More travel funnies…

More travel funnies…
Torrey Orton
May 11, 2011


We're off to my 50^th boarding school reunion, a family reunion and a France reunion for a month, with various interludes and postludes along the way. I start with preludes.

 "No record of reservation…"
Travel funnies started before the travel this time with the news by email that our reservation for the reunion had never been received by the Heritage Hotel…a discovery thanks to a query from classmates about the state of our accommodation and such since the school had no record of them (not that they should have since I'd never sent them and no one had asked for them!). I was rabid about the news, driven by the fact I was awake at 3am to receive it and had dopily turned on the email.

I fired off a note of complaint to the school's event manager with my reservation number and date of approval (Feb 10, '11). …. And somewhat later set off for a morning's therapy at 7am by train and tram, whence another unfunny chapter opened unexpectedly, disappointingly and totally unnecessarily.

Back to the trams…where months ago I noticed that I often entertained myself with pre-work exercise in segments marked out by the train/tram route on the way there. There was a theoretical hitch at that time: that I occasionally almost got it wrong - "The almost is the lurking awareness that I could still mess up, or be messed up, by misjudgement plus fate" I noted at the time. Wait or walk, I wondered again this morning.

Well, this time, already angered by the accommodation screw up a few hours earlier, I walked and waited in vain. Arriving at one tram stop, I had five minutes to go to the next scheduled tram and was caught midway by an early arrival passing me by, stopping at the next stop and waiting for two minutes for its schedule to catch up with it, and then moving off just as I caught up with it!! This sequence was repeated two more times as my pre-work walk turned into a 40 minute, 3 kilometre quickstep to the clinic, arriving 12 minutes late. Fortunately, the expected client was s serial lateness offender and bore the wait well (forewarned by SMS of course). Still, I was smoking, but only wisps showed.

 (The accommodation bungle was recovered three days later, or so I was promised by email.)

 LA International Airport…incoming
There's a song which celebrates the West Coast entry to the US. Well, it was an undeserving entry this time. Apart from an eventual 1 hour wait in an incoherent and disorderly queuing system, we got a standing room only wait in the plane on arrival due to congestion in the entry hall. We were told there were a thousand just-arriveds standing in our way. I should have known we were really in for trouble when I sighted a sign saying something like: With our 140 years of customer service we know paying attention to customer needs counts! I read this as a line from the mouth of LA Tourism thinking they really have reached heights of self mockery. A few metres further up the passage I saw the words were an HSBC bank self-promotion, but then…

Joining their last members (maybe 500 folks or so) 15 minutes later, we started our passage in a hall with no toilets other than a pastel sign promising renovations of the previously available offerings were well under way…and this after 13 hours in the air.

The entry hall was itself quite new, with numbered ranks of passport control stations spread in a 150 meter array before us. Trouble was, they were less than half staffed, though they were armed with a terrific set of terrorist detection tools – both iris cameras and handprint capture machines. There was not even a hand-lettered sign telling us which line was for foreigners and which for returning natives, though there was a quite well-designed one for diplomatic and special business travellers, of course.

 LA …outgoing
A day later we got the AA treatment (no, not that AA; the American Airlines AA) on the way to our next stage. The boarding routine was a marvel of self-contradiction which seemed to work. There were stringent carryon bag limits clearly posted around the departure halls with explicit threats that oversized ones would be thrown into the hold (delicately by their experienced staff waiting hopefully below the plane to receive renegade bags from watchful cabin staff).

The warnings were enough to make me slightly antsy about the somewhat oversized backpack I was carrying. No need to worry. Others were carrying material for a beach party. Due to my abiding never-be-late phobia, we had arrived early and due to Jane's possessing a higher grade of Frequent Flyer, we boarded in the first rush scoring empty overheads for the effort. What came next was a scramble by the masses to grab space which was close to the unconscious meaning of unseemly…not quite pushing old ladies out of the way but an outbreak felt imminent.

Coaching from the sidelines was the chief speaker for the cabin staff - running through the outsized bag routine as a request for civil compliance rather than an order. She backed up the civility theme by encouraging the scramblers to "help each other" with the short, weak and maybe old as worthy targets for help (if they couldn't lift their overweight bags, couldn't get them to fit the compartments (quite a few), or just couldn't find space, though passing the weight and size reg's). After 20 minutes wrestling bags, jockeying for position and "helping" the place was cleared for take-off. Lots of bags disappeared under seats in front, to the point of leaving little foot space, but then whose fault was that.

