“You are not stuck where you are unless you decide to be.” That's a quote by Dr. Wayne Dyer. I think this self-help guru was absolutely right about this one!
I here so many people say they hate their job or they hate the area where they live. I tell them, "then find a new job." or "Then move!" Well, you wouldn't believe the responses I get to that. Well, I wouldn't make as much money somewhere else... or all of my family is around here. Well, then don't complain! If you are not happy where you are or in what you are doing, then it is up to you to change it. So many people are afraid of moving away from what they know... or move out of their comfort zones. I know, because it happens to me too. We get comfortable, and even though we know in our hearts that there is a better way or a better place for us, we get comfortable with the status quo and get afraid to try. In the past, I have run my own business. I loved being my own boss, but circumstances changed in my life, and I went back to a corporate job to make my life easier and to get a consistent paycheck. Even so, not a day goes by where I don't either look for a new business to start. I know that for me to be happy, I need to be running my life... not just in the hours between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., but all the time. If you are not happy with something in your life, then you need to make a decision and act on it. Everything does not have to change in a day, but you do need to take at least a small step in that direction each and every day. Life is short. Don't be miserable because you are too afraid to take action. Remember, not taking action is an action in and of itself. It is a negative action, though. Tomorrow, take a step back and look at where you are in your life. Try to find the areas where you are not happy and then take steps to change them. Even little steps involving just looking for alternatives to the things that make you unhappy, will make you feel a bit better. Look for opportunities that will lead to your long-term happiness, and then take actions to make those opportunities a reality. Rome wasn't built in a day! But remember, Rome never would have been built at all if someone hadn't taken those original steps necessary to begin it. Be happy. And take the steps necessary to become happier
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"Wisdom comes from paying attention to wise people." That's a quote by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. Tsunetomo was a samurai in the late 1600's and early 1700's. I somewhat disagree with this statement. To me, wisdom comes from experience. While you can learn a lot from paying attention to wise people, these people also had to learn.
Pay attention to everything, but especially wise people, would seem to be a better quote to me. There is so much you can learn every day, if you just open yourself to it. Everyone has something that they can teach you. Whether it is how to act or how not to act in any given situation, you can definitely learn something. One thing that I like to do, but don't get a chance to do a lot, is to have conversations with older people that I don't know to see what makes them tick. I have learned so many life lessons in that way in the past! You would be amazed at the range of topics that will come up, if you just open yourself to listening to other people and ask open-ended questions. Reading is also a great way to learn and gain wisdom. Take old Yamamoto here, for instance. I originally saw only the one quote by him, but in knowing that he was a samurai, I looked him up and found that he had written an entire book of his thoughts on the warrior code... or bushido as we call it now. His book was: Hagakure: "The Book Of The Samurai" Below are some other quotes from that book. What I learned from looking at that book is that Tsunetomo was likely a bit of a psychopath! Below are some of his wiser sayings... I have left out the ones that lament about how men no longer want to behead prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs! Oy! "There is certainly nothing more important in life than what we do at the present moment. A person’s entire life consists of nothing more than one moment piled on top of another, over and over again. Once enlightened to this, the warrior has nothing else to worry about, because he realizes that he has only to live in the present moment with the utmost intensity." "A man’s life is only a vapor that vanishes in an instant. One should spend his life doing that which he enjoys. As short as life is, it is foolish to spend it doing only the things one hates." "The secret to a happy marriage is this: Treat your spouse all of your life as you did when you first met and there will never be room for discord." All said, I agree with the last two quotes wholeheartedly. For the record, after Tsunetomo actually gave up being a samurai after his original Lord died. He did not like the man who took over, and instead of serving someone he did not agree with, he went into the mountains and became a monk. His book was written by another samurai who went into the mountains to find him and learn from him. Learn wisdom from wise people, but also read and learn from the words of wise people who you have not met. Everyone has something that they can teach you. Just be open to the lessons you can learn. I just read my dad's most recent post, and as they often do, it inspired me to go digging for quotes about a certain topic. In his post, he spoke of how he gets lost during conversations at times, and that he misses having Mom to validate that he "isn't the crazy one". I feel this, I really do- because I'm the same way with my close friends. We'll be standing in the same circle of friends listening to the same speech, but we can both tell that we aren't fully paying attention. All it takes is a quick glance when a controversial topic comes about and we already know the other's opinion. Having a connection like that with people is great (and I am in no way comparing that to the relationship between my Mom and Dad).
In any case, it got me thinking about validation- how some of us only need small amounts of it (such as a shared glance in a boring conversation) and how some of us... some of us thrive off of the opinions of others. Sadly, I have friends who dwell only on what others think of them and it's quite depressing. Their own self-worth has declined so greatly because they only care what others think, and it is my lack of approval for this behavior that inspired me (along with my dad's post, of course) to find quotes about validation. Enjoy. “What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.” ― Confucius “Do not wait for someone else to validate your existence; it is your own responsibility.” ― Jasz Gill “The one person you'll be spending the rest of your life with is you. Treat yourself with love and respect.” ― Elle Sommer “The only permission, the only validation, and the only opinion that matters in our quest for greatness is our own.” ― Steve Maraboli "If you live for people's acceptance, you will die from their rejection." "If you persistently seek validation from others, you will inadvertently invalidate your own self worth." "You're only invisible to those who don't deserve to see you." "Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone." "What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you." That is a quote by Richard Wilbur. Wilbur is an American poet and college professor who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry; one in 1957, and another in 1989. Unfortunately, I have never read any of Wilbur's work, although I plan to correct that error at some time in the near future.
