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Personal growth: Allowing tomorrow to spoil today July 26, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in personal development ideas.
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Unless we believe in the existence of time travel, there is no way the future can physically reach us today, yet we often do allow tomorrow to be with us today on the level of thought.

Inviting tomorrow to be with us today is mostly harmless if we restrict the practice to optimistic thinking about what tomorrow will hold.

But more often than not the experience is not positive, and is instead detrimental; because instead of optimism, we often project our fears and negative thinking.

We sometimes tend to forward-think a current fear, serious problem, or significant personal challenge not only into tomorrow, but into our overall future in its totality.

We fearfully think that whatever our problem is, that it will never go away, that it will never be solved.

This harmful thinking tendency can result from focussing to the point of obsession about the existence and parameters of the problem itself instead of taking any action steps, or making even a beginning intellectual effort towards considering possible solutions to the problem.

“What’s the use?”

We all can get trapped into this loop, particularly if we are fatigued, “stressed out” or at a low energy level due to unhealthy eating habits, or insufficient sleep.

For each of us to break this habit will take a lot of internal work.

It’s an ongoing process, but starts with recognizing the logical reality that most of our problems, even the very tough ones, have some form of solution.

—  Dennis Mellersh

Personal growth literature and the timeless quality of human nature July 1, 2018

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal growth.
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Sometimes when, through a period of time, we have delved into a lot of personal development and self-actualization materials, including very old commentary, it may seem that there is really nothing new in much of it.

And the reason is likely that individuals, the people such material is written about and directed to, do not change, even over countless centuries.

As Erich Hoffer writes:

“It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations, past and present, are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams and preoccupations have remained unchanged through millennia…

“…If in some manner the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.”

It is the individual, rather than any particular society as a whole that is “nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship,” Hoffer observes. (1)

Historical examples are numerous: ancient philosophical texts, such as the writings of Roman and Greek philosophers, playwrights, and poets; centuries old religious tracts; wall paintings in the tombs of ancient Egypt.

(1) Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1973

Dennis Mellersh