Voting

Your vote is your choice. Getting a vote is an important step in becoming responsible for the world around you, to making decisions about the physical world you choose to occupy. To let the world know what you believe. It’s important to share. We learn from each other and by making decisions as a group we can learn how to better our society.

Would you vote for a world where every decision you made was approved? Every law, mandate, mode of operating, what everything costs, where resources go, how energy is used, how your neighbors feel around you, and so much more. This is a world that the candidate you voted for wins. The law you approved gets approved. You pay the taxes you want to pay. You make the choices, and get to live alongside people who agree with you.

How to we create worlds where people make the majority of their own decisions on how to operate. Groups can find each other and live in their preferred manner, as long as it is in accordance with Earth’s laws. Earth’s laws can’t quite be voted on, they seem to be the system we exist in and we must respect Earth and her Natural Laws.

Your vote is your choice. What do you choose? How do you choose to live today, in a way you can share for future generations?

Safe Hugs,

The Happy President

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Two

BEING AND CARING by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER TWO: ENJOYING LIFE: FROM JUDGING TO APPRECIATION

We all have the capacity to enjoy life. But instead we may act out old habits that darken our days and sabotage our hopes.

We can find ways to enjoy what we do. “There are over eight hundred ‘happy texts’ in the Bible. If God said that many times to be glad and rejoice, he must surely have meant it.” Learning to celebrate our existence in work, play, and relationship is both a religious and a spiritual charge.

Unless I’m living in a way that pleases me, my actions and projects are unlikely to nourish others. If you enjoy your own existence, your actions and undertakings are more likely to help others enrich their lives, too. What else have we got to do that’s more important than learning how to be good to ourselves – and to those around us? How fully we enjoy our lives is dependent on our self-esteem: how we feel about ourselves and perceive our value to others. High self-esteem, an attitude that includes self-respect and good feelings about ourselves, makes it easy to enjoy life. Low self-esteem, an attitude that includes feelings that we’re somehow wrong, bad, or inadequate, makes it harder.

A tragic irony is that if my own self-esteem is low, I may depreciate others so I can feel good by comparison: “At least I’m not as bad as you.” In doing that, I challenge their self-esteem.

Thus, self-esteem is a learned process that emerges from our social interactions. To a significant degree, it’s an estimate of how I perceive the people in my environment valuing me.

Listen to what you say to others. Does your comment seem to make the other person feel better or worse about himself or herself?

THE NATURE OF JUDGMENT

We all know the feeling many call “bitterness in our hearts.” When I feel this way, I tend to pass harsh judgment on whomever or whatever comes my way. As I pass judgment, I separate myself from others. These are depreciative judgments.

Evaluation, Preference, and Judgment

Our own judgments about what we do and don’t value provide us needed life-orientation and guidance. Constructive criticism of our ideas and undertakings gives us feedback about what’s useful and what isn’t. But we don’t have to transform the need for constructive appraisal into habitual rejection through judgment that can pervade our lives, interfere with our appreciation of ourselves, and demean the beauty in our world.

To clarify that distinction, when I have to make decision or choose among alternative, I call it evaluation. Evaluation is considering the effects of something: Is it helpful or harmful?

Liking or disliking, by contrast, is primarily a feeling process. I enjoy this more than that. When I pay attention to what I actually prefer now, I’m likely to respond more openly instead of staying locked into old habits.

Instead of saying, “I don’t like Brian,” I say, “Brian is a jerk” (he is, you know). Instead of stating my own feelings, I pretend, even to myself, that I’m responding to “the way things are.”

I use the term projective judgments for these feelings disguised as judgments. I assign my own feelings to some aspect of the person, thing, or event I’m judging instead of recognizing that they come from me. I define you in terms of what’s happening in me.

Accusations, condemnations, and rejection contribute to lo self-esteem in others and, when directed inward, maintain it in ourselves. When I let go of judgment in this sense, I open myself to a broader canvas of experience.

Habitual judging makes life brittle. Few things steal more vitality, or cast a chiller, darker mood, than the habit o criticizing and condemning.

