psychology dector

Here comes summer with all its warm nights and whispers, the glow of televisions in windows up and down the block.  The heat never fully leaves, but the dawn brings some cool relief, damp and full of promise.  These are the nights I stay up late, reading, thinking, considering the stars. The struggle comes with the switch to summer living.  I am not good with down time.  I crave the pressure, the busyness of a full daily schedule.  Then summer hits, and suddenly things slow a bit, switch tempo, start a new song.  And I am left out of the dance. I have projects waiting, writing to be done, but somehow, I wander through the days.  Evening comes and I wonder where the time went.  Meanwhile, others around me are busy.  Not everyone’s life slows down with summer. One of the hardest things for us to do is live in the moment.  The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us:  “One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays.  T...

There is no doubt that in its time, Jessica Mitford’s   The American Way of Death Revisited (Vintage Books, 2000)  changed how the funeral industry does business in this country much the same way that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (See Sharp Press, 2003) changed the meat-packing industry in Chicago.  Mitford, with diligence, grace, and humor, opened America ’s eyes.  The irony is that the book was almost dead before it saw the light of publication.  Houghton Mifflin, as Mitford recounts in the Introduction, thought the book too graphic, especially the details of the embalming process which happen to be the most interesting pages.  Luckily, Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster stepped in to publish the original edition back in 1963. The book spawned legislation to regulate the funeral industry, and put undertakers, mortuary workers, funeral directors, or whatever name they go by these days, on notice.  These groups responded with negative ad campaign...

We cling to what we know.  We grab the knife by the blade end and grip it so tight even as we feel the cut deep into the thick flesh of our palm.  In the face of pain, we can’t let go.  Through the blood and suffering, we hang on with the desperation of a drowning man.  In the scope of years or the collision of circumstances, some of us learn an important lesson.  The daily scrapes and bruises finally register.  What should we do?  We must let go.  In life, as soon as we latch on to something, it is a safe bet that the ground beneath our feet will shift.  The only constant is that nothing is constant.  Everything must change or die. This is the message of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, Anger:  Wisdom for Cooling the Flames .   Indeed, it is a consistent theme in every treatise of eastern philosophy or Zen Buddhism.  When anger rises, according to Hanh, we must concentrate on breathing or walking, and simply recognize the feeling...