A circulated email leads to thoughts in our time

A teacher asked her young pupils how they spent their vacation. One child wrote the following:
"We always used to spend the holidays with Grandma and Grandpa. They used to live here in a big brick house, but Grandpa got retarded and they moved to Florida and now they live in a place with a lot of other retarded people.
"They live in a tin box and have rocks painted green to look like grass. They ride around on big tricycles and wear nametags because they don't know who they are anymore. They go to a building called a wrecked centre, but they must have got it fixed, because it is all right now.
They play games and do exercises there, but they don't do them very well. There is a swimming pool, too, but they all jump up and down in it with their hats on. I guess they don't know how to swim.
At their gate, there is a dollhouse with a little old man sitting in it. He watches all day so nobody can escape. Sometimes they sneak out. Then they go cruising in their golf carts.
My Grandma used to bake cookies and stuff, but I guess she forgot how. Nobody there cooks, they just eat out. And they eat the same thing every night: Early Birds. Some of the people can't get past the man in the dollhouse to go out. So the ones who do get out bring food back to the wrecked centre and call it potluck.
My Grandma says Grandpa worked all his life to earn his retardment and says I should work hard so I can be retarded some day, too. When I earn my retardment I want to be the man in the doll house. Then I will let people out so they can visit their grandchildren."

How many of you had the opportunity to watch the programme, The Young Ones, where they placed a group of one time famous celebrities in a house where everything was 1975 and they watched as they re-gained not only independence but also some agility?
By the time we reach our early puberty we have already worked out exactly how we should behave at different times of our lives. Scary isn't it. By the time we are 13 or 14 years of age, we have already experienced what is expected of us. And how do we experience that? Well by the people around us. We have seen our grandparents, we have seen our uncles and aunts, we have seen our parents and the work that they do, and we know, what they do, is what we will do as well.
So that little girl who wrote about her grandparents was already making images and expectations ready for her old age, and this was becoming a marker for her to attain (or fight against) when she reached the appropriate age. So what was she looking at as the expectation of her old age? Did she see balloon rides, sub aqua swimming, travelling abroad, living life to the full, or did she see lack of stimulation, rapid degeneration, stagnation of the mind?
In the programme, the Young ones, we watched as a group of people who were buying now in their mid-70s or even 80s, experienced life together in a world they knew so well. They were surrounded by all of the trappings of that time, and slowly but surely their minds developed that way of thinking again. By giving them challenges they soon discover that the expectations they had laid down when they were children weren't necessarily for them. If you think about it, they were laying down these images of expectations of old age during the Second World War. This was a time when 1930 values were still operating, even though the war effort meant a degree of emancipation for women whilst the men were at war fighting. So, what did 1930s values say about old age and when did it begin? For women did it mean at 60 you stop doing anything except basic housework? Did it mean for men, but at 65 they were on the shelf and of no use?
The early baby-boomers are now reaching retirement, and having kicked the system all the way through it will be interesting to see how they respond to this idea of retirement. Will they be interested in climbing into old age people's homes in the same way that their parents generation did? Already we see large estates of semi-sheltered housing for the over 50s and these are being snapped up by people who really do want to step out of the world as it is today. Talking with some of them it is clear they wish to be with people of their own they age, and one question I ask is, why is that? Is it because they have the same background and therefore a similar understanding of the world, or is it that they just do not understand the youth of today and their world? I suspect it's a combination of both with a heavy leaning towards being amongst people with similar memories, such as shared pop festivals, world events, and fashion styles.So perception is laid down very early in life. Does that mean we cannot change it? The answer that is no. We can change our perception whenever we choose to, the only thing that maintains our perception is habit. We have become habitual lies into one way of seeing and hearing the world, and we have become 'typecast' in the way we express ourselves.
