In Stark Contrast: Learning to Value Being and Knowing Not Just of Doing and Proving

© 2000 Michele Toomey, PhD

 

Aug. 15, 2000

Our orientation toward somthing is as significant as our actions toward it. If your recovery from a devasting illness that attacked your brain is oriented toward proving you're still smart and worthy, you will be under constant self-scrutiny and stress. If your orientation is geared toward discovering how the brain damage has affected you and how you can compensate for the loss and retrain the brain, you will be on a mission to pool all creative resources to discover what is wrong and what works. Data is a friend, a desired source of information, not an enemy that exposes your short comings.

We are on a mission! We value how you are and what we know and what you know. We use every scrap of information to better understand how the brain and the body and the psyche work together. We do or not do things as the insights occur, not to prove what we know or what you can do, but to understand it and maximize it. We work like an aerodynamically designed car, reducing the stress not creating it. Cherishing what we discover, not parading it as trophy.

The integrity of discovery, of learning how to be with what we discover, allows us to become intimate with your brain damage, with the recovery process, and with you as you journey through it all.

This orientation yields intimacy, clarity, insight, and peace. We have nothing to prove, but we have everything to discover. We learn, we deal creatively with what we learn, we treasure what we learn and we rejoice at knowing how to do this so effectively. There is no imposed stress, no proof of worth, it is too sacred for such a materialistic outlook. We know, really know, what to do with knowing. That is somthing most people will never know.

 
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