EDIT
ORIA L FEAT URE
Recognizing the Value
of Celebration - Part 2
By Kim Sawyer
I
n the Part 1 of Recognizing the Value
of Celebration, we explored the meaning of “value” as the basic guide to and
result of successful living. We looked
at the ritual of celebration as a practice
that is indispensable to our capacity to
create value and enjoy it fully. Now, as
promised, I will explain my theory about
the root purpose of Celebration and
present a critical element in our psychology, sense of life. Further, I will reveal a
hardwired dysfunction of our survival
mechanism and the consequent really
problematic impact on our sense of life
and, thus, our access to peak performance and satisfaction in our lives.
Celebration is directly and fundamentally tied to our basic underlying, overall
mindset toward life. I refer to this as our
sense of life. I am convinced that our
ability to enjoy life and function well requires us to maintain a fundamentally
benevolent sense of life.
Sense of life has two components; one
is our worldview.
It is my core belief that I live in a benevolent or malevolent world or somewhere
in between. A benevolent worldview
is comprised of a deep, usually unconscious emotional equivalent of the belief
that the world is a friendly place where
good things are the rule and bad things
are the exception, combined with the
conviction that I have a place in it.
The second aspect is self-view; do I
hold myself in self-esteem or self-contempt or somewhere in between? Similarly, it is deep, usually unconscious,
and emotionally experienced and it is a
combination of self-worth and self-confi-
dence. Do I deserve good things and am
I basically up to the challenges that living
in the world will bring my way?
As humans, we all have a sense of life
that includes both components. We can’t
help it; we are wired that way. And all of
us have a primary set point somewhere
on the plus/minus spectrum of each. It
has evolved mostly subconsciously over
the years through experiences, decisions,
choices, and actions. I can be changed
but very slowly and with a lot of hard
work. In addition, all of us can have our
moment-to-moment experiences of our
sense of life, up or down that set point in
response to our circumstances and actions.
Another important part of our psychology as human beings is our survival
mechanism. Thank goodness that we
have it and that it operates so well when
we truly need it. However, there is an inherent and unavoidable side-effect that
can be very problematic to our sense of
life.
Because our survival mechanism is
built in to autonomously, uncontrollably
react with massive intensity on many
levels including chemical, muscular,
neural, emotional, and mental when
confronted with anything that we consider a threat to our well-being, we are
left with a profound, powerful, and lingering recollection of that experience.
The power and half-life of even relatively
minor negative experiences are far greater than positive experiences, even very
good ones. In other words, whenever we
make a mistake or the world places a bad
turn of events in our path, the memory
of them hits hard and lasts a long time,
whereas when we do something well or
something favorable happens to us, the
memory flickers briefly and is rapidly forgotten.
The difficult consequence of this process is an unavoidable and ongoing distortion or influence in our sense of life
toward the negative. We all know in our
calm thinking moments of awareness,
the occurrence of mistakes and things
gone wrong is statistically minuscule
relative to all that we successfully do
when things go well. Nonetheless, we all
tend to predominantly ignore or take for
granted our successful functioning and
the smooth goings on in our lives. All
the while, we reverberate with our errors
and misfortunes, reliving and replaying
them consciously, talking about them
with others and dreaming about them at
night long after they occur and fade into
the past.
So we all navigate through our lives
with this constant inner-pressure to increase our doubt of ourselves and the
world we inhabit. Without a conscious
and usually challenging effort to compensate for it, our sense of self and sense
of the world skew to the dark side. This
does not bode well for our ability to live
our lives with excellence, success, prosperity, love, and joy.
What can we do? How can we deal for
this pernicious stowaway in our cerebral
cortexes? How can we continually correct this distortion, adjusting and re-correlating our conscious view of ourselves
and our lives?
»Continued On Page 30
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