Was I seeing another instance of a self-regulating system at work?? The last I remember was the response to the US Airways flight #5149 which crashed without loss of anything material but itself in the Hudson River in January '09 (just where we were heading!). Cameras monitoring the area of the crash (by chance) caught ferries and other boats turning to save passengers before formal rescue could have been organised. Local players had chosen to disregard their SOP's, city, state and federal regulations with probable risk to their licenses and captain's bars to do the obviously right thing. Perhaps an example of "giving forward", as my niece described an effort of hers to make a difference in some family matter. More another time.


Fly well, fly high.   

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?
Torrey Orton
May 4, 2011

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?", she said quietly.

We were in the fourth day of four in a leadership program for journalists. The group of 9 held six women and three men from seven countries/regions: Indonesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Irian Jaya(Papua) province of Indonesia, PNG, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands. They spoke 15 or twenty languages between them and no one language was competently held across the whole group. Individuals often had 5 or six, including English, pidgin, family or clan languages and a national language. So there was a constant play of interpreting throughout the learning activities. I was the only non-islander English speaker in the group. I was also 30 years older than everyone but Jason, who was about 50. Jason held down the darker end of the colour spectrum for which I anchored the lighter, with everyone else spread out in between* - the ethnic Indonesians closest to me, the Papuan next and the others following to Jason.


Our program included five segments, in this order, on personality, stress management, culture and leadership, negotiation and conflict management, and mentoring/networking, all with an orientation to the leadership demands of being a journalist in their respective contexts. The culture segment opened the door on a range of shared histories among us, and the overall shared history of European colonialism. In the process of exploring the cultures in the room I pointed out that we all come out of Africa. This was news to everyone.


At some later point in our excursion through negotiation and conflict management I mentioned to the group that there is published research evidence about the out-of- Africa claim and I had the book – Spencer Wells' The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Jason jumped at it, along with another – Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – which explains cultural success in geographic terms, as well as the unintended depredations of Christian colonialism (germs, mostly).


On reflection, I have to admit that saying I come out of Africa has a very low face-value truthfulness about it. A case of the mind's eye getting it wrong to any unbiased observer. I just don't look anyone's 'black' or tan or Asian, or…Italian. The research shows (love that frame!) that my relatives are traceable to a female origin out of Africa quite a while ago. But it is demonstrably obvious that I'm not black or tan or anything other than fading lily whiteish. And it is even more incontrovertibly clear that I didn't come out of Africa in any comprehensibly practical sense. Talk about an inner truth?! The genes shape us but the appearances make us.


And so the quietest group member, and occupier of a prime position in the darker range, Fijian Dorothy said, pointing at the leader with no clothes running the training – me:

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?" she posed quietly.

 

And three of us – Diana, Jason and I - broke into unstoppable laughter, with tears, which lasted three or four minutes, reigniting as they do with recollections or repetitions of the cue line "Ask him…" I've since repeated it enough to drain the trigger of its tickle.

 

 

*I recalled as I was entering the culture segment of our work that I had first encountered the colour conundrum 45 years ago as a beginner high school teacher in New Haven, CN, USA. This was particularly the first time of my really being a minority person for a bit. Years later in China it was daily for two years – a more shaping experience. At that US time I devised a simple experiment. In English classes with a majority of blacks and an ethnic multitude of whites, I offered an exploration of the substance of the terms 'white' and 'black'.


We (including me) lined up in a horseshoe (so everyone could see everyone else) whose gradation from darkest to lightest, and back, was agreed by all. The result always was that some self-identified 'black' kids actually were over the line into 'white' and vice-versa, as agreed among the participants in any particular line-up. (This kind of perception is the empirical origin of the current identification 'mixed', which is established in the identity stats of the UK census and an ongoing subject of discussion in the US). The kids had little trouble agreeing on the fade from light to dark and vice-versa, yet clung energetically to the soundness of their practical judgment that the difference was black and white clear!! Black hung with black and white with white. Therein the dilemma of the difference which is not, but is!


