I surfed the atmosphere this morning and read many of your posts about the inaugural (didn't always comment, sorry about that, but I was there!).
I guess as a therapist I'm thinking that anything that gives us hope is a good thing. And the President of the United States has so much power, so much power, despite our checks and balances, that having a new one in the White House, one who inspires hope and optimism, not fear, feels very good.
Emotions, you see, generalize. We do get some of our emotional stim, if not a lot of it from the social-political reality show of life.
The Story:
The kids came over for dinner because a huge cabbage in the refrigerator in the basement said to me, Either you fry me up or I am going to change from green to black, the change is beginning, as you can see, and you know, although black is beautiful, it is not going to be pretty.
I had some egg roll skins in the freezer and a little wild rice, and there is always food stuff somewhere to fry up in the wok.
So we were talking and Cham said, "It was overwhelming, yesterday. It was a good, good day."
It is time to interject here to tell you that I have people, people who worked incessantly for President Obama. I mean, people who lived to see him get elected, who worked for him, prayed for him, all but worshiped him, while I patiently listened and weighed the virtues of each candidate and what he or she had to say. Not that they didn't, but they made up their minds for change, not the stuff we give the guy who sits with a cup outside of Blockbuster, either.
And it's not easy being around enthusiastic, strong-willed people with strong opinions and obviously, ownership of the truth, the real dope of life, what's really going on.
It's hard, when you have a strong opinion (and I have many, so I know) not to think that your particular truth isn't the only truth. How could anyone else have a truth that is true, too, if mine is obviously true?
Truth is, there are many truths. Therapists will go so far as to say that a person's reality is that person's reality, end of story. Post-modern interpretation of seeing validates everyone's reality. And seeing reality, I'm pretty sure, is the way we see truth. The two become interchangeable. We believe what we see.
Being a post-modernist, accepting that there are multiple realities and that they are all true, if only to the people who have them, will gracefully get us through not only political and religious differences, but most of relationship conflict in life.
At dinner I remarked about the fact that so many people blogged about the Obama inaugural. My son said that it only makes sense. A blog is a diary for most people, for most young people, at least, and they want to look back at it in the future and say,
This is where I was at mentally/emotionally/physically at such and such a time in my life.As obvious as it is, as true as this is for so many people who journal with a blog, those of us who are a little older can't even wrap our minds around the idea that what we write on the Web is actually permanent.
We click "publish" and the post disappears! It's out there!
If you're neurotic like me, you think, Maybe one day the Internet will go down and we'll never even see it again!
I guess that says something about me, but nothing we don't already know.
I have to stop right now. Yesterday I promised myself I'd get some work done, quit blogging for the week. It's okay not to look back and remember most of it.
therapydoc
