About . . .
Your Cheerleader !
Origin Story:
Decades ago I read a Kurt Vonnegut story about a man captured on Mars. His overlords succeeded in brainwashing every human except him. Just when they thought they had him, he would remember his predicament and start planning his escape.
His secret was to write his truths in a letter to himself, well hidden. After each brainwashing, he would come upon the letter and rediscover the truth of his captivity, forever making him free in mind.
We are not unlike our hero above. During the course of everyday survival, we get “brainwashed” and forget what is important and how best to manage ourselves, our lives. Yet there are times when all is clear to us, when life seems to make sense, when the important things are easy to understand and prioritize. If only we could draw upon this clarity in times of confusion and turmoil.
We can. We too can write things down, capture them for later recovery and reuse, if we create a simple structure and format that is easily retrievable. This is Better Is Good, originally called the Bummer Manual, filled with my own truths for starters, open for each to embellish and customize, to craft into something meaningful that works: information storage and retrieval, made personal. The right perspective at the right time.
When you come upon the “ah ha’s” of life, when you smile in understanding or shine in love of or someone, capture it in a retrievable format. Keep it close at hand. Use it whenever you are feeling lost, lonely, unloved, adrift. Like a photo that recalls a tender moment or scene of beauty, a few words that rekindle the clarity, a clue that helps solve the puzzle – or at least the one just in front of us. Such a journal will bring you back to your true self, which is a pretty good place to be.
Perspectives
There is one more explanation I must offer. Herein lie Perspectives – mine at first, yours as you capture and create them. They are not intended to be the highest forms of clarity nor absolute assurances of a return to bliss. Instead, they represent a direction, each a slight course correction, each a single step on a path. That’s all they need to be: incremental improvements bringing you back to a healthier outlook, one notch up on a ladder to somewhere better. If each step gets you to a better place, pretty soon you’ll find yourself in back in the amazing wonderland of life on earth.
Perspectives toward a better time: an incremental improvement in direction has taken ships around the world and back again. Such navigation can bring you back from bummer times and can help you find what you seek – one step leading to that journey of a thousand miles, one small smile growing into uncontained laughter. Better is indeed good.This journey is meant to be enjoyed. I invite you to do so often and fully. Grab the stick; you’re in control. After all, it’s your life!
About the originator:
As do you, I sometimes think of great things to write — perspectives that clarify or amuse. I enjoy them, but only for a moment. Soon they are gone — lost from short-term memory.
If we only could gather these things up, give them form and design an access. Something to supplement the limitations of our memory, to allow us to store-and -retrieve them. Memory when we really need it. Not in RAM, not in ROM; not magnetic, not optical. Two dimensional, infinite battery life: text on paper.
I’ve been writing my whole life — mostly for myself, but sometimes to publish and share. Back in the Seventies in the Haight-Ashbury, I was walking back from a self-publishing seminar one night. I paused near the UC Med Center, looking north over Golden Gate Park, and came up with an idea: The Bummer Manual.
I would muster all the philosophical tricks I could to pull myself out of bad times, all in one place, to use and to share. After 35 years of adding, forgetting and remembering again, of false starts and assisting technologies that have become obsolete, I am resolved to bring this idea to fruition, into the light of day, to serve in the dark of night.
So this is my attempt to gather all the wisdom from dozens of journals, from hundreds of scraps of paper, from a myriad of half-remembered thoughts, from a life pretty full but not yet complete. It is my attempt to make them Accessible; for they can only be useful if we can find them.
Me? Minnesota raised, Stanford and Berkeley educated; watched three daughters grow into wonderful young women, bringing grandchildren into our world.
But that doesn’t matter. You are the one to use these tips and tricks in your life. You are the center of any value they may have. You’ll see me in the words in Better Is Good.
Maybe you’ll add your words as well. Then this expression will successfully be
About … you.