We can think about the counsel Jesus offered: “Pass no judgement, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; acquit, and you will be acquitted; give and gifts will be given you…for whatever measure you deal out to others will be dealt to you in return.” (Luke 6:37-38, New English Bible)

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius commented, “Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them or bear with them”. When I feel an impulse to criticize people, I might first ask myself, “Am I willing to take the time to show them a better way to do it non-judgmentally so they’ll be willing to hear? Do I know a better way – really?”

Discovering What’s Beneath Our Judgments

When we don’t feel impelled ot respond to hostility with hostility, we’re apt to make better contact with people and resolve issues more effectively. Discriminate between evaluation and depreciation. I’m more likely to hear you when you tell me your feelings, or when you describe how you react to what I do, than when your words or voice imply that you’re better and I’m worse.

It is important that we acknowledge our humanity. I don’t have to pretend to be nonjudgemental about things I really do judge. As you feel the bitterness that lingers on in you, be gentle with yourself. If you forgive no one else, at least forgive yourself.

DISCOUNTING OURSELVES

Many people (not just those who chronically feel bad about themselves) disparage themselves, as much as – or even more than – they put down others.

How many times a day do you feel inferior? But ask yourself, inferior compared to what? Compared to what you might realistically expect to be and do, given your background and the breaks you’ve had? Of course not. That way you’d come out right where you are.

You can improve your skill at doing almost anything, once you get rid of your image of yourself as “no good at it.”

Here is one of the most important statements in this book: At this point in your life, at this moment in time, however you are, it’s all right for you to be that way. To feel what you feel, to think what you think, to do what you do. What is, is. What you are, you are. Recognizing that can make it easier to begin moving today in directions that will help you feel better about your life tomorrow.

“Shoulds”

Every depreciative judgment about myself has a “should” at its center. I “should” be a certain way, and if I’m not, I’m defective.

“Should”, as it’s widely used, carries a quality of absoluteness. The things I “should” are are right, and the things I “shouldn’t” do are wrong. And that’s that.

When my mind is filled with what I “should” have done, ordinarily I don’t find out as much about what happened as a result of what I did.

WORKING WITH JUDGMENTS

Monitoring depreciative judgments can decrease their frequency and intensity. The most reliable way to monitor your judgments is to count them.

SAYING “YES” TO OURSELVES

There are several alternatives to depreciative judgment. One is positive judgment. Another alternative is to appreciate something for what it is, without judging it as either good or bad.

The Theory of Positive Intent

Appreciating what’s going on involves two steps. 1) Recognizing what it is in our behavior that drives away the very response we want from others or that defeats us in other ways. 2) Recognizing that we don’t defeat ourselves because we’re bad, sick, stupid, or crazy, but when we don’t recognize and honor our own positive intent, nor that of others.

The theory of positive intent helps us take an apparently negative, destructive behavior and use it as a starting point for growth.

The Perfection in What Is

Perfection has two very different meanings. One is the gradual change from being “imperfect” to being “perfect.” The other is the perfection of each thing that exists, just as it is right now.

Here and now, I’m a perfect me, and you’re a perfect you. No one in the world can be as perfect as You as You are.

None of this means that we need to tolerate troublesome conditions in our lives that we can change. Instead, the task is to get in touch with exactly how things are not okay, and set out to remedy that.

Saint Theresa of Avila said it beautifully: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Since I have some choice about how I feel, I can feel hostile, angry, and bitter as I work to change harmful conditions, or I can feel full, alive, and in contact with myself and my world.

Art Hoppe, my favorite newspaper columnist, wrote one day, “If we all celebrated life, who could oppress or kill or hate his fellow man?”

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter One

“BEING & CARING, A Psychology for Living,” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984.

Selections curated by The Happy President.

PREFACE

We all write, direct, and act the parts we play in the theaters of our lives. These roles grow out of how we feel about ourselves, how we want the world to see us, and the constraints of our environments. Within these contexts, each of us has the option of finding ways to live that help us to feel good and know ourselves more deeply – to create and flow and to stretch and reach.

