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Personal growth mistake: Wanting the future to repeat the past October 24, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.
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It’s natural to want any situational enjoyment with a high positive emotional component to last a long time, ideally forever. As a result, we may develop the habit of projecting our enjoyment of the present moment into anticipated pleasure of the same moment occurring in the future.

This makes full appreciation of the present difficult because our minds are straddling two separate time frames – current real-time reality and imagined future potential.

We can only be in the future mentally, a fact which obviously takes away some of our perception of the present moment.

We are attaching to our future, which can never be more than a thought pattern,  the particular emotions of longing and anticipated nostalgia associated with the moment we are currently enjoying.

Any pleasurable experience in the present moment will be more intense and rewarding if we don’t impose on it the mental condition and constriction of future repeatability.

— Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth: Is the uneventful life a key to happiness? July 20, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development.
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In our quest for constant improvement through our personal development efforts, there may be a downside.

Could “more” actually equal “less?”

Would we be better off seeking fewer self-actualization stimuli?

The philosopher/longshoreman Eric Hoffer made the following observation in a moment of self-assessment in an entry in a diary he was keeping:

“Early this morning on my way to work I felt a burning pain in my arms. It seemed to me for a moment that had I been without this pain I would have been wholly happy. In a moment like this I realize how lucky we are when nothing at all – good or bad – happens to us.” (1)

(1) Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfro0nt

— Dennis Mellersh