This dilemma is played out in both light and dark communities as they privilege the other in their beauty gradings – for some purposes. The lights approve tannedness among themselves (even fake tan!), but get queasy with permanently tanned members of their 'community' (maybe they've got a bit of dark the lights suppose) and the darks approve with envy the lights of theirs while at the same time reserving true darkness membership to the darkest (nearest to Africa??). What a human mess. Was 'mixed' cooked up to bridge the unbridgeable distinctions without creating a discriminatory difference??

Learner therapist (7) …Listening for talent

Learner therapist (7) …Listening for talent
Torrey Orton
April 29, 2011

This is only a taster for a longer trip. Hopefully there's enough indications of the trip purpose and process to warm others up for a later journey.

Not everyone speaks well. They have to struggle for words or thoughts. Things just seem to come to others. Here's one words don't come to in his first session:

By 40 minutes into it I didn't think that we had anything to work on. He was a litany of falteringly expressed sadness, aimlessness and hopelessness, presented almost as if they were a state, not a need. There was nothing for me to hold – that was his state, until I heard his language. I was listening for the strength (agency) which brought him into therapy. For someone claiming no discernible talent his presentation was peppered lightly with very particular vocabulary – not at all that of the truck driver he claimed truly to be. I had noted the words as he rambled around his self-described misfit history, but not noticed them for the talent they exposed. I confirmed my notice by pointing out that he had such language and he both recoiled at the idea he had anything and brightened up with the notice in one move. It wasn't clear to me that he had verbal talent. He had capability, and so maybe talent not just training.

It has turned out that he has quite a verbal talent. Everyone has some talent, some quite a lot and some quite a few – the Renaissancers among us. They often, especially those showing up for therapy, do not know or trust their talent. It may have been a cause, or collateral effect, of the injuries which brought them to therapy. Sometimes they show up as a loss of talent, as here:

At a social event I met a lifelong male painter, now 63, who was visibly flat and poured it out smoothly. He had lost his painting muse or mojo or animus and so was wandering around for the first time in his life with nothing to do. For a talented person whose gift was clear and commanded what to do, every day was given by the gift. He literally had lost his way, his inner light which showed him the path. That light had shown brightly since early primary school when a teacher recognised it by saying, "You should be a painter."Now he was lightless for the first time. I saw him again a few weeks later and he was still befuddled by his self-abandonment (it must have been himself, he thought; no one else stole his light from him).all that of the truck driver he claimed to be.h ng to grab for me until I heard his language. For someone presenbting tent ho

Whether he was a good painter or not is irrelevant to the matter of his talent. That 'good' is for discussion another time under the heading of competences or capabilities. The world is full of possible painters, fishers, writers, fixers, fighters, builders…. Few are great, but many are satisfied if they know and live their talent(s). There's room for many levels of the many talents.


Finding ones talent(s) can be a grounding experience, providing for the first time in our lives a source of truth which is reliably ours. It is no guarantee that a way will be made for our talents to enter the world, but knowing that they come from within is heartening and self-defining. Basic life standards are self-sourced and the associated motivation is self-validating. Just exercising the talent(s) creates further motivation.


There may be many ways to bring the talent into the world, allowing exploration and exercise of it even under conditions of low potential success – where a person's existing life commitments to partners, children, parents, siblings prohibit a fulltime engagement with the emerging talent. Equally restricting may be the low wattage of the talent – visible, palpable but not powerful to be a life on its own, yet still providing inner based illumination. We all have a complete suite of the talents necessary for life, just differently arrayed and enabled. The array and enabling are congenital; their growth and enactment are circumstantial (the domain of nurture and effort).


What the range of talents is can be taken from one or another of the emerging systems of well-being, all of which depend on defining the domains, directions and intensities of action which create well-being. Getting the items and their mixes right is essential, since well-being is specific. I like the "Elements of well-being" because they were created by the authors in an effort to provide a new approach to treatment of sex offenders, a notoriously difficult group.