Being and Caring begins, in Part One, by setting out some guiding principles:

Learn to appreciate and enjoy yourself, your life, and other people, rather than depreciatively judging all these. Live in a self-determining, authentic way that’s based primarily on who you are rather than what others want you to be. Develop the neglected sides of who you are and become a more fully integrated person. Increase your freedom and power by accepting responsibility for your behavior. Sharpen your ability to be aware of events both within and outside yourself.

Part Two presents skills and information about interacting with other people. Parts Three, Four, and Five consider emotion, cognition, and overt behavior. The order is psychological: Emotional clarity facilitates clear thinking, and both feeling and thinking affect our actions. Part Six returns to our connections with others with an emphasis on intimate and other long-term relationships.

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

CHAPTER ONE: PERSONAL EVOLUTION

Look in the mirror: What tales do the lines in your own face tell? In our first few years, we all live with the faces we were born with. After that, we start wearing the faces and living the lives we’ve created for ourselves.

Each of us becomes more of who we can be in part by being fully who we are now. “Don’t push the river,” said Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, “it flows by itself.” So often, to fit our ideas about who we should or could be, we stop ourselves from acknowledging who we are. We don’t have to rush headlong into changing ourselves, nor feel unhappy about who we are today to evolve in constructive ways. As we recognize our complexities – our diverse parts that interact, conflict, demand, and counterdemand – we’re more likely to appreciate our processes, purposes, and actions.

Finding ways to enjoy and appreciate ourselves, those around us, and our interactions with the circumstances of our lives is part of what might be called personal wisdom – something as unique as your fingerprints, signature, or way of laughing. Such wisdom includes actively seeking choices and alternatives rather than passively playing the role of a “victim of circumstances.” You can confront your reality creatively rather than accepting other people’s solutions and limitations.

THE EMERGING YEARS OF “PEOPLE PSYCHOLOGY”

Amid the material growth and prosperity that followed World War 2…Unhappiness was seen as a defect in a life of all possible goods. A popular textbook from the forties and fifties comments that a “maladjusted” person was often viewed as morally “bad” or “wrong”.

Adjustment textbooks, valuable to many readers though they were, suffered from two significant limitations. First the goal was some abstraction called “normality.” Normal is “an accepted standard, model, or pattern; especially corresponding to the median or average.” The old “adjustment psychology” sought to help troubled people become like everyone else instead of accepting their own uniqueness.

Second, most of the values and conditions to which a person was asked to “adjust” were unquestioned.

Fritz Perls (1947) argued that in the context of a society changing as rapidly as ours, it’s not clear just what we’re supposed to adjust to. He held that the demand to adjust can interfere with the self-reliance that maturity requires. To adjust blindly, he asserted, is to participate in the collective madness inherent in some aspect of our society.

Jungian analyst James Hillman goes a step farther, pointing out that the “manic consumerism and overtiredness and sleep depressions” of many clients in therapy today reflect the environments in which they live. We need to develop a psychopathology of civilization. As we discover how our culture is crazy, we can conceive of saner, wiser ways to redirect it.

THE MYSTIQUE OF SELF-FULFILLMENT

The humanistic orientation in psychology. (Theorist) Rogers emphasizes a person’s capacity to define the central issues of his or her life. Perls identified the fragmented nature of many people’s experience and the need to move toward a sense of integration and wholeness. Maslow described needs common to all of us as we seek both to be our unique selves and to understand the ways of the world we live in. Their perspectives can help each of us participate creatively in our world without being consumed by it.

The self-fulfillment ethic appears to have three different roots. One is the emergence of a psychology that aims at helping people discover themselves at a deep level, use themselves creatively, and achieve a full, happy life that doesn’t depend entirely on possessions and status. A second is our historic attitude of commitment to individualism. A third is our consumption-oriented economic system that relentlessly exhorts people to buy everything they want – today!

Is the quest for self-fulfillment an unmixed blessing? Some think not. “You’re obsessed with your own fulfillment but you don’t help others with theirs,” such criticism runs. “There’s no cooperative glue there, no shared effort of the kind that’s needed to build a mutually nourishing society.”

In their movement toward greater self-knowledge, people go through stages of development.

The next step beyond self-fulfillment is to take our more fulfilled selves into mutually enriching social relationships with others.

