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Meditation, prayer
Breathing
Eating
Excitement
Exercise
One man's meat is another man's poison. One man's Mede is another man's Persian. One man's addiction is another man's hobby. If your teenager spends more time on his computer or cellphone that you would or than you would like, he is addicted. He has an addiction. Something must be done! However, if you do so more than your wife likes, she has got to learn to give you a little space!
Is it an addiction? A profession? A hobby? More than one?
I am reading over Stanton Peele's work on addictions and I intend to get to The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
(The underlined sentence above is a line in one of Odgen Nash's poems but I can't find it to quote it. He wrote tons of wonderful poems, full of lovely ideas and bearing titles worth quoting in themselves. It bugs me that so many of his poems are not to be found. I did find this poem on the way having a sense of humor puts things into perspective, perhaps to the disadvantage of the possessor of that sense.) This poem is on the web, here:
http://www.unz.org/Pub/NashOgden-1938-00039
DON'T GRIN, OR YOU'LL HAVE TO
BEAR IT
It is better in the long run to possess an abscess or a
tumor
Than to possess a sense of humor.
People who have senses of humor have a very good time.
But they never accomplish anything of note, either
despicable or sublime,
Because how can anybody accomplish anything immortal
When they realize they look pretty funny doing it and
have to stop to chortle?
Everybody admits that Michelangelo's little things in
the Sistine Chapel are so immortal they have everybody
reeling.
But I'll bet he could never have dashed them off if he
had realized how undignified he looked lying up
there with his stomach on the ceiling.
Do you think Der Fuhrer could keep on being Der
Fuhrer
It he saw what everybody else sees every time he looks
in the muhrer?
Yes, fatal handicaps in life are fortunately few.
But the most fatal of all is the faculty of seeing the other
person's point of view.
And if your devoted mother suggests that you will some
day be rich and famous, why perish the suggestion;
That is, perish it if you are afflicted with the suspicion
that there are two sides to every question.
Good gracious, how could anybody corner wheat
li they were sissy enough to reflect that they were causing
a lot of other people to be unable to afford
to eat?
Look at mayors and congressmen and presidents, always
excepting college presidents, such as Harvard's
Conant;
Do you think they could get elected ii they admitted
even to themselves that there was anything to be
said for their opponent?
No, no, genius won't get you as far as common everyday
facility
Unless it is accompanied by a conviction of infallibility,
And people who have a sense of humor are extremely
gullible.
But not enough so, alas, to believe that they are infullible.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
