Post No. 3,054 - The duty to do and appreciate enjoyable things (if one can)

One of the problems I have to still overcome is of wanting to do too much - to be busy or feel usefully occupied. 

In part, that is due to being raised in a household where both my parents had been raised with a combination of the stereotypical “protestant work ethic” and also experienced considerable hardship during the Great Depression - and many such survivors are afraid to not be busy or productive as those experiences have given them a fear of losing work or otherwise not having food, shelter, and the absolutely vital survival attribute in such desperate circumstances of having the support of one’s family/peers. Those characteristics were strengthened by living through World War (part) Two, which was followed by a desire to rebuild what had been destroyed - which required work, aka “being busy”. 

On top of that, my autism results in me taking exhortations to give 100% much more literally than others - meaning I would work to the point of a deep exhaustion from which the effects of masking, which were always manifest when I was at home, would hinder recovery. (I’ve given links below to a bunch of shorts from a channel that is very good at explaining this.)

And, to complete the trifecta, I worked in a profession which was cursed with people with self sacrificing (to the extent of being anti-family and even anti-life, in effect) and abusive personalities of the type Musk wants, expects and amathiacally “thinks” is - or should be - commonplace ... and quite a few unscrupulous and flawed characters took advantage of my characteristics to get work done the way they wanted at the expense of my well being and sanity. 

In response to all that, I developed skills such as meditation and what this blog covers, but the one characteristic that I have struggled with is the simple pleasure of just existing (as the footer puts it, “we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing”), which can actually be a powerful counter to the Musks and other such of this world, and taking that further to allow myself to have time to do things I enjoy doing - things that give me pleasure, such as listening to music, going bush, sketching, etc. 

Some pleasurable things are beyond me now for various reasons - so I won't have another pet (the physical demands of pet care are beyond me now) or go sailing again (owing to the transphobic hate in sport), for instance, but the others remain. 

(There can also be valid reasons for not being able to experience joy at a moment or period in time, such as the loss of loved ones or other suffering - as well expressed in the Hallowe'en tweet described in this article. There are also dangers such as spiritual bypassing, denialism, not attending to shadow work, etc to avoid.) 

On the other hand, my recovery from work has reached a stage where I can start thinking about going out and about and meeting people IRL, for instance (socialising, in a word - a bit).  

The move to write this came when I had started a music playlist, and found myself sitting and thinking “OK, so what should I do while the music is on?”, which was a d'oh! moment.

Now, the world is not in a good place, and there is a valid need for people to be activists working for change - and I have friends in hard situations, but, as a number of activists have written about, you cannot keep giving endlessly in activism without rest, rejuvenation, or renewal - and doing something you enjoy will increase your BPM energies, and, if you allow that joy and happiness - aka BPM energies - to flow out into the world, it will be a direct counter to nonBPM energies. 

And thus I enjoyed my music playlist - without guilt. 

Links

• “Why autistic people ‘give 100%’ 🧠”   https://youtube.com/shorts/lrhdkVNEV1Y      “Autism + ‘giving 100%’ 🧠”   https://youtube.com/shorts/rMQkbeJADPc      “Autism + learning to rest 🧠”   https://youtube.com/shorts/s34CKeu0ly0      “Breakthrough moment: Autism + unlocking leisure 🧠”   https://youtube.com/shorts/64JElZ4uK1I      “Neurodivergent + ‘relaxing’ 🧠”   https://youtube.com/shorts/-mS7QdFGtPA      

• “Neurodivergent + masking 🧠”   https://youtube.com/shorts/H_qNBOJiVqg      

and also

• “ADHD in the media vs reality”   https://youtube.com/shorts/0yEgaicwgFg     
  

There is one other matter I wish to cover, which is that the current US president may have a reading problem. 

I came across a YouTube video on this which, although it covered the key points relating to that person well enough, did so in a snarky way that effectively attacked others with similar disabilities and thus I will not use it. 

However, there are other articles online which address this, including The Times of Israel (2016) and We Got This Covered (2024), but the one I want to particularly refer you, Dear Reader, to, is: 

“Why [the current US president] Can’t Learn: An Educated Guess by a Veteran Teacher”   https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/17/why-[the-current-US-president]-cant-learn-educated-guess-veteran-teacher   “Dyslexia may explain a lot about the twisted behaviour of the president”      

This article includes the following: 

“I think he began faking when he was six or seven and couldn’t keep up with the other children his age who had learned their letters and were starting to read sentences and little stories. He wanted to be "great" so he made things up.   ...   Dyslexia is not predictive of a particular fate but combines with elements in each person’s personality. One person might become an excellent forest guide who knows all the birds, small creatures, and trees intimately and doesn’t need to rely on reading. By contrast, another might undertake a strenuous course of tutoring to maintain grade level in school, be open about his or her [or their] reading problem, ask for extra time in exams, and eventually graduate from college with a stellar record. A third might inherit a lot of money, then create and monitor a foundation to help people with various disabilities. A fourth, discouraged, might drop out of school and settle for doing odd jobs in the neighbourhood.   And a fifth might fake and falsify his way to fame and power and enjoy lording it over so-called “smart” people and thwarting their hopes. I am suggesting that [the current US president]’s lifelong experience with dyslexia, instead of increasing his capacity for compassion, has instead combined with problematic elements in his personality, including a penchant for revenge that was apparent even when he was a young adult.”  