I will give you an example. When I was at school most of the teachers were bilingual and as a consequence when they got angry with you they would resort to German. If you wish to remain on the right side of your teachers it was a very good idea to become bilingual yourself, and by the time I reached the second year of senior school I would imagine that my German was almost as good as my spoken English. I remember my mother commenting that one day she came into school and for parts of the conversation she had with the headmaster and myself we all spoke in English, but when the headmaster and I spoke to one another we resorted to German. I didn't even realise. But one thing I did note and that was when I spoke German I perceive the world differently, and that was because of the way the language constructs itself. Joe is a very precise language and doesn't have words for things in the same way English does. If it wishes to name something it will do so by describing its parts so therefore it is a very descriptive language; when English wants to name something new it comes up with a new word, for example mobile, laptop, etc. We know that if we use the word hoover, we are talking about a vacuum cleaner. But the word hoover doesn't describe it in any way at all because it is the name of the manufacturer. We tend to call an MP3 player and iPod again this is the manufacturer's name and doesn't describe the item, but we know exactly what it's talking about. We say iPod, and we have a perspective on that.
These may seem trivial and small but when added together they become a very large whole. If you start putting together the words blue, grey, set, shampoo, little, old, Cardigan, slippers, hot cups of tea, the words start to produce an image perspective inside us. To me these words conjure up a little old lady with blue rinse hair, shuffling about in her slippers, wearing a tatty old cardigan. I carry this perspective of old age, and fight it with every fibre of my being. Fortunately I know it's there, and I know where it's come from, and I also have the skills to avoid it, because as far as I'm concerned there is no such thing as old age, there is just as state of getting older. And there's another difference, if you keep the verb, getting, still in its active state, you allow yourself the privilege of remaining active yourself. If you replace that by a statement, old age, then you create a static image which you can at some stage step into. This is what the little girl had done. Instead of allowing herself to grow old, and enjoy every step of the way, she had created a situation of presuming there was as point at which you would step through a door and move into what was called, Old Age.
If we can create a perception as powerful as that, where else have we created perceptions I wonder? One friend of mine is only too willing to share with other women is the perception that marriage is a wonderful state in which everything is wonderful. She laughs when she says,' it in the vows if you read it carefully enough, you know, the for better or for worse bit, kind of gives the game away.' And yet how many women plan and spend a fortune on their wedding day not thinking about the days will come, and when some of those days aren't so much the fairy tale of the wedding day, it doesn't match their perspective of what wedded bliss should be and they bail out with a quickie divorce.
If you look at the definition of the word perception you are told it is the process of gaining awareness or understanding of the sensory world, and when you look at the words associated with perception you find constraints, communication, control, instruction, meaning, mental stimulus, representation. What happens if your representation is flat, it had no perspective, what I mean by that is you have placed no three dimensions on it? This is what often happens when we make statements like, old age, getting married, in a relationship, having a baby. Each one will carry an image and that image will have a few senses attached to it, but will not indicate its relationship in time. As we have already seen, getting married, very rarely goes beyond the day itself and perhaps the honeymoon. This is where the image stops and when reality kicks in, it often doesn't live up to the image held within their perspective. My friend turned round and said when you say the word, having a baby, you are invariably not looking beyond pregnancy, and it isn't until you reach six or seven months you realise that that lump can come out! Then you start thinking about the birth itself, and all that's going to entail, but you still don't think about the 20 odd years you have a child to bring up. That as she said is not part of the perspective.
If you want to think about your own perspectives, then stopped for a while and think about what it is you are wanting to achieve over the next 10 years. Write them down as the list and then have a look at them and see if you can pickup any statements where the verb has ING on the end. If it does then chances are use have a degree of three-dimensional perspective in that particular area. If it doesn't then there isn't any three-dimensional perspective, you have created a two-dimensional image with no substance, and as such it cannot and won't materialise. So how do you make it three-dimensional? Ironically, put the 'ING' on the end.
Here is an example;
a client I worked with recently wanted to run her own business. When she told me what it was she wanted I listened very carefully to the verb is in the sentence. It had become static, she wanted to run, instead of saying, I see myself running my own business. We worked on it for a while and then she went away and because she had now changed the verb in the sentence she found she was miraculously coming up with three-dimensional thinking. To cut a story short, it is now three months since that conversation, and her business is already beginning, she has four clients, and the possibility of quite a few more once they see how these people get on. As she said, 'I could see myself running a business, but I couldn't see the three dimensions behind it, because all I was looking at was a two-dimensional picture.'