BEYOND CONFORMITY AND THE “ME GENERATION” – BEING FOR ME AND CARING ABOUT YOU

From birth until death, a person can grow in his or her ability to be with other people in mutually fulfilling ways. At the same time, the person is developing an ability to be independent, separate, and unique. Thus contemporary theorists speak of an interplay between two motives: individuation and relatedness. At every point, both are active. The two tendencies not only coexist but support each other. The more I know and the better I feel about myself, the more supportive, challenging, and caring I can be in my relationship with you. And vice versa. This interplay represents the guiding perspective of this book.

When I’ve learned to stand on my own feet, I’m ready to move toward you and with you. It’s then that I discover what synergy means: self-interest enlightened by appreciative awareness of myself in your existence and of your participation in my world. We do for each other in ways that enrich us, too, and do for ourselves in ways that enrich each other.

LIVING BY OUR REAL CONCERNS

Taking Time for Assessment

Taking stock of our lives is something we need to do more.

Living and discovering in ways that embody my life themes may require important redirections of my energy. These may involve changes wihtin my life. My deep concerns are found both in the far future and in how I do what I do each day.

I need to find a way to feel all right about what I do. This doesn’t mean “Chip up and put a sunny face on what’s nasty and uncomfortable.” Rather, it means that if I’ve examined how I use my time and energy and find no more effective alternative, I may need to go easier on myself, and recognize that, all things considered, I’m doing the best I can for me and those important to me.

Clarifying Our Directions

Evolving toward ways of living that demonstrate our own values and priorities involves a self-determination that’s more than just rebellion against others’ expectations. It’s an active process of redefining what we want to do with who we know ourselves to be. How do I know if the direction I choose is a productive one? If it leads me to make better use of who I am, I’m willing to call it growth.

I can distrust my ability to accomplish anything when I focus only on the finished product, and forget that the process of creating somethign can be as rewarding as completing it. When I’m afraid I’ll never make it, I don’t even start. Perhaps if we pay attention to the ways we frighten ourselves, that act will be a start toward what we want to accomplish.

ETHICS AND WISDOM

The direction of our evolution is influenced by the natur of our ethics. Our approach is this: to experience our acts in terms of how helpful or harmful they are – how useful or counterproductive – to whom or what, how under what circumstances.

Our knowing process becomes distorted when we’re required to learn large amounts of information in which we find little meaning or value. Understanding is seeing relationships among facts that are important to me. As I develop understanding, I become able to use my knowledge.

Wisdom goes beyond understanding. Wisdom is the knowledge of the spirit. We tend to expect a different kid of knowing from our spirituality than from our heads – a very personal integration of knowing, feeling, sensing, and doing.

Health and Happiness

The world is currently shutting down its usual activities due to the fear of COVID-19, commonly called the coronavirus. Two of my activities have been cancelled for the next two weeks because anyone with a cough or sniffle could give anyone else a deadly disease. Theme Parks, some of the most internationally visited places in the world, are shutting down for obvious reasons. The grocery store was busier than usual today, though. Toilet paper was sold out, pasta was almost all gone. People are really less concerned about carbs and more concerned with wiping their butt.

While I want everyone to be healthy, I would like to think that COVID-19 is just a way for Earth’s inhabitants to have time to stay at home and chill for awhile. Stop the hustle and grind to get a paycheck and instead slow down and check into the moment. Catch up on that latest streaming show. Call people you haven’t talked to in awhile. Learn a new skill even if you may never show it off in person. Live as if the the world is changing. Laugh with me, just not on me.

Spend time at home cleaning through your old shit. Read up on the KonMari Method. Keep only what sparks joy in you. Eat consciously. Plant a garden and see what grows by the time this whole thing ends. How you take care of your home speaks volumes about you. Keep yourself clean and stop using so much toilet paper.

Don’t let this silly virus that originally came from a chicken make us become zombies to one another. Stay healthy, wash your hands, and trust in the power of the human body. It has been scientifically proven to be able to heal itself.

Stay Happy and Healthy,

The Happy President

LibertyHand

Wash Your Hands, Please.