earth that a healthy soil absorbs Carbon dioxide, and we all have learned that the buildup of CO2 in our atmosphere has contributed to global warming.

 

How can we heal the planet? How can we help ourselves?

 

Intrinsic in the Hippocratic oath physicians take at their initiation into doctoring is the phrase, "First do no harm."

 

What if we adopt that?

 

We can argue whether global warming is a naturally occurring event or whether people have caused it. A better question is, "How can we help alleviate the problem?"

 

We can emphatically say, "If you are going to destroy us, your people, the animals you have nourished, and the plants you help to grow, you will have to do it without my help."

 

While many troublesome conditions prevail on the Australian continent, there is hope. Many people are creating sustainable living conditions, farms, an animal food source derived from algae that reduce methane produced from cows by 80%, electricity from the wind, wrapping material derived from plants that look like plastic, and people living entirely off the grid.

 

Instead of sucking up negative vibes from the media regarding world conditions and contemplating our navels about our psychological needs, we ought to have a grander view.

 

Instead of wringing our hands at such questions as "Is the world ending?" Instead, we can follow Maslow's directive, stop studying the ills, and look to what positive thing works."

 

Thus, I turned to the Humanistic approach of psychology. We've focused on Freud's theory of biological determinism long enough. And while people like Darwin contributed significantly to our knowledge, we have reached the stage of life where we are driving our own evolution. (Consider the study of epigenetics, and Joe Dispenza's book, Becoming Supernatural.)

 

Maslow's theory of self-actualization has been met with resistance. However, the humanistic branch of psychology is widely misunderstood. 

 

The main point of the humanistic movement, which reached its peak in the 1960s, was to emphasize the positive potential of human beings. 

 

Imagine such a thing.

 

It is as if Freud supplied us with the sick half of psychology, and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.

 

Some of the people Maslow studied were Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Eleanor Roosevelt. In his daily journal (1961–63), Maslow wrote: "heroes that I write for, my judges, the ones I want to please: Jefferson, Spinoza, Socrates, Aristotle, James, Bergson, Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair (both heroes of my youth)." All were "reality centered," able to differentiate what was fraudulent from what was genuine. They were also "problem centered," meaning that they treated life's difficulties as problems that demanded solutions.

 

A part of Maslow's theory is that a person enjoys "peak experiences," high points in life when the individual is in harmony with himself and his surroundings. Some would call that one's spirituality.

 

Peak experiences are moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world, more aware of truth, justice, harmony, goodness, and so on. 

 

Spiritual life, as Maslow puts it, is an instinct. It can be heard through the voices arising from within. However, two forces are pulling at the individual, not just one. One pulls us toward health and self-actualization, the other towards weaknesses and sickness.

 

According to Maslow, religious or spiritual values are not the exclusive property of any one religion or group. Self-actualizers are religious in their character, attitudes, and behavior. 

 

"Spiritual disorders" tend toward anger or a loss of meaning. Sometimes it is grief or despair regarding the future. There is often a belief that one's life is being wasted and that finding joy or love is impossible. Often this comes at the time we call a mid-life crisis.

 

What is missing is Grandma's lap, the soothing hand, and the stern voice to tell us to get off our duffs and get to work.

 

To read 7 Tips for Discovering Positivity and Inspiration During a Mid-Life Crisis by Kimberly Hayes, kimberly@publichealthalert.info
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