To get back to Wilbur's quote, it really hits too close to home for me. In my mind, I need to modify it a bit though to really make it fit. "A lonely me, a dead you." The holidays have been a tough time for me over the past few years, and no matter what I do, it doesn't really change. I seem to be the type that can be lonely in a crowded room. I don't seem to be lonely due to a lack of people... I am more lonely due to a lack of people to share my heart with. I miss the closeness of knowing one person really well. So well, that I can say anything to them. That feeling is the main thing missing in my life right now, and at times it can make me sad. Sharon and I had our troubles, but we always had the ability to communicate with each other with just a look or touch. To know someone understands where you are coming from on all levels is a great comfort. It's a comfort that I find very hard to come by. Sure, I talk with people. Although I jokingly say I am a recluse at karate, due to the fact that I work from home, and rarely go out during the week accept to go for coffee or to workout at the dojo, I am not really a recluse. I can easily talk with most people and keep up my end of the conversation. What throws me off occasionally, is the why of the matter. Usually, I understand why a conversation is going in the direction that t is going, and whether it is something serious or just idle chit chat, I usually know what's what. It is those odd times when a conversation takes a step towards the bizarre where I really get lost and feel lonely (oddly enough). Something will be said, and I will feel like I should be getting some kind of connection from what was just said, and instead I get this feeling of confusion and nothingness. Those are moments that are best shared with someone you love. A look or a nod would be enough to let me know that I wasn't really the crazy one. Now, I hit that point, and I just feel like what happened was really weird and I have no clue what is going on and no way to really check to see WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED! You know, the sad part is, that really isn't it. That seemed like a way to start to describe what I am missing, but it really isn't that. There just seems to be a really huge empty hole in me where my feelings used to reside that is now just an empty cavern. My thoughts go to where these feelings used to be and gets lost there. They wander for hours in a cavern of what was and what might have been. Memories can be a great comfort, but they can be a private hell as well. I guess what I am trying to say is that there is a type of loneliness that being around people really can't cure... and it happens a lot around the holidays. At least for me. Sometimes being busy can be a balm. At the same time, it can also be a scourge. I think at the holidays many people miss the power of two. I know I do. On Black Friday when many people were out binge shopping, and a couple of people were actually getting trampled to death, my daughter and I and her boyfriend Seth decided to go to the Shinedown/Five Finger Death Punch concert. Overall we made a great choice! AS LionThe night started out with a whimper. I think it was me waiting for the first band to get done! The first band up, AS Lion, seemed more like a bar band than an opening band at an arena. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they were the worst opening band I have seen in quite a while! The band is from England, and they really didn't seem to know how to get the crowd going. Their sound system was poor and the only thing I really heard clearly was the lead singer cursing a lot. About half way through their set, I actually started hoping that the lead singer would fall off the stage as he pranced dangerously close to the edge. Unfortunately, he never did, and we suffered through about a half an hour of their nonsense. They have a new album coming out next week. I think I'll skip that one! I think a better name for this band would be Ass Lyin! Sixx A.M.The next band up was Sixx A.M., a group led by Nikki Sixx, the original bassist for Motley Crue. These guys put on a great show, and had the crowd out of their seats early. At one point, the whole arena was lit up with cell phones and lighters as the band sang their biggest hit, Life Is Beautiful. The group has a good stage presence, and rock hard, but at this point only make as a good opening band. I just don't think they have enough solid hits under their belt to be a main headliner yet. ShinedownShinedown put on the set of the night! These guys came out and rocked hard. They have a large number of hits, and they played all of them! I had heard from a number of people that they put on a good show, so I had high expectations. And the band far exceeded them. Although I am a big fan of Five Finger Death Punch, I thought they would have a tough time beating Shinedown's performance... and I was right! Unfortunately, the lead singer for Five Finger Death Punch was very distraught. He had just found out that his mother had died that evening and he was waiting for a plane home. Amazingly, he came out and tried to sing a few songs. The band did a short set and then called it an evening. I give him a lot of credit even coming out on stage after hearing that news. I have seen Five Finger Death Punch in the past, and I know they put on a great show. My condolences to Ivan and his family. Below, are two pictures of Five Finger Death Punch, and then three more from Shinedown. The large picture that opened this blog post is also a picture of Shinedown. For the record, My favorite song of the evening was Simple Man by Shinedown. They did a great job with the old Lynyrd Skynyrd classic. At one point, they had the whole arena singing the chorus and it sounded awesome. All of those people (myself included) connecting with the band on that one song really was something to experience!
Two other songs worth mentioning were Life Is Beautiful by Sixx A.M. (The crowd also tried to sing this one, but it seemed to have a little less feeling behind it) and Cut The Cord by Shinedown. I have short clips up on my Facebook page of Simple Man and Life Is Beautiful, so if you have nothing to do, go to my page. Just search Wayne Nef (I live in New Hampshire, just in case there is more than one person with my name). Enjoy! "Nothing can be done without hope and confidence." That is a quote by Helen Keller. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Helen was a deaf and blind women born in 1880, who became the first deaf and blind person to earn a college degree. Her life story is truly amazing and should be read by everyone, in my opinion.
