Permanent head damage inevitably leads to the PhD‘s favorite pastime activity: Procrastination. If you take a closer look you may wonder whether “pastime” really belongs in that sentence. Not necessarily.
Sometimes it does take quite some effort to bring yourself back to focus. Sometimes you’ll be desperate for coming up with important stuff such as doing your laundry or washing the dishes, all for the purpose of delaying anything that has the slightest bit to do with your project. You may feel like a cat that apprehends water anxiously, with a fierce look in its eyes and its fur and tail erect.
How do you persuade yourself to get back to business?
Take an essential break. Do something for your body. Call your mother. Procrastination is essential to getting back to normal, to reverse the supposed permanent head damage. Get back to a state of mediocrity for once.
But bear in mind your deadlines! It doesn’t seem to be the smartest thing to do to wasting the evening away with everyday profanities when you know that the next morning you need to be sophisticated again. This does not mean that I don’t appreciate improvisation. In fact I’m a big fan of it. Instead, even improvisation must be grounded upon something more than merely speaking your mind. If you want to improvise, you must mentally prepare yourself for doing that. You must set the stage for the act of acting, actually. Don’t merely rely on your rhetorical skills in charming the pants off your audience. Charisma is indispensable, but it won’t necessarily do the job, particularly when you’re faced with an audience that you cannot really predict. Particularly when it’s an audience that doesn’t consist of males only.
So there’s nothing left to do but to put yourself in the adequate state of mind for both delivering sophisticated results and improvising where necessary.
Now I need to come up with some more essential household choires.
I am gonna refer to my favorite crazy guy from ancient Greece: Epicurus.
AntwortenLöschenIn a nutshell, his main interest was in ethical philosophy and according to his theory the main goal of philosophy should be to provide people with a practical tool that they could use in order to make their lives better. The purpose of human life should be the pursuit of happiness. Happiness according to Epicurus is a mind free from disturbance and a body free from pain: The sate of ‘’eudaemonia’’. I find that message to be very topical today as there is a great deal of research going on in order to unveil physical phenomena and human cognitive mechanisms, but I am not very confident that researchers always keep in mind that the final goal is holistic and not pursuing knowledge for its own sake.
Why I am saying that? Because the mainstream, dominant dualistic approach we have been forced to follow distinguishes body from mind like work from leisure, sex from love, being silly and being intelligent etc...but the point is to pursue happiness all the time irrespectively what we are doing, where, why and with whom...
Regarding improvisation, what's the point of preparing something that is meant to be spontaneous by nature? But didn't quite get your point after that...It seems that you referring to someone, somewhere, somehow in particular...or maybe not. Can't tell for sure. Anyway, improvising where necessary to me its self-contradictory and seems like a plan mainly coming out from cognitive sophisticated results. Don't think that both have the same mind departures and any effort to merge these two in one results to constantly overloading specific parts of our mind while leaving some others idle and this might create a permanent damage to both...
Have to do my laundry tho...thanks for reminding me
AntwortenLöschenTo go with your philosophy I must add my favorite quote: Mens sana in corpore sano. I’m just wondering why it took so much time for us to get back to this really ancient idea. As another friend said, we keep working on our brains, but what about the body? And what about the heart? Guess those latter two have great potential to be neglected these days.
AntwortenLöschenThe eventual goal must be holism. Psychologists are getting there, incorporating cognitive aspects with the initially cherished behavioral ones. We must realize that one can’t possibly go without the other, unless we’re keen on making enormous sacrifices to the detriment of our overall health and well-being.
I will tell you why dualism appears worthy to be pursued: That’s the easy way out. Why bother with wanting it all at the same time which is inevitably tied to conflict, when it is so simply to just excel in one?
Likewise, improvisation, in some regards, may again be the easy way out of a situation in which you see yourself confronted with lack of the requested knowledge even though cognitive efforts may have brought you in that position in the first place. Ergo improvisation and necessity are not contradictory, but complementary.
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AntwortenLöschenDelete it by mistake...I mixed the things up with so many guidelines in German.:)
AntwortenLöschenAnyway since I am not preparing anything when I am writing comments here I lost my text and I tried to put some of its meanings by writimg a lengthy comment (sorry!) on your new post...