Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Wisdom-ing
Just Do It–A Misleading Cliche
The saying, “just do it,” is an oversimplification and deserves to be critiqued, semantically unpacked, examined more closely, which is what this blog piece aims to do. (Please forgive my pedantry. One of my goals is to promote imagination, spontaneity, play. Another goal is to promote critical thinking, reflection. It might seem that these two […]
Just Thinkin’
There is a hidden assumption that everything can be presented in terms known to all. This is as fallacious as saying that all higher mathematics can be symbolized by simple arithmetic and no other symbols are needed. It’s a matter of trying not to be all “stuck up”—we learned to try to not be this […]
Keep Believing, Keep Pretending
There is a little verse is at the end of the 1980s Muppet Movie in which the melody of the Rainbow Connection is once again sung as a reprise: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. We’ve done just what we set out to do, Just like the lovers, the […]
Last Day of Life
I’ll go with dignity, I expect. But I giggle when I think of my Shadow complex, as illustrated by the Charles Schutz’ character of Lucy in the 1973 Peanuts cartoon: Another variation of Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night ?
Later-in-Life Learning
There’s a lot about early and even mid-childhood development and the many things that go on during these phases. But I’ve been impressed recently, on reflection, how much still there are lessons to learn, new integrations, continued healing of past stresses, traumas, neuroses, and relationships. We realized also that this continued learning is part of […]
Let Flow
Instead of Let Go, this inner rule is still not absolute. Let flow 89% plus or minus. There’s still a need to exercise discrimination, judgment, responsibility. Maybe that rises from 11% to 32.5%, because becoming to slack, secretly or unconsciously hoping God or the Angels or Providence will do it for you is folly. They […]
Let it Go (On Not Over-Packing One’s Life)
I’ve been contemplating a bit of obsolete mental programming I picked up in my youth: The cultural injunction to be well-read, well-informed, scholarly, well-traveled, active, etc. (At least this was so for the sub-culture in which I grew up in the mid-20th century.) I should keep up on the news, know what’s up so that […]
Levels of Mind
I don’t know how to prove this, but mind that thinks about awareness represents a dimension of mind as different from bare awareness as is the third dimension different from the second dimension. Yet there’s a further step in dimensionality: If mind—awareness—is another dimension, then thinking about thinking is what humans do. So if space […]
Life Enlargement
Indeed, I’ve changed my vocational direction to the title of this piece! Back when I was into psychiatry, Freudian—really, post-Freudian— psychoanalysis still was dominant, and though I differed with many of the ideas, some I agreed with. Last year I taught what has become more standard and evidence-based, and after thinking about it, though I […]
Life Enrichment
There’s a new field emerging: Life Enrichment. It’s for just what it says. It emerges from improvisational theatre and psychodrama, and has roots in the way we played with imagined scenarios as kids—cops and robbers, house, hospital, whatever. Our great grandchildren may say about our generation, "Can you believe they were mostly just one person? […]
Life Improv(-isation)
There is improv (short for mainly dramatiic improvisation) for psychotherapy, also known as psychodrama, pioneered by Jacob Moreno. This has been given new life by professionals who have also done improv for therapy. There’s also comedy improv, done by people associated mainly with the theatre arts—though some few have glimpsed at improv as a way […]
Little Paradigm Shifts
I was thinking about mailing boxes of books and realized that scanning books on has become almost cheaper than mailing overseas. This floored me, as I realized that electronic copy technology has overtaken mail. Shipping costs make it relevant to compare what it might cost to ship versus scanning-on and emailing the copies. It occurred […]
Living Creatively
One of my life missions is the introduction of methods that people can use to live more creatively. The methods are adaptations of psychodrama or a type of improvised dramatic enactment. I’ve written about this in other contexts, such as a chapter in Jacob Gershoni’s edited book, Psychodrama in the 21st Century. An imaginative application […]
Lollygagging
What a wonderful word. To amble and even ramble in a lackadaisical way. As in “Don’t lollygag, now.” But indeed, my age, the 70s, is a luxurious time to lollygag. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle were a popular singing duo in the later 60s and early 70s, and in 1967 they recorded a song titled […]
Losing It a Little
I’m still pretty sharp and productive, but my kids notice that sometimes I repeat myself. But I have been consciously making choices about not paying as much attention to conversations. When I start to lose interest I allow myself to drift into my own thoughts. (I learned this morning that Winston Churchill did the same!) […]
Make a Splash!
This cartoonist Wiley Miller sometimes expresses wonderful truths. I particularly liked this one. It was a fair description of my life other than a moderate mis-caricatur-ization of my adolescence. Mine was less goth on the surface, more dorky. And the last phase may be age-ist, the cliche of the cane and all. But the joy […]
Making Meaning
I’ve participated in the Network for Personal Meaning, and a recent email from Dr. Wong, who heads up that group reminded me of some thoughts I’ve had about this topic. Personal meaning emerges largely as a feeling, like feeling secure in one’s home. It can also be stifled by a childhood of great insecurity. But […]
Making Meta-Cognition Explicit
One of the trends in the last century—still not apparent to most people, though—is the increasing interest in how we think. It’s an extension of the interest not in the content but the spirit of psychoanalysis. In other words, let’s wonder about the possibility that what is true in astronomy and microbiology is also true […]
Mature Love
I’m having a love affair with my own wife! Yay! It’s a mature kind of love, not young love— that’s why I bother writing about it. Nothing need be in secrecy. Mature adults can be deeply, sweetly in love.. I get a kick out of her. I get a kick out of thinking of nice […]
Maturity Becoming Obsolete
The very idea of “maturity” as having “grown up enough” is passing. We live in an era of exponential development where, by the time someone has grows up, the world has changed. The maturity involved in being fully “mature” keeps receding, like the horizon. “Maturity” has advanced beyond us, and even the best of us […]
May I Dance With Your Eyes?
This is a trans-dimensional perspective on things. I dare to play, because pure reason backed by evidence is the basis for responsible discourse only at the 6th and lower 7th dimensions. At the upper 7th dimension and certainly above, categories of reason don’t apply. Much is indeed paradoxical. Let me explain: Most humans experience a […]
Mean Play versus Nice Play
A recent item has been circulating as a piece of internet humor, in which a bored husband plays a whole bunch of practical jokes in a store that’s part of a major retail chain. On one hand, I enjoyed it and laughed… but on the other hand, what is described is is an example of […]
Meaning of Life (Provisional)
An acquaintance heard that I was interested in philosophy and jokingly asked me, “What is the meaning of life?” I didn’t have a ready answer then, but the next morning, in reverie, I found myself thinking, “You know the answer.” Surprised—because I didn’t know that I knew—, I asked this inner voice, “Oh? What is […]
Meaning-Making
We all make meaning as instinctively and intuitively and largely unconsciously, just as we generate the illusion of a self and other illusions, such as reality being out there (objective) rather than in-here (subjective). The unconscious mind is unbelievably fast and powerful—this Freud got right, Groddek even more so, and contemporary psychologists, while disagreeing with […]
Meta-Existence
In a recent Discover magazine there’s a small article and visualization titled “When Black Holes Collide, which illustrates in 3 dimensions (plus color—which adds another type of dimension) “how black holes stretch and bend the fabric of space-time.” Now this concept of stretching or bending space-time is inconceivable—Dr. (Kip) Thorne says that “The human mind […]