If anyone has the right to talk about hope, it was Helen. She was born in rural Alabama and at the age of 19 months contracted an illness that left her deaf, mute, and blind. At the age of seven, her parents brought her to the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where she met Anne Sullivan, a visually impaired student who became Helen's teacher. After many months, she had a breakthrough with Helen that helped to change her life forever. If you are interested in the story, you can watch the film "The Miracle Worker" which tells Anne's story about working with Helen. Over time, Helen learned to sign, read braille, and even speak. In her later years, she became a prolific author and an activist for many causes. After learning to speak, she became a prolific lecturer as well. Imagine, through all of that adversity, she kept a sense of hope and optimism. Not only that, she put her education to good use trying to help people with similar disabilities, as well as for political causes she believed in. Note that Helen was a pacifist and opposed Woodrow Wilson's policies in domestically, in Europe and in Latin America.. About Woodrow Wilson she stated: ""Could it be that we don't want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson... We don't want complicated icons. "People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions, and conclusions are not always pleasant."" It is hard for me to imagine being blind and deaf and still being able to learn how to speak and write, let alone doing so as eloquently as Helen did. On top of that, she had the empathy to stand up for and fight for people with similar disabilities. On this day of thanks giving, I find I am thankful for people like Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan who use what God has given them to the best of their abilities. They prove that hope and optimism can go a long way towards helping people. In the end, Helen lived her beliefs and fought for them nonviolently, Isn't that something we can all aspire to? "Silence is the most powerful scream." I read this anonymous quote while looking for something to write about this evening. It reminded me of a poem I wrote to include in Sharon's book of poems. Sharon was a beautiful writer, and she left a large number of poems behind. On her death bed, I promised her that I would publish her poems. It took a while to gather all of the poems and get them ready for publishing, but they are finally ready. I have included a couple of my poems in the book, as well as one by Maddie. With any luck, the book will be ready to be published on Amazon for Christmas. The book is called "Butterfly Screams." Below, is one of the poems I wrote for the book, that the quote above reminded me of. Enjoy! Scream In Silence
I scream in silence, So my loved ones will not hear, I cry inside, So my eyes won’t shed a tear. I live my life, With a heart that’s broken bad. I have no emotions Except one… and that is sad. I do my best To get on with living life, But God knows How much I miss my wife. I scream in silence, And carry on like nothing’s wrong, I sing the lyrics, Though I really don’t like the song, Living life without you, Brings me unending pain, No one can see though, I’m like a tear drop in the rain. 6/26/14 "An absence of tears is not the same as an absence of feeling." Okay, so this is a bastardized quote by me! It is bastardized because the quote I was looking at was: "But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling." They are very close, so I will give credit to Lisa Kleypas for this one. Lisa is a best-selling author of romance novels. I have never read any of her work, it is not really a genre I follow. Even so, her quote inspired my thought.
The above quote sort of fits my mood over the past few days. This mood hits me every once in a while, particularly around the holidays. It's a feeling of not really sadness but emptiness. For me, absence is as much an emotional state as sad or happy. In fact, absence to me is like the lack of any real emotion. I am not happy, sad, satisfied, or unsatisfied. I'm not angry, frustrated, optimistic, or pessimistic. In fact, it just seems that everything is gray. Nothing is good enough or bad enough to elicit a response. Three things seem to drive this feeling in me. First and foremost, things that remind me about my wife. Sometimes, I just can't seem to get past that she is dead and that I won't be seeing her again. I'll hear something that reminds me of her, or smell something. Sometimes it's just a memory or something that I remember seeing with her. The holidays also seem to drive this feeling in me. At times, I feel joyless and just want to hide. I want my daughters to enjoy the holidays and have a good time... and I try to make sure they do so. But oftentimes, underneath my veneer of mirth and joy, I feel empty. It is far worse than feeling sad. Finally, the last thing that makes me feel absence is when I am not actively working towards my goals. Oftentimes, I will bury myself with projects when I am in absence mode to keep myself too busy to think. I will work on a number of goals all at once so that no one feels neglected or excluded. It's at these times that I need everyone I love to be involved for at least a little while each week. Time to spend with my family helps me to slowly kill the absence that I feel inside. Things to do, memories to make... Talks of inconsequential things, all of these are some of my favorite things! Am I nuts? Who knows. Do you experience the emotion I call absence? If so, how do you beat it? Leave me a comment if you have any ideas, because it really does suck. "Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor." That's a quote by my favorite poet, Robert Frost. Frost had a way of looking at the world that made you stop and think. Many of his poems, at first, make you think he is writing about the most inconsequential of things. If you thought this, you would be right... at least on the surface.
