FootprintsintheWind.com

Are nursing homes boring? Do they cause people to be bored? Are they arranged for boredom? Do some people who refuse to be bored get labeled as “acting out,” “non compliant,” and get medicated for it? Is this boring arrangement conscious, or simply a failure of our imagination?

:- Doug.

Life, the world,
The all there is
Is my friend

:- Doug.

Give us conversations whole engendering….

:- Doug.

Conversing’s a sun and a prevailing wind curving thinking into a trajectory to serve humanity.

:- Doug.

How might we restore life to those in the nursing home? Do we see folks in nursing homes as dead men and women walking?

We need to assign blame in this to ourselves, and not to society in general: what do we do every day to counter this picture?

Do we speak of “senior moments” as code for memory lapses—or for playing with grandkids? Do we avoid visiting people in assisted living facilities—the modern form of shunning? Do we say “ouch” when someone says something negative about people who have a few years on us, but who are living? Do we find ways to foster their creativity?

:- Doug.

I was wondering the other night about how Bohm’s concentration on thought, and mine on conversation complement each other, fit together. Of course, that is thought at work: saying they have to fit!

:- Doug.

Bohm says thought does something and then says I did not do it. Long ago we recorded messages in our brains, messages which tell us barns are red, and then we treat “barns must be red” as a fact, and don’t see what is really there. We don’t even see we can change red barns back to green. Or into something else entirely, like an invitation.

:- Doug.

I am a little impatient with myself, but I had determined to go in slow motion today. Besides, Bohm and Edwards keep saying part of the response to thought is to slow down thinking, to catch it in the act.

:- Doug.

I used to say we spend 98.5% of our time thinking in the future. Now I think I had it backwards. What we learned and experienced years ago recorded tapes and disks we replay now. Often unconsciously. But if now is our home, our only possible home, does now not deserve 98.5% of our efforts, not its mere 1%? Fire is an “ouchie,” but it can be useful now that we are adult. What “ouchies” did you replay today?

:- Doug.

Can you tell the difference between a memory and thinking in the present? Don’t be so quick…. Ask this question before you speak and see what you can see. Is it work now, or is it fitting something present to something past?

:- Doug.

How human, that is, creative, do we allow people to be in a nursing home? Staff, administrators, residents all face the same limits.

:- Doug.

If you want to see larger
Parcels of the world
You must converse
With far and wide

:- Doug.

This casino runs on pure greed and cigarette smoke.

:- Doug.

Swear off metaphors!
Seek one to many correspondences
Squealing birds, monkeys, tires
Do not exhaust the possibilities
Evoke

:- Doug.

My insights are glimpses and guessings.

:- Doug.

The poetry is but guessings.

:- Doug.

A good example of T₃ is the Medicaid caseworker interview—together advocate and caseworker are thinking about the past, analyzing and categorizing and proving. Seldom reflecting, never generating. Issacs’ picture of politeness, etc., overlaps a bit with T₁…T₆, but his is more concerned with the what and results of the interactions than the nature of the work that is being done (analysis, reflection, etc.) although he does approach generativity and emergence.

:- Doug.

Then I saw a universe much larger and diverse, divers too—at least 6 powers of thinking, 6 directions, 5 gestures, unnumbered dimensions beyond thought, 360 flows, and here we sit counting and sorting and guessing, when we could be! And engage!

:- Doug.

Courts are a utility. Courts are not a hindrance, but a way to get clarity and finality, commodities rare in our world. When you need water you go to the water utility, for electricity you go to a different place. A trust is good for fair weather for monetary assets for long terms. But if you need a quick disposition of human issues, a court may be your choice.

:- Doug.

Conversation is not a skill
Like driving a car
Many driving actions need to be
Ingrained
So we can act in an instant
Conversing takes an ever new
We
Ever present
Ever conscious of
Everything
The only ingrained is
Moment to moment to moment
Attention

:- Doug.

Life after death?
Love after death!

:- Doug.

Jill Bolte Taylor used the word “innocence” which strikes me as a good word—we want to be naïve, open, at peace and at one. Her experience also suggests to me that babies are born with a functional right mind and we spend years training the left one. What if we trained the right one as well?

:- Doug.

For this lawyer, time is…life energy.

:- Doug.