Elements of well-being (basic human needs) *From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives. Tony Ward, University of Melbourne, Claire A Stewart, Deakin University 1) Life (including healthy living and functioning) 2) Knowledge 3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences) 4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness) 5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress) 6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships) 7) Community 8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life) 9) Happiness 10) Creativity

And, by the way, if you want to think about what the generic therapeutic task is from a biopsychosocial (cultural) viewpoint – this is it: a multidimensional well-being one. Elaborating that perspective is a task for another day. Well-being constructs like that above are starters. They are also the basis for work on things like vocation (below), since the kinds of vocations there are must reflect the needs we strive to fulfil through work.


This set of archetypal vocations was built with Hamid Homayouni 5 years ago in the birthing phase of a 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' company which never grew up. However, many patients have found the constructs helpful for their efforts to build a picture of their vocational potential. The archetypes are described in ordinary language and everyday behaviours.

• Helper

Are you…compassionate, attentive to others' needs, a 'fixer'?

Do you like to…offer help, give suggestions, 'fix' things for others?

Are you good at… listening to others, putting your own thoughts in their terms, seeing how others really are, suggesting options for action…?

• Builder

Are you… physical, careful, 'results oriented', a 'tool man' (or woman)?

Do you like to…complete a piece of work, have something to show for your efforts?

Are you good at…making things with your hands, planning steps of development, using tools?

• Protector

Are you…cautious, attuned to possible dangers / threats, physically and emotionally robust, action-oriented?

Do you like to…be in dangerous situations, test your strength against others, use weapons, wear uniforms?

Are you good at…containing conflicts, dealing with anger, checking threats, using your body as an instrument?

• Entertainer /artist

Are you…flamboyant, emotional, and imaginative?

Do you like to…tell stories, draw pictures, make videos?

Are you good at…performing, working under public pressure, taking on different roles and styles?

• Maintainer

Are you…orderly, systematic, obsessive about detail?

Do you like to…keep things in order, clean things, know how things work, take them apart to see how they tick?

Are you good at…keeping things running, making repairs, figuring out what's wrong with things?

• Believer / visionary

Are you…'off in the clouds' at times, certain where you stand, looking for the answers to the final questions?

Do you like to… wonder about 'the meaning of life, engage others in questions of meaning?

Are you good at…seeing the larger picture, talking about 'the meaning of life'…?

• Thinker / investigator

Are you…introverted, abstract, logical, pattern seeking, 'deep', insightful?

Do you like to… get things clear, understand rather than act, find your way through confusion and unclarity, put the truth first …?

Are you good at…seeing patterns in things, making systematic pictures of things, making sense of puzzles / dilemmas ….?

• Creator / entrepreneur

Are you…a starter, sensitive to new things, early adopter of technologies / ideas?

Do you like to…be the first to do things, be recognised for innovation?

Are you good at…expressing, creating visual / musical works, starting up from nothing?

• Coordinator / leader
  

Are you…someone who steps forward first, takes the lead in social / political things?

Do you like to…negotiate shared tasks and resources, talk to people about what they want / need?

Are you good at…keeping a group together around shared tasks?

 

Appreciation (35) … A poem a day…

Appreciation (35) … A poem a day…
Torrey Orton
April 18, 2011


I never much liked poetry…not enough to continue reading after university until many years later…the last 6 or 8 in fact. Les Murray shifted that a bit as I took seriously that he speaks for aspects of this wide brown, lately green, land which are important. So I undertook to read, and have read, everything of his in print… part of my self-australianisation, akin to learning successfully to like bush and dry and flat and gummy, and ever since starting 38 years ago seeing new bits for the first time here and there now and then.


As I'm writing this I also notice that I did not read poetry (except to complete requirements) because it was hard to read. Compared to philosophy of any kind (exception: symbolic logic, but then that's not reading is it?), poetry requires attention of the short but deep variety – one not natural to me who does long and deep effortlessly. I did not know to make the effort, which says something about how I was taught poetry – as a must do, a formal compliance presumed to be valuable.


The last past they got right. Because I read it under academic duress, I 'learned' it so to speak. I know about some poetry, as I do some music, without ever getting into it until recently, and still now with more a long view than the immediate one. And once again, an education is shown to be unpredictably worthwhile. In that education I read a canon or two because, in spite of my lack of natural inclination to the mode, it was given to be done by people and a system I respected and whose standards I was brought up earlier to aspire to.