Many of Frost's poems would seem to be about small everyday things. Yet it was the meaning that he saw in these things, and his ability to make you see these meanings that make Frost's poems so compelling and haunting. One poem that comes to mind where you can see this in action is with the poem "The Exposed Nest." The poem is about a farmer who is usually very jocular, who is found out in a field trying to place hay in such a way so that it is standing up. His friend finds that this isn't one of the farmer's typical jokes, though. While mowing the field, the farmer accidentally exposed a bird's nest with some young birds in it. He builds the shelter in the hopes that it will give them some relief from the exposure of the sun and some cover from their enemies. He then notes that after doing this, the farmer then never checks on the birds again. To me it seems like the farmer really didn't care about the birds per se, but was instead trying to assuage his own guilt about what was likely to happen to the birds. The birds in the nest were too young to fly away, and without the shelter and the cover of the long grass were likely going to die. The farmer felt bad about this, but not bad enough to take them to his barn and nurse them until they were strong enough to fly away. The truth of the matter was that these young birds were likely going to die now. The farmer did not want to face this truth though, so he built the shelter to at least be able to say to himself that he gave them a fighting chance. He never checked on them again, because he didn't want to ever check on the truth of the matter. To bring this discussion back to the original quote, the change that we see is that these young birds that had the promise of life, were now likely going to die... either from exposure or from a predator. The reality of this change in fortune did not sit well with the farmer, and he felt guilty about it since in effect his reaping had brought this change of fortune about for the young birds (I guess you could say he was the grim reaper). Frost shows that the farmer is aware of what he has done, but doesn't really want to just leave the birds to their fate, and thus he is found building the screen. By not returning to the nest the next day, it seems he doesn't really want to confirm that his actions led to the bird's deaths, but would rather go along with the thought that his subsequent action may have saved the birds, Without checking, he'll never know, and thus it softens the blow to his psyche from his accidental deed. Is this the correct meaning of this poem? I don't know. Some people believe the poem is about a father finding his child in a field trying to help the birds. While this theory makes sense for most of the poem, it loses its potency once he mentions that the person never goes back to check on the birds. Most children I know would do so. Not only that, they would continue to go back and check on the birds until they were no longer there. Most children would return with worms and bugs to toss to the birds to make sure they wouldn't starve. This definitely is not the case in the poem, and thus it leaves me to believe that it is the farmer who spies his mistake and tries to assuage his guilt. In the end, the only constant is change. Changes do occur. In fact, they happen regularly. Truths remain truths, whether we choose to believe them or not. For me, my daughters will always be my little girls... even when they are grown women. My eldest daughter is now 15. When I look at her, I see her, but I still see the little girl who used to hold my hand and reveled in the stories I used to make up on the fly and tell her on long car trips. For Ashleigh, she is now six, and still holds my hand. When I look at her I can see that, but I also see the small little bundle that slept in a cradle next to my desk while I worked, or stood in the playpen at the front of the dojo while I took my karate classes. The changes occur, yet we will always see the truths that live in our hearts. ""Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute." That is quote by Edgar Allen Poe... In fact, Maddie used this quote in one of her blog posts earlier today. I wanted to touch upon this quote because I think he got it wrong. Not wrong exactly, but just not quite right.
Years of love can be forgotten in a minute, but I don't think it is driven by hatred. Instead, I think it can be driven by hurt, sorrow, despair, misunderstanding and fear. You see, I've seen it happen, and I know that while it can and does happen, that the love can still be remembered again and acted upon. My wife's illness once drove a wedge between me and her as well as with others in the family as well. Sharon's disease was complex, and difficult for an adult to understand let alone a child. Although her actions hurt her, and ultimately killed her, her action's also hurt other family members. We couldn't understand what made her drink, and her actions and the lies surrounding them definitely led to anger, pain and sorrow. At some points, those emotions would rise up and obscure the love that Sharon had for all of us. It sometimes blinded me to the pain that Sharon was in and the pain that our reactions had on her. You see, the pain worked both ways. We were hurting from her actions and the stress and emotions they brought out in us, and while we witnessed the physical pain her addictions were causing her. The emotional turmoil it was causing her was often overshadowed by our feelings about what was happening to our family. Resentment and anger would come to the forefront and become hard to overcome. Sometimes to the point where it obscured the years of love that were there hiding just beneath the surface. The love was being obscured by the pain that we were all feeling. Anger, and frustration would, at times, seep to the surface, and the years of love were forgotten for a time. To be honest, I think the emotional pain and suffering was felt by all. None of us were immune to its effects. We all suffered our own private hell. What times takes away, it can also heal. I think with closure, memory comes back. At first in trickles and small rivulets, finally in a torrent. While not all memories return, I think enough good ones come back to remind us that love was there, and that it can, with time, overcome despair, anger and sorrow. In the end, years of love cannot be forgotten. Obscured for a short time? Yes. But forgotten completely? I don't think so. In fact, I know so. So don't despair. No matter how much true love can be obscured and forgotten, with time the long years of love will be remembered... and bring comfort. There is an old saying that "You learn something new every day!". Well, lately I have been learning how to use memes. If you have never heard of them, they are pictures that people have placed words over to make the pictures funny. The younger generations seem to use these to communicate and make each other laugh. I am still learning how to use them, and Maddie tells me A. I am not very funny B. I do not know how to use them properly. C. Please stop. Well, I find them easy to make, and kind of amusing, so I have taken up making them in my spare time. Sometimes I use them on Facebook, or post them on Imgur. Other times I just send them to Maddie to make her smile. The picture above is actually a meme. I took a picture from Monty Python's Flying Circus and added a well known saying from the show. I place it at the top of my post, because this is a subject that I usually don't write about. Those who have watched Monty Python, might see it and get it. Others, not so much. But I digress! Below are pictures of some of my memes and I will try to explain how I used them. The first example is likely one of my better uses. I used it in a message with Maddie on Facebook Messenger. The conversation started normal enough. Maddie: Hey Dad, I have a question. Dad: Maddie: Can I go over to Seth's..? I'd be able to get a ride back and at this rate it may be easier since it's later. I don't think grandma would have a problem dropping me off. Dad: No. Maddie: Aw, Why? :( Dad: Maddie: I know Well bring you some back XD Maddie: Well? Dad: Maddie: Yes way.... But why can't I? Dad: (At this point, I was only playing with her. The real conversation ended with no. We both knew it. Now I was just practicing making memes quickly and trying to stay on topic. But she kept trying none the less.) Maddie: But it makes more sense and it'd save time XD Maddie: So why not? Dad: Maddie: Dad :) :) :) Dad: Maddie: Oh my God! I get it. :) :) :) Dad: Maddie actually liked this exchange and was laughing about it. It is now one in the morning, so I will just place a few more for you to look at. If you like them, I can always do an occasional post on the topic, or just add one in occasionally. Below are a few that I add in when someone makes a silly comment. I think you will be able to figure out the gyst of the comments from the memes. Well, that's it for now. If you like them, let me know... I have tons of them, and they are easy to make.
