In My Room - Remembering Brian Wilson
My interpretation functions as a reflection by an older man looking back on a full life of experience, while the original from Wilson’s channels the experience of an adolescent. Mine channels the reflections of an older version of a similar adolescent looking back at a life fully lived. As Wilson’s lyrics in the opus masterpiece Smile observe, the child is the father of the man.
The Limitations of Professional Psychology
This is just an overview, a summary, of my thoughts from over three decades of study and practice in positive psychology to describe some limitations of contemporary professional psychology. What do you think? What have I missed? I’m eager for any comments, disagreements, or other perspectives.
Listen to Your Sleeping Dreams
The lesson from my story is, listen to your dreams! What parts of you might you have left behind, things that make your heart sing? It could be anything. If you feel a kind of nagging emptiness in living that you can’t quite define, the clues you need may be in your dreams if you can learn to listen.
Research Links Music to Health Outcomes for Young and Old
Music can reduce physical pain, facilitate regeneration and health of neurons in the brain, improve memory, and other benefits. The outcomes are greater when people take music lessons or learn to play an instrument, rather than passively listen to music. Music’s impact is evident across all ages, benefiting children and older adults alike.
Featured Art: My Yellow Guitar by Ray Hart
Original oil painting by Ray Hart.
I’m lucky enough to have a couple of his original pieces, plus a couple more prints. I love his work and talent and want to share that. His use of bold colors, his textures, his compositions, they’re all beautiful and evocative. I get no payment or kickbacks from this post.
Negra Murguera is a Three Act Play (versión de Milo J)
Negra Murguera is not just great a song, it’s a multilayered work of musical literature that illuminates the human condition and rewards not only joyful listening but thoughtful analysis. Don’t believe me? Read on!
Words to Live By
“We invented a mountain of superfluous needs, shopping for the new, discarding the old. . . that is wasting our lives! When I buy something, or you do, you’re not paying for it with money. You’re paying with the time for living that you had to spend to earn that money, but with this difference: life is the one thing money can’t buy. Life only passes by. And it’s miserable to waste one’s life losing your freedom.”
Dilemmas
I’m struggling with all these things as I think about what to write about. I want to explore art and creativity and community and human growth and wellbeing here. I believe that the way to overcome violence and cruelty lies in building community and promoting human growth and interrelatedness., attunement to oneself and to others. But if that all comes across as evasion and pabulum, what good is that? These are my dilemmas. I’m just trying to figure it out.
What If Workers Could Hire and Fire Managers?
None of this is inevitable. Al of this is the result of choices made by society, choices that can be reviewed, discussed, revised and undone. These are systems we as humans create. There is no natural law or invisible hand that creates all this. We are the invisible hand. It is possible to build successful - very successful - businesses where managers and leaders are elected by employee owners of the companies. They already exist.
How Do People Change?
Perhaps the core lesson I brought with me from my years of training as a psychologist was this: all human growth is derived from positive relationships. People change from experiencing on a fundamental level that new possibilities exist. Seeing that, experiencing that, in the form of another person who shows it to us, more by how they relate to us than by what they say to us. . . that’s the magic sauce.
The Counter Slop Revolution
I believe, purely by observation though not with hard data, that a counter movement against constant stimulation and toward greater authenticity, depth, and substance is underway, below and away from the braying social media bullhorns and the firehoses of emotional manipulation aimed at us all by mega tech corporations.
AI Love?
We live in an age where technology is diverting us from human connection and psychological growth and health. The epidemics of loneliness, despair, suicide, and flight to violence and authoritarianism of the modern age can only be accelerated, not resolved, by the erasure of the human and the complexities of building positive, authentic relationships.
The Mysteries
A dear friend sent me this book, The Mysteries, as a gift. It’s a fable and illustrated storybook for adults created as a collaboration between Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, and caricaturist John Kascht. It’s so cool and beautifully illustrated in textured black and white art that perfectly both tells the story and leaves lots of room for the adult imagination to fill in the emotions and gaps of the tale.
Is This Thing On?
I needed to create an introductory blog post to justify the existence of this place. So if you’ve read this far, thank you. Welcome! The truth is I’m here to share a little of the wondrous exploration of the beauty of life and living. There’s plenty of ugliness, as we all know. Maybe I’ll talk about some of that too at some point, but I’m fundamentally a very fortunate man filled with gratitude, and I expect that’s going to come through in anything I put up on this site.