Somewhere in graduate school I learned poetry was music, though I knew that from Plato's complaint about the insidious nature of poetry long before without hearing it. Somehow I heard the music a bit. Like many musics, poetry is varied and less or more accessible to different personal attunements and cultural conditionings. Mine was more Gerard Manley Hopkins than Wordsworth. I have a simple, engineering ear. And I never wanted to make music, so never learned to read it. Same thing with poetry? I did write one poem in 1971 and it seems that was enough.


So I bought Frederick Seidel's Poems 1959-2009 due to a long view review in the New York Review of Books a year ago where claims were made for his grip on America (hear a Murray-like attraction here again? Yup). And I've started reading them in a new way compared to my Murray experience - grazing them at first, not striving to get inside yet tasting enough to think I could later do so. From the graze I cannot immediately embrace Seidel like Murray but he seems also less local than I expected; he's more cosmopolitan?


In the end of this wander maybe I just don't have a very poetic inclination, or too much of the engineering one crowded it out. Having grown up in a musically competent household, I never caught the tunemakers bug which my siblings did. Genetic defect, cultural or ???

Learner therapist (4) a breath of life?

Learner therapist (4) a breath of life?
Torrey Orton
April 7, 2011


In my search for patients' agency, and the author within who drives them (if other things don't get there first), I'm increasingly noticing little signals of activity. This is a matter of small sounds and slight expressions. These may grow into loud sounds and gross expressions as modelled for us all with indelible memorability by Homer Simpson.* Among the hardest things to say for the injured are words of self-approval or words disapproval of family sources of their injuries. I suspect such words are what are coming into hearing/view through the little breaths below.


I offer these signals as enticement to others to share their bits in the hope that we can develop a taxonomy of little expressions to join the forces of little steps. The point here, as there, is to enhance patients' awareness of ways in which and times at which they are taking small steps towards their emerging selves. It is our responsibility to provide such help, since they are often blind to their own agency and ignorant of the myriad forms it can take.


Small breaths…

For instance, "phuuh" is a sound I cannot spell. Yet it reaches me these days like a declaration of dry despair, usually arising out of the flatlands of a psycho-spiritual plateau, often mid-session midway through a therapy engagement. It is a quiet, almost inaudible expression barely strong enough to be heard, more seen than heard in the slightly pursed lips of a patient. Or myself, too, I'm noticing these days. The sound occurs often in synch with a slight movement of the head away from the line of eye to eye engagement, the kind of movement which also signals an emerging insight or feeling.

Apathetic Irritated

Further along this spectrum lies a dry spitting sound - "pffft" - which ejects a thought or feeling mildly but certainly. It often has a comment hidden in it. The speaker seems not to quite embrace it, but the thought is out enough that it cannot be restrained. The "pffft" is more about getting the fact that they have a thought out than making that thought visible.

Disturbed

Another grade along is the wet, spat ejection….a slight swear.

Annoyed

"Doh" or "doah" – derisive mimicry of dopey other(s), which, depending on the tone of speaking, may be cuttingly abrasive (an aggression) or just a twitch of the rhetorical tail (a slight gotcha).

Angered

"pfauuugh" is towards the other end of the exhalatory spectrum, a clear rush of derisive disapproval, amazement that another does not share one's own insight, sensitivity, …..or one missed it oneself!!

Enraged

These can all be applied recursively – directed at oneself as well as others. I'm not sure of my classification of expressions by feeling levels, but there's something systemic about them in the anger spectrum. Kassinove and Tafrate's "Anger Thermometer" has 10 grades of anger marked by ten vocabulary steps. These are more distinctions than I know how to use, but some psychs feel comfortable enough to publish them so facility with the distinctions may be useful.



*By the way, 50 years ago when in boarding school, an expression indistinguishable from Homer's "doh" was a popular reproach to another teenage dope's intellectual or behavioural vacuity of the moment. No one escaped the title! How did it transit all those decades?? Is this just another item in the records of the eternal return?? If the latter, then 'doh' arises from a deep cultural meme or, as the neuropsychs might have it, hard-wiring.

Learner therapist (3) What’s a person…

Learner therapist (3) What's a person…
Torrey Orton
March 27, 2011

… an agent, with potential authority?