Sometimes my Grandma says to my dad ''can you make a sandwich''? He will say okay, and then I help him. I make the sandwich for him, and then Daddy cuts it in half for my Grandma. I put it on a plate and my dad makes a cup of coffee. Then I take the meal on a tray to my Grandma.
After she ate it all, I play ''GO FISH'' with her. Maddie and I sometimes eat hot dogs. Then we play Call of Duty with my Dad. Later on, we rest and eat dinner. It is usually not sandwiches! Ashleigh I just finished reading a post my dad recently wrote about teaching your children- while also teaching yourself. I liked it a lot because he's absolutely right- a lot of who I am is based off of who he is since he's the most influential person in my life. In fact, most of my personality surrounds how I've been raised and I wanted to take this post to bullet point the things that make me who I am- that I've inherited from my dad.
* My sense of humor. While my dad does tend to lean more on puns and movie lines than I do, the distorted reflection has left me with quoting Internet memes to amuse my friends and dry sarcasm paired with strong opinions. * Logic. Oh god, logic. Something I didn't fully grasp and still wouldn't say I've entirely grasped until recently, but a vital piece of my personality that my dad taught me. However, I am more emotional than my dad since if someone fails to see logic the first time; I get annoyed. * Peace over power. While primarily taught by karate, my dad has really instilled this little saying into me so that it is a part of who I am. As a martial artist you are taught to never start fights, only finish them- and I try to apply this mantra wherever I can in my life. * It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder... essentially, raise your words and not your voice. Volume will not win you any arguments, so it's better to avoid yelling altogether. While I'm still struggling a little with this; for the most part I'm level headed when it comes to arguing. * It's the little things that count. This needs no elaboration really... it is what it is. My dad has given me a deep appreciation for the small things in life, particularly in nature. * Noticing everything. I'm extremely observant, something I've learned from my dad over time. Going back to humor, most of my dad's revolves around noticing things going on around him and turning them into jokes. To understand his humor, I learned to be observant and it now aids me in my humor as well. * "Colorful" language... my dad mentioned this in his post, but my language is also inherited from him. Can't be from anywhere else really; everyone else in my family is against it! While I know there are far more ways I'm similar to my dad; these are some of the main ones. I've also inherited an awesome taste in music from my dad- something that didn't need to be on the bullet list, but that I definitely appreciate! It's nice to have a dad who enjoys heavy metal concerts as much as I do. Thank you dad- for everything. - maddie "If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves." That is a quote by Carl Jung. Jung was the founder of analytical psychology. He was a firm believer in individuation. One of the unique things about Jung is that at a very early age he believed he had two personalities. One was that of your typical Swiss school boy at the time, while the other was that of a dignified, authoritative and influential man from the past. This belief would go on to influence much of his groundbreaking future work.
Getting back to Jung's quote, I think he is correct. Oftentimes, although not always, our children are like mirrors of ourselves. While we all recognize that to some extent, it is when we see a perceived flaw that we try to get the child to change it. A good example of this can be found at my house.My Mom is constantly haranguing Maddie about the neatness of her room. She wonders why she just won't keep her room clean. Remember, a reflection is not an exact duplicate of the original. Mirrors have a tendency to distort some details... writing, for example, will look backwards in a mirror. And so it is with our children! Maddie's room is indeed a mess at most times. Although my room is usually neat, my desk is a disaster area. There's the distortion! Take it out one generation further, and my Mom's room is a mess! So my Mom subconsciously wants to fix a flaw in Maddie that she inadvertently sees in herself. She will often try to enlist me into the fray by having me tell Maddie to clean her room. Is the dirty room the only similarity I can see? No. There are many examples. To stay on neatness for a moment, we all have areas outside of our own personal space where we generate our own messy kind of comfort. For me, it is the garage, where I am constantly battling to clear up the clutter. For Maddie, the library has become her own personal girl cave. My reading chair seems to have molded itself to her shape and the side table always seems covered in her soda bottles and notes for school projects. Meanwhile, the basement has been taken over by my Mom's stuff and the kitchen island seems to have become the final resting place for much of her mail and notes. Even Ashleigh has her own special messy place in the living room! Lately, the dining room table also seems to be collecting a lot of Ashleigh's school supplies and coloring books. From the use of colorful language, to the quest for coffee and a mild form of procrastination, everything I see in my daughters I can also see in myself. To different degrees certainly, but they are still there. We all have different things that annoy us. While I do get on my daughters to curb their more egregious behavior, I also try to see where it is coming from and correct that as well. Oftentimes, the example they are emulating is me (but not always). Finally, with my daughters I try to lead by example. There are three old sayings that I try to remember always. These are: "People in glass houses should not throw stones."; "Those who say it can't be done, should get out of the way of those who are doing it." and "Do as I do, is a much better teacher than do as I say." Yesterday I took my daughters, and Maddie's boyfriend, Seth to Ashburnham, Massachusetts to hike the Watatic Trail. Mount Watatic has an elevation of 1,832 feet above sea level, and our hike was about 2.5 miles round trip, It was a very cloudy day, and we beat the rain by about two hours. This was Ashleigh's first attempt at climbing a mountain and she did very well. We are slowly increasing the length of our hikes and adding some elevation, so that eventually she will be ready to attempt Mt. Monadnock, which she has been wanting to climb for the past two years. The Watatic trail is the shortest of about four trails that meet on the mountain. We chose it because it looked like rain, and we also were not certain that Ashleigh was ready to do a seven mile round-trip hike in mountainous terrain. The trail was well kept, and an easier climb than Mt. Monadnock... perfect for Ashleigh's current skills. We met a number of hikers along the way, and Ashleigh took the opportunity to photograph all of the dogs we ran into along the trail. Below, are pictures I took along the trail, and at the summit. Just out of curiosity, does anyone else see a representation of an owl in the branches of the tree on the left? Not a real owl, mind you, but an owl made of branches and leaves. Take a look at the bottom left, just above where the two trunks are. The branches make what looks like an owl's face, with a wing spreading away on either side of it. The two trunks then look like its legs, and between them it looks like a hawk's face. Above that, the branches also look like some kind of weird representation of a bat.
