On the day we landed in Bangkok, Thailand we stood in front of the airplane as it coasted in over the horizon, in a loop flying east to west. Across the border to Laos sat the beautiful — if madly insistent — Let it go, printed slogans. Near our destination, the message on the street was “See your past self in tomorrow.” Yes, I’m digressing a bit, but in this day and age if things are going the wrong way, we’re stuck between two possible courses of action: tear down or rebuild. There are no other choices. The key question in these problems is, how do we get through the pain and find our way back to happiness?
As Dr. Mark Sutian and Dr. Vandana Bhargava (both Harvard-trained psychologists) put it recently in an interview, many families who are struggling with multiple diagnoses like cancer, diabetes, sleep apnea and beyond bounce around in a stupor. The questions are, what to do and how to do it. To make it to the end of the journey we have to redefine our potential — we have to escape the prison of being paralyzed. This is where creative activity can come in handy. A competitive person with a healthy sense of adventure will have gotten to where they are today by “practicing creative activities.” It will be part of our normal routine every morning to write down 5 things we were trying to solve that day.
Let’s take a not-so-simple model like this and work it up into an active repertoire of activities that enable one to improve. Below are four essential elements. Let’s call them P+B+C — Productive Activities:
Productive Activities are situations that engage the whole focus of the person. Sure, they might be small craft and hobby sites or volunteering with the water department — but whatever your creative activity might be, it needs to have relevance and not be a sideline.
It should also challenge the mind. Psychology has helped us to figure out (with the aid of brain research) the 11 functions of the mind. There are four main functions: the Positive and negative emotions system, the Panoptonic memory system, the space system and the bus-centered neural system. In summary, our imagination needs to help restructure the brain to be optimally active. Productive activities should intentionally shape our perceptual experience so that we are coherent with all 11 functions.
Let’s leave aside perception, emotion and memory and recognized the role that bus-centered activity can play. Bus-centered activity involves one’s sense of place in time and space. If it’s not physical we need to think consciously about other activities, and by thinking more intently there will be only one more platform on which all activities can work. Food and shelter are essential elements in this definition.
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