Amanda Slavin: Settling vs. Settling Down. I was a very restless little girl.
When I was in kindergarten my mom told me she walked past my classroom, expecting me to be sitting silently and perfectly, listening to the teacher, and on the contrary she witnessed her little daughter moving around anxiously, not able to sit still for one second. I was tested for ADD three times, always with the same negative results. My parents couldn't figure out where all this excess energy was coming from.
I was told my entire life from kindergarten to 10th grade "I had so much potential, but I talked too much in class. " In reality, I was bored. When I was a teacher there was a little girl in my class who was the exact same way. As I got older, my energy levels never faltered. I just recently read this awesome article about moving around without losing your roots, and it hit "home" for me. Hard as it may be to reconcile local and global homes, it is a privilege to have a chance to inhabit both. For me, this means never settling. Moving Around Without Losing Your Roots - Gianpiero Petriglieri.
Big questions always strike unexpectedly, when our guard is down.
I was watching my toddlers splash in the pool last summer when a fellow dad plunged me into revisiting the meaning of home in a globalized world. He didn’t mean to. He just asked where we were from. “We live in Boston,” I started, “but we’re from Europe. How about you?” I learned the name of his hometown, where he owned a business, and prepared myself to tack towards our common ground next — the children’s age, the local weather, the economic climate.
“Where from in Europe?” Fair enough, it’s a diverse continent. “I am from Italy, my wife is British, and we live in France. “Did you meet her in France?” I felt the impulse to lie and get it over with. “We met in Switzerland when I worked there.” I didn’t just hail from a different place. Those conversations always make me pause. For many years now, I have spent my days in circles where careers and families like mine are the norm. I think of them as a peculiar tribe. Seek Self-Conquest First. Do you seek power?
Do you wish to conquer your world? Is the whole world your adversary? Do you seek the power of wealth and control over others? Does the world seem full of unsympathetic, unjust people, always criticizing you, attacking you? Are your anxieties and worries of the past or of the future? Once upon a time an ancient king had a hall of mirrors built in his palace to entertain his guests. What would have been the best way for the king’s dog to make those thousand other dogs cease barking at him?
To find peace and true power in your life, sit back a moment ad be still. Once a great woman saint was passing through a forest infested with robbers. There is a power which is not the power of wealth and riches nor ego. Once upon a time an emperor posed this question to his advisors: “Here, I have drawn a line on this board. If you always seek to shorten the lines drawn by others, you will not win your battles. If you seek conquest, seek first the power of self conquest.
Abraham Maslow and the All-American Self. Algis Valiunas The most important American psychologist since William James, and perhaps the most important psychologist altogether since Carl Jung, was Abraham Maslow (1908-1970).
Maslow’s brainchild was the ideal of the “self-actualizing” person, the supreme human type who becomes everything he is capable of becoming. “Everything? ,” one may justly ask. That has a Nietzschean ring to it, and leaves a lot of room for moral ugliness and even enormity. Abraham Harold Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, in New York City, the first child of Samuel, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a cooper, and Rose, his first cousin. Maslow attended Boys High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where, as the novelist Irwin Shaw declared, you could learn everything you needed to know to get out of Brooklyn. Maslow managed to transfer to Cornell, getting a nearly free state-sponsored ride by applying to the College of Agriculture, with a plan to pick up liberal arts courses on the side. The Greatness Within.