Okay, I know, it's late and I am just reaching for things here, but that is kind of what I see when I look at the above picture. Maybe I just have too much time on my hands, but that is what I saw, and I snapped the pic, and I can still see it in the photograph. Some people can see pictures in clouds... I guess I can see them in branches and leaves! Anyway, I'll finish off today's post with some pictures from Halloween. I think Maddie looks very spooky this year, and that she did a great job with her make up. Meanwhile, Ashleigh makes a very pretty rainbow fairy. Finally, that last pic is me as a hippy. To be honest, I always dress like that. The only part that is a costume for me is the bandanna and wig. Old hippies die hard I guess! This is part two to the post I wrote yesterday. Today, I will focus on the program I followed to educate my eldest daughter. I will likely follow the same steps with Ashleigh, although I will likely have light changes to the regimen due to differences in their personalities. Maddie was a very strong reader at an early age and thus she started writing reports on the classics at a very early age. To give you an idea of her reading abilities, Maddie read Harry Potter at the age of four. Even so, the first classic I gave her to read didn't turn out too well! At the age of seven, I gave Maddie Black Beauty to read. I always thought children loved that story, so I thought it would be a pretty safe way to introduce her to the classics. How wrong I was! She ended up hating the book, and didn't want to read any more classics because of it. The next few books she enjoyed, though, and she quickly learned that not all classics were as droll or boring as Black Beauty. The Wizard of Oz, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and nearly all of the Sherlock Holmes stories were some of her early favorites. Huckleberry Finn was another disaster for Maddie since she had a tough time reading it due to Twain's habit of writing in the vernacular of the South. It wasn't to a few years later when I had her take a college level course on Twain that she learned to appreciate him. Blogging & WritingAs Maddie was growing, we did a number of age-appropriate projects to help her learn. Blogging played a large part in her education. Over the years, Maddie had at least three blogs that were dedicated to learning. Her first, was maddiesthinkathought.blogspot.com. The blog only shows posts going back to 2011, but I think we started the blog in 2008. We started it as a writing exercise for Maddie. Each day she had to write something down. It could be about anything she wanted. After writing on the blog for a few years, it morphed into a poetry blog. One of my proudest achievements in Maddie's education is that I successfully passed on a love for poetry to her. Both Sharon and I wrote poetry, and I love to read poetry as well. If you would like to read some of Madison's early poetry, follow the link above. In 2010, We started a second blog to help Maddie learn about animals. This blog was called Absolute Animals, and it was a site where Maddie wrote a short post on a new animal each day. Although she no longer writes on this blog, her write ups are still there along with pictures of the animals she wrote about. Maddie's Minerals soon followed. This site was a blog where Maddie wrote about all of the elements on the elemental table, as well as about gem stones, since she really found those interesting. I found blogs were a fun way for Maddie to learn, and I often gave her writing assignments that required her to place them on a blog. One creative project I gave her involved the book "Around the World In Eighty Days". After reading the book, I had Maddie start a blog where she had to write a blog post as if she had to go around the world in 80 days. The trick was that she could only travel a few hundred miles per day, and she could not fly. If she took a ship, and reached her travel limit while out in the ocean, she then had to write a post telling what she did on the ship that day! Maddie was determined to not have to write about being stuck on a boat, so she came up with some creative places to go on her journey. You can follow her journey here: 80 Days. The last blog I'll mention here is called The Book Stack. The Book Stack is the blog where I had Maddie post most of her book reports I had her write. Being able to communicate is a very important skill, and my teaching style required Maddie to read a lot and then write reports explaining what she read. Unfortunately, many of the above blogs seem to be erasing some of her older work, or deleting some of the pictures she used. Thus, some of the older posts have blanks where the pictures used to be. If you are looking for ideas on how to home school your children, I think you may want to browse through the different blogs I linked to above. The Great Courses & Coursera
good grasp of the subject. Other times, I would give her topics that I already knew well to make it easier to tell if she was learning. I particularly liked to use the Great Courses for history and math. Some of the courses Maddie studied are in the picture at the top of the page. After researching on the web, I found a second resource to use with Maddie... Coursera. Coursera is an organization that offers online courses from many of the major colleges across the globe online for free. At first, I was a little skeptical that these were real college courses, so I decided to take a class myself to see how tough they were. I enrolled in, and passed a course on the Python programming language from Rice University. I can tell you that these are definitely college-level courses! Soon after, Maddie signed up for, and passed a course in Songwriting from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Maddie passed her first college course at the age of 12. She has passed eight others since, including courses from Rice University, The Georgia Institute of Technology, SUNY, and Duke University. Although none of these courses gave her college credits, they gave her experience taking challenging courses, and more importantly, the knowledge she gained from taking the courses. VLACsAlthough Madison is still being home schooled, most of her learning is coming from a home-learning program for high schoolers set up by the state of New Hampshire. A friend from karate had told me about VLACs and I looked into it. There were two things that I found very appealing about the program. 1. Maddie could continue to work from home, and would still receive a high school diploma if she successfully completed the required courses. The second point that I liked was that if Madison was accepted into an accelerated college program, she could graduate high school with both a high school diploma and an associates degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