What are we trying to help patients 'fix' or to repair in themselves? For me it is essentially their agency, their ability to act or to influence their worlds. Psychic injuries, like physical ones, inhibit our power, render us weak where we could, or used to be, strong. The help we need is to restart our motivation (value) and improve our action competence(s) (behavioural repertoires). Notice I've slid from patients to 'us'. We are them, but they are usually not us, when in the room. For what follows, we are them, too.


This is a vignette to hang a theory of agency on. The theoretical connections are made through numbers in parentheses – eg (6) – which refer to examples of agency in the first paragraph after the vignette.


D


One day alcoholic D, about 40, walked in with his whole self on show. His hands were fairly damp for the first time in a while. He asked for tissues to dry them (6) as he noted the fact in passing. It was the first time in 16 months work that he had been fully present, though not for lack of trying. That he could be present was always on display (7) in his ambivalence about being here. He could talk about that easily, and did so every session (1). "I really don't have anything to say today" he would announce on arrival, while always being almost unclothed his defences were so slight.


He has a lot to defend – a lifetime's actual and threatened violence from a still living alcoholic father. One thing in particular: the fiercely vivid memory of repeatedly over his primary years having to lie silently in bed in feigned sleep to avoid his just-home-from-the- pub father's attention, consciously effacing himself by containing his terror from the senses of his terrorist. He has the finest detectors of non-verbal expressions I have ever met, attached to a capacity (2) to precisely test those perceptions.


...a glass of whiskey


But that day he arrived in such ambivalence that he had skolled a glass of whiskey from a local provider on the way over. His conflicted feelings (anger and hope, riding on the energy of interest) had bounced him back and forth in the bus on the way here, just as they do every day for him. But in the room they were visibly so as he shifted in the chair, giving and withdrawing eye-to-eye contact like a chimp in a cage. What he had to say this day, after briefly having nothing as usual, is that he was here with his fears blazing and his hopes leading (8). This is the motivation that brought him into the room.


We stepped from his present into its origins through the gateway of D's defences, a set of behaviours which mark his coming to the end of bearable exposure of his pain. These gestures all happening together – breathing out, shaping up to fight or fly (in the shoulders), scrunching up his face – lead to a visible / audible stop signal (4) from D, if I haven't already got their implication. When I use his name, D, it always elicits this expressive set, as if I called out from the end of his bed to waken him into the expected paternal violence. It is this set of behaviours which expressed his being in that life space while in the room and how he controlled his exposure to it.


Control the terrorist father within…


We worked on that space to reduce its terror. I explained that this was a normal approach for engaging traumas of many kinds. Through it he could learn the threat was no longer present in its embodied way, and that he could control the feelings. As we finished a few minutes exposure, he queried, "You've done this before haven't you?"(5) And, he was ready to consider starting (3) the reconciliation trip through which he might get final control over the terrorist father in him. We had approached it 6 months ago but it had seemed way over his horizon then. Now it's in view; feels possible and desirable (1).


When I'm working with D, I have an implicit model of a person in the near background of my approach. I listen and look for certain indicators of how he is. (1) Can he say what they want, (2) interrupt to clarify a meaning, (3) propose a direction for discussion (at the beginning or in the middle of a session), (4) request changes of time or place for sessions, (5) offer feedback on how it's going for him, (6) notice what his body tells him about how he is, (7) how he presents overall, or (8) have an inner sense of truth or direction which tells him what's right and not (often expressed as feeling unfairly done by), etc.…? These are access points to his growth potential, present motivation(s) and levels of need(s). They apply to everyone.


…anyone can grow


When I first had the idea of presenting my underlying therapy assumption it seemed easy because it is so obvious to me, revisited daily in my conduct of therapy. The foundations extend back to my past as a teacher, trainer, coach where my assumption always was, and remains in every new encounter in therapy, that anyone can grow if they are compos mentis.


This is not a value statement. It's one about our nature (to which our nurture may or may not add!). The value aspect arises in making the choice to apply this assumption to everyone I encounter, professionally or personally. This is our professional responsibility.


