on my mind

I’ve taken quite a long hiatus lately. It wasn’t intentional, trust me. At first, I couldn’t write because of writer’s block. I powered through, wrote it out, and was over it about a week ago. I was anxious to get back on the horse so to speak, but Magpie has had different ideas about what I do with my time.

So what’s been on my mind? A few things: habitual negative thinking, the evil of plastics, and nature-based learning. Let’s see how far we get.

First up: nature-based learning. I’ve decided to use the Enki curriculum for Sassy next year. I’ve been focused on finding a curriculum to use next year and ultimately decided this one was a strong contender for a good fit. I wanted something that would keep me focused and energized. Something that would allow us both creativity – me as her teacher and her as the student. Something that would teach the teacher new skills, especially more traditional skills. And finally, something that would focus on learning through experience and projects.

Although I can’t say Enki is or isn’t any of this, since I have no first-hand experience, my good friend C does. I trust her judgment implicitly, so I’ve decided if it’s right for her family there’s a very good chance it’s right for ours. Done.

Next: the evil of plastics. This is a baby topic in my head right now, just taking form, but I’m connecting little dots here and there and wondering if the USA – make that the world, the entire world – wouldn’t have taken a completely different direction had plastics never been invented & introduced into our available goods.

Think about it. What if everything we purchased were still made of wood, metal, or some sort of cloth (including leather). How would our lives be different?

Sweatshops in China? Probably gone. Wal-Mart? Definitely gone. Family businesses could stay alive. Woodsmiths, metal workers, seamstresses, all still in business. Landfills would be tiny compared to what they are now. Packaged foods? Difficult to achieve, and more expensive due to their packaging.

Would our woods all be stripped, our mines tapped out, our farmland filled with genetically modified cotton? Or would we have purchased things that were made to last and not purchased again for a long time, never getting a taste for the world of disposables. I suspect the latter.

You would pay $300 for a sewing machine, but then you’d expect to have that machine for the rest of your life.

Can you imagine this world? William Dufty in his book Sugar Blues claimed that the devil couldn’t have created a better food than sugar to cause the nutritional downfall of an entire society. I don’t think the devil could have created a better product than plastic to create a greedy, centralized consumerist culture.

I’ve been dwelling on the old adage “penny-wise, pound-foolish” lately. Jeff and I went through a long period where we made many “pound-foolish” decisions. Lately, I’ve been closely examining those purchasing habits. I’m looking beyond cost to lasting value, not because we can suddenly afford much better, but because the whole plastic-dependent consumer machine pisses me off. Don’t you dare sell me a $100 espresso machine that has a cheap plastic wand so it will break as soon as my 30-day return period is up.

I now have another reason to add to the growing list against using plastic. It’s a rip-off, plain and simple, and it is a major contributor to the destruction of lives, traditional skills, small businesses, and the environment.

So if you have alternatives to common plastic items like Ziploc-type freezer bags, portable storage containers, etc, please let me know.

And finally we’re down to the psychological arena: the habit of negative thinking. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my pattern of thinking negatively. I’m talking about self-doubt, insecurity, anger, resentment, self-pity, jealousy, envy, irritation, frustration – basically all of them except for true grief. True grief isn’t in the realm of habit. True grief is necessary and allowed and circumstantial.

I’ve been thinking about negative thinking because I just went through a nice little period of slight depression. It’s unusual for me to experience depression, so it made me examine what my brain was doing. I realized my brain was being negative with nearly every thought that popped up and I wondered if I could think of a time in my life when I wasn’t in a pattern of thinking negatively. I couldn’t. I wondered it it might not just be a bad habit, like smoking, or sugar, or caffeine. I wondered if I could more or less re-program my brain to make the first thought positive rather than negative. Turn a natural distrust and cynicism into a natural trust and optimism.

So I’ve been practicing. I’ve told Sassy what I’m trying to do, in a way. For example, I went outside the other day, frustrated, hurried, and found that Jeff had put shoes where I didn’t want shoes.

“Why does Daddy have to do this all the time? I’ve told him!” I started. Then I stopped. “Wait, I want to try again.”

“Daddy is good to us to try to get so much done this morning before work. It’s a shame he forgot his shoes. Let’s put them away for him. It’s hard to break a habit of putting things somewhere after you get used to that spot.”

Well her little face lit right up. “Yeah!” she said. “It is hard. Let’s help Daddy!”

My internal dialogue says, “I am so irritated I’m getting no time of my own to write.”

I change it to, “I’m so happy I have this baby to rock and nurse and cuddle.”

My inner dialogue says, “I hate living in a mobile home that seems to fall apart around me.”

I change it to, “I love not having a big mortgage payment and a little financial wiggle room right now.”

My inner dialogue says, “I wish Jeff would find a better hobby and interest than automobiles.”

I change it to, “Jeff has learned a lot about cars now. It’s good he has such an interest in it because it motivated him to teach himself and save us a lot of money on car repairs.”

I could go on and on and on. My inner dialogue spits these things out all day long so I’m changing it around all day too. I’m shooting for 31 days. If I do it for 31 days, will it be more automatic? Will my inner dialogue internalize the change?

Along with blatantly changing a negative into a positive, I’m also trying to do what I’m calling “assume positive intent.” Sometimes (not always), I assume negative intent with other people when none was intended on their end. I’m not sure why I do this, and it doesn’t particularly matter to me either. I’m sure it’s an evil stepmother, mom dying kind of childhood bullshit that makes me this way, but in the end, knowing why you do something never actually fixes the problem. I think that focusing on why someone ended up the way they did was one of the worst turns the field of psychological therapy ever made. (Cyndi, I’m expecting a comment now.)

So I’ve decided to practice assuming positive intent until proven otherwise. Jeff has been the nearly constant recipient of assumed negative intent, although he probably never knew it. Isn’t that terrible? For a long time, I don’t think I even knew it.

Now I do, I’ve recognized it, and I’m going to work on changing it. I wonder how my marriage will be different after 31 days of assuming positive intent and creating positive thoughts. I’m excited to find out.