We signed Maddie up for freshman year in high school last year, even though she technically should have been starting eighth grade. They allowed her to start as a ninth-grade student and the lowest grade she had in her first year was a B+. Maddie has started her sophomore year now, and has signed up for her first official college course. Although I am no longer teaching her, I do keep in touch with her teachers and monitor her progress. She also continues to write on our family blog daily. To me, nothing I have done in my life has been more rewarding than teaching my daughters. I sometimes miss the discussions Maddie and I used to have about the books I assigned to her. The look on her face when she first discovered that there were layers of meaning in some stories (The Swimmer by John Cheever) will be etched in my memory forever! I will also cherish some of the interpretations of poetry that she did. I am happy that we both share a love for the poetry of Robert Frost as well as for Shakespeare's sonnets. I look forward to teaching these subjects to Ashleigh as well. When I was younger, I often wondered what the meaning of life really was. Sometimes, I still wonder. Other times, I think that the meaning of our lives can be found in the meaning that we make for ourselves. And for me, a large part of that meaning is to find how I can best help my daughters to find that meaning for themselves. I think the best way I can do that is to teach them how to think for themselves in a logical manner. I hope that the education that I have given them... am giving them goes a long way towards achieving that. Before I start, I just want to apologize for not posting much over the past week or two. I am a stock analyst and I research companies and write reports about the prospects for the equities of the companies I cover. I had thirteen stocks due on Tuesday, and they were going to press this week. Next week I will be a bit less busy, and I should be able to write blog posts regularly again. Usually, once people find out that I home school my daughters I get asked a lot of questions about how I do it. In today's post, I will try to explain the process I use to teach my girls. This post, I will focus on Ashleigh, and the early years of education. Next post I will focus on Maddie and how I interact with her to help her learn. To start, I just want to say that I only loosely follow a set curriculum. After researching a number of programs, I thought that the Robinson curriculum would work best for me. The Robinson curriculum is very heavy into math, and stresses a lot of free time for reading so that the children learn through their spare time as well. ReadingThe biggest challenge, I find, is actually teaching the children how to read. With both of my daughters, we started by using Hooked on Phonics. I like the flash cards that help to show the children which sounds come from which letters. Although Ashleigh now knows how to read, I still go back to asking her what sound a particular letter or set of letters combinations make to help her figure out what a word is when she gets stuck. The second stage I used for Ashleigh was to have her write down very simple words, repetitively. I would give her a set of about six to 12 words and have her write them down ten times each in a row. On trickier words, I would have her say them out loud as well. I had her do this every day for weeks on end. As she began to recognize words, I started having her copy short sentences too. After a few weeks I began having her try to read some of her story books to me. Since she was very young, My Mom and I have always read little stories to Ashleigh. As she progresses, we began having her read them to us! Unfortunately, many of the Disney books are not geared towards young children reading them themselves. I found that too many words were there for adults to read them to the children. I solved this problem by finding an old McGuffey Reader online. For many weeks, I had Ashleigh read passages from the reader to me. I then wrote down sentences based on the words she read in the passages and had her write them in a notebook. We have gone through a number of notebooks that way. The exercise helped to improve her reading AND writing abilities. Next, I began to have Ashleigh write a short blog post each day for this website. Her topics are simple, but it helps her to learn to write out her thoughts. Me or my Mom will usually help her with spelling for some of the larger words, and I do read it with her and help her to fix punctuation mistakes. Ashleigh has to read out loud each day and when she finishes reading a book she has to write a book report for it as well. She publishes these reports on this blog, as well as on a site set up strictly for her reports. You can find that web site here. MathematicsAnother area that is very important to my curriculum is mathematics. I started teaching Ashleigh basic math at an early age. There are two things that I do to teach math. First, I give her a page or two of hand written math problems each day. I started her with very basic adding and subtracting problems, and then moved her up to larger and larger numbers. At the same time, I started her on IXL. IXL is a computer-based math tutoring program that follows the state standards for math knowledge. If you are interested, you can find it at www.ixl.com. Ashleigh has completed the program through level C math and is currently about 50 completed segments into level D math. Each day she covers about five segments, so they add up quickly. The program is good because when she gets an answer wrong, it sets back her progress in that area and she then needs to answer more problems correctly before she is allowed to graduate out from that segment. I have found her math skills have really improved since she has started that program. Recently, I have also started to give her the times table to copy down and learn. Although I have taught her the basics of multiplication, she still views it as a derivation of addition, so her progress has been slow. We still work on it weekly and she has started to be able to answer some of the smaller multiplication problems in her head. When I was teaching Madison. we used the same programs, however we also used the Saxon math books. These helped to broaden her understanding to some degree. Once Ashleigh can read better, I will likely use the same books with her as well. Physical EducationPhysical education is one of my favorite subjects for the girls! Each of my girls started training in karate when they were three years old. Currently, Maddie is a second degree black belt and 2015 Grands sparring champion. Ashleigh is currently a purple belt with a black stripe, and will be testing for her blue belt in two weeks. Both of my girls have won invitations to the Grands tournament in November. Maddie will be competing in sparring and weapons, while Ashleigh will be competing in sparring and forms. Recently, Ashleigh was honored to have her picture featured on a flyer that was sent out to all of the students in the New Ipswich school system advertising a new after-school karate program. The picture is below. Although karate is a great physical activity, the girls gain so much more from it than they would a regular gym class. The most important thing to me is that they are learning to defend themselves. As a Dad, I worry about their safety, and I wanted to make certain that they have every chance available to them if they ever have to defend themselves.