I have worked with this assumption in the US, France, China, Singapore and Australia. You probably have your own version of favourite indicators and there's probably a thousand books proposing various right or correct answers to 'What is a person?' For me, my version allows me to approach EVERY patient from the same foundation – that they all have an identifiable set of needs, core functions and basic necessities for effective living in their world(s). I find the details of their needs, functions and basic necessities arguable, but a lack of them is the boundary between human and android. At another time a full underlying theory of a person may be usefully added to my entry assumption.

Appreciation (34) … Just do it!

Appreciation (34) … Just do it!
Torrey Orton
March 6, 2011


'Just do it!' should be a candidate for a Rectification. It reeks of modern mantras commanding effortless deployments of will for transformations of shoes, souls, or real estate perhaps. But this appreciation came to me in the flush of a therapeutic intuition.


Many years ago the impossible – reversal of a 90% public opposition to seatbelts – occurred in 6 months or less (the user survey did not identify at what point in the six months respondents' opposition to the innovation had ceased). It occurred by force (legislation). Six months later the numbers were almost reversed. 'Just do it' version 1, a seamless habit change, but a very small and doable one with almost zero post-adoption costs for drivers. Easy to do, and easy to police.


Then there's the Nike version arising out of the mindless careerism of the 80's – 90's driven by the silly but attractive proposition that everyone and every organisation should be "world class". A principal capacity for arrival in that class was action and that, in turn, was a mere matter of personal will. 'Just do it' Version 2. Implication: if you don't have the will you don't deserve the fill. Moral arm twisting and a competitive edge.


The version I want to bring into view arises from another developmental proposition altogether – though it can easily appear as just another version 1 or 2 above. This is the 'doing it' required for an experience one's never had. This extends across the full range of human activities from eating to loving. For me a recent one was taking up morning floor exercises when in partial recovery from pancreatitis.*


I was still feeling achy and dog tired much of the time, and this started from the beginning of the day. I wasn't improving my sleep either. Probably some connection between the two facts: low sleep and low feelings. So I decided to take up the sleep improvement program's first recommendation – learnt to relax, and practise it daily for 20 minutes. While at it, I thought I'd throw in a few stretches I'd learned in yoga 35 years ago, and then also a few tone builders for my weakened gut core. Some leg lifts, bicycling, arches, and various hip flexors. Altogether about 25 minutes.


No surprise to those on top of rehabilitation, but I got such a seriously clear lift in overall good feeling that I was looking forward to doing it again the next day. I've been at it daily ever since, on the back of the same daily reinforcement, which is now an inducement to persistence. It's an internal push rather than an external pull.


It struck me that there must be many variations on this theme of taking action to discover a need or want. Cuisines offer obvious (once discovered) taste titillations hiding behind the screen of olfactory repulsion – eg., durian, chou doufu, some wines and cheeses. Music provides similarly distinctive, and equally offensive to the uninitiated, variety – the modern atonal, Beijing opera, Middle Eastern rhythm and melodies. Visual arts are a storehouse of visions which have to be learned to be appreciated, or even seen in some cases – Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.


Different degrees and kinds of actions are required to enter these worlds because they initially resist entry or even obscure the possibility of it. So it may be helpful to find a person's relevant previous experience(s) to build a first effort on. Relying on chance won't do. Explicit encouragement is required since the unknown cannot be chosen until it is known. A look at a durian does not invite a bite. A first hearing of a Beijing opera is a jangle. First sight of Blue Poles may be a downer.


Whatever the approach to taking action, the moment of action has to be faced. Having a purpose other than that which the action explicitly seeks can help cross the hurdle into a new experience. For some, just trying something new is enough. For others, the action's explicit objective could be to acquire a skill, a sensitivity, knowledge, etc. The implicit objective might be to validate their own sense of direction. Support is often essential to find an inner source of motivation so 'Just doing it' can be its own reward.


*A not to be recommended event which left me 10kgs lighter (which could have taken months of training to achieve but only a week of nil-by-mouth in hospital). The standard recovery period is 3-6 weeks, of which I am now into the eight week, restarting moderated work 3 weeks ago (therapy) and developing new self-management regimes in eating (no alcohol which I don't miss at all and one latte on clinic therapy days) and morning relaxation and exercise practices with daily consistency, so far!