Karate is much more than a sport. It is a life style. Our dojo has five rules: effort, etiquette, sincerity, character, and self-control. We also practice peace over power. In other words, we are trained to not use our skills to start fights, but to finish them. We are only to use our skills in self defense. I like that my daughters will be bale to train in karate throughout there lives. So many of the sports I played as a child are no longer played by me or my friends. Even so, at 50 I still train three times a week. I picked up karate late in life. I started training at the age of 42. I started to train because we reached a point in Maddie's training where I could no longer help her because I did not know the material. I started to train to help her, but ended up continuing because I enjoyed it so much as well! We like to say "A family that kicks together, sticks together!" Both of my girls love karate and it is a major part of their lives. Even so, I made a rule early on that neither of them could date until they had a black belt. Maddie got hers at ten, so the rule did not impact her dating life at all. At her current pace, it also looks like the rule won't have an impact on Ashleigh's dating life. Although the rule was made half jokingly. It makes me feel better to know that the girls are trained to take advantage of weaknesses in anatomy if the need ever arises. A second way that my girls get exercise is by having a love of the great outdoors. I try to take the girls hiking regularly, and they both seem to enjoy it. We all take pictures while we are out, and many of them end up gracing many of the blog posts on this site. Madison also has an instagram account, where she posts many of her pics. Well this post is running a little long, so I will end this post here. On my next post, I will tell you how Maddie's education differs from Ashleigh's since she is older, and I will also touch upon how I teach science and history. Here are four more pics of my girls through out their karate careers! Me and the girls went hiking yesterday. The fall is one of my favorite times of year, due to all of the beautiful colors and the cool breezes. I took a number of pictures to capture the beauty. We hiked about three miles along the Jaffrey branch of rails to trails. We cut off into the Children's Woods, and circled back onto Rails to Trails a little further up. Here are some of the photos I took yesterday. Enjoy! I hope you enjoyed that little bit of Fall color! If you have a nice Autumn scene, send in a pic and I will try to post it. I will naturally, give you credit for the photo.
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." That is a quote by Aldous Huxley. Huxley is best known as the author of "A Brave New World" and "The Doors Of Perception". The Doors Of Perception recalls his experiences when taking a psychedelic drug, and was a book that had great influence on Jim Morrison. In fact, the book had such an impact on him that he named his rock band The Doors. How's that for trivia! Although I am sure that most true Doors fans already knew that. Anyway, Huxley was considered one of the greatest intellectuals of his time and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in seven different years. While I am thinking about it, congratulations to Bob Dylan for winning the 2016 Noble Prize for literature. He won the award for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. The Swedish academy stated: “We’re really giving it to Bob Dylan as a great poet – that’s the reason we awarded him the prize. He’s a great poet in the great English tradition, stretching from Milton and Blake onwards. And he’s a very interesting traditionalist, in a highly original way. Not just the written tradition, but also the oral one; not just high literature, but also low literature.” Though Dylan is considered by many to be a musician, not a writer, Danius said the artistic reach of his lyrics and poetry could not be put in a single box. “I came to realize that we still read Homer and Sappho from ancient Greece, and they were writing 2,500 years ago,” she said. “They were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, but they have survived, and survived incredibly well, on the book page. We enjoy [their] poetry, and I think Bob Dylan deserves to be read as a poet.” I find it fitting to write about Aldous Huxley on the same day that Bob Dylan wins a Noble Prize because both men, in their own ways, called for social change. In fact, way back in 1958 Huxley gave a prescient warning about what he saw coming for the world in the future. Now, 58 years later, some of those predictions look startlingly accurate! Meanwhile, Dylan wrote songs in the sixties that called for social changes that also seem to be slowly gaining traction.
To get back to Huxley, after nearly sixty years, his words too are now history. Let's see what he was saying and if there is anything we should have learned. The quotes below come from an interview he did with Mike Wallace back in 1958. At that time Huxley stated that: 1."Technology, bureaucracy and Television will be used to enslave us." Huxley believed that: "we mustn’t be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology. This has happened again and again in history with technology’s advance and this changes social condition, and suddenly people have found themselves in a situation which they didn’t foresee and doing all sorts of things they really didn’t want to do." Specifically, on television he stated: " it is being used too much to distract everybody all the time. But, I mean, imagine which must be the situation in all communist countries where the television, where it exists, is always saying the same things the whole time; it’s always driving along. It’s not creating a wide front of distraction it’s creating a one-pointed, er…drumming in of a single idea, all the time. It’s obviously an immensely powerful instrument. ' There were a lot of other things that Huxley said too. Isaac Davis recently wrote an article about Huxley. Instead of just quoting from his article, follow this link to read it yourself Huxley It is rare that I ever just send my readers to another blog to read, but the article is well worth reading. In my opinion, Huxley was amazing. Now that you have read the article linked to above, I think you can see how self evident Huxley's quote to him. And remember, Brave New World was written in 1931. About 27 years before he gave that interview! Truly, He was a man ahead of his time. It's no wonder that his name often comes up when people speak of George Orwell, another writer of dystopian novels. He is best known for his book 1984. A Brave New World, 1984, and even Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand are all history now. Why not read them? And see if you can learn the messages these authors were trying to alert us to way back then. Today is my daughter Madison's 15th birthday. We had a laid back morning, and then she went out with one of her friends for a few hours in the afternoon. At six, we went out to Texas Roadhouse to celebrate. There were five of us tonight since Maddie's boyfriend was also invited. Instead of a long wordy post, here are some of my favorite pictures of Maddie over the years. Enjoy! Tomorrow I will be back with one of my proper rants. Maddie took this picture this morning 2015 Black belt Sparring Champ Happy birthday Munchkin! May you have many more!
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