I know or have known a total of at least four other people (plus a few acquaintances and work colleagues) with dyslexia, and many of them have actually been wonderful, caring and/or genuinely talented (in a particular area) people, so blaming the current US president’s behaviour on dyslexia is flawed - other factors, especially his abusive father, are far more likely to have been significant - although the abuse of other children would not have helped either, and is a good example of why bullying by children must be actively stopped (and doing so should also be used to teach children to be upstanders, not bystanders). 

This double point about 

(a) not using a disability to “explain” (“excuse”) problematic behaviour, and 

(b) not tarring all people who have a particular disability with the same brush, 

is important, and applies elsewhere - including the supposedly autistic Musk, and a stack of others I know or have known. 

And with [the current US president], while dyslexia might partly explain the possible confusion or misreading that changed transgenic mice to transgender mice, it does NOT excuse the hate.

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider: 

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also other options. 

Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here. 

(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)  

Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

#PsychicABetterWorld   and  

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2025     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/  

 

Post No. 2,862 - A commentary on some of my recent political blog posts

I haven’t posted much on this blog this week (although, as my last post indicated, there is off-line work being done), but I have been posting on my political blog. The list of posts from my interesting reading post is:

“Another trans right activism email”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2024/08/another-trans-right-activism-email.html      “A poem to bad managers”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2024/08/a-poem-to-bad-managers.html      “On living with “invisible” (non-apparent) disabilities”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2024/08/on-living-with-invisible-disabilities.html      “Australia’s national ALP government’s re-election campaign as compared to the Harris-Walz campaign for the US Presidency”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2024/08/australias-national-alp-governments-re.html      “A major win for trans+ rights”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2024/08/a-major-win-for-trans-rights.html      “Some news links on history”   https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2024/08/some-news-links-on-history.html     

I don’t want to comment on all of those, but there are a few supplementary comments I want to make in the context of this blog. 

 

Firstly, the major win for trans (being used as shorthand for trans and gender diverse) rights. 

A key aspect of this is the fact of indirect discrimination. I and others have been pointing out that indirect discrimination was real and a major problem in trans abuses, but the established non-trans activists were dismissive, patronising, and condescending about the topic. Their attitude showed them to either have ... limitations of competence, problems with sharing the “abuses stage”, or outright transphobia (possibly internalised).

If, on the other hand, they had listened to the experts on trans matters (us), the situation would have been better years ago - and likely lives would have been saved.

Because that’s one of the other points here: things like misgendering kill trans and gender diverse people. 

So ... morally, ethically, and spiritually, but not legally, those who poo-pooed the facts that we were pointing out have, in my opinion, blood on their hands. 

And some of those people were trans and gender diverse people who are personally comfortable with being misgendered (or amathiacally “thought” ignoring the problem was some sort of “sophisticated” or “smart” strategy ... !!!) and arrogantly considered everyone else should be the same as them - which is inherently the opposite of being inclusive, and thus is, in spiritual principle, the same behaviour as that shown by transphobes. 

Now, these behaviours show a range of spiritual/character flaws - arrogance, hypocrisy, tokenism being fairly predominant amongst those. 

The significance of those problems is that they are typically formed and nurtured in other areas of life, so when we accept our personal (or others’) spiritual mediocrity or inadequacies elsewhere, we are not just limiting ourselves or making life harder for those who live with/interact with us, we are potentially feeding into broader problems - problems that could cost lives. 

As I’ve written in a few places, we contribute to the psychic-social soup that we live in - often a minor effect, but sometimes our most significant effect is either strengthening a trend others started/grew (whether good or bad) or failing to block a bad trend that others started/grew. 

Even if you cannot stop a bad trend totally, do you really want to live with having failed to act - with having failed to do what you knew was right, possibly out of the arrogant saviour-complex attitude that you couldn’t fix it all totally yourself (or directly see a perfect outcome that was clearly linked to your personal input)?

Next, my post on living with “invisible” (non-apparent) disabilities.

Non-apparent is the preferred, more accurate term, but invisible seems to me to often be used for greater psychological impact in the audience. For now, I’ll continue with invisible (but don’t be surprised if, after further reflection, I come back and edit it to favour non-apparent).

Anyhow, what I want to add to, is my comment about how things like my autistic voice limited my capacity to be a leader. Burnout and sensory overload issues, and the need for time out to manage those, are also key points (that I will probably add as a postscript to that post), but those problems are less issues with regard to the sort of spiritual practices I cover in this blog. 

That means, I may not be able to be a political leader, but I can still play a role - or more easily play a role - spiritually. 

That also, I suggest, applies to others ... And with that perspective in mind, maybe re-read my first set of comments above. 

PS - the lack of confidence that can come with being neurodivergent, and the sometimes limited ability to visualise, are ways that being neurodivergent can potentially also hinder psychic ability

Finally, I posted an article with a few links on historical matters. The significance of that is that it reminds us to learn what we can from what others have done - and to contribute to others being able to learn from what we have done - good and bad. 

In my first set of comments, I was referring to actions from a quarter of a century ago - so there has been a sustained refusal to learn for a quarter of a century ... 

That’s not particularly significant in terms of human history, with a two and a half millennia struggle against slavery and ten or twelve millennia struggle against patriarchy, but in terms of an active, adapting, modern human rights movement, it is a shocking failure. 

Our human world is better connected than it ever has been before, but character limitations such as discomfort with change or the rate of change (as pointed out by Alvin Toffler in the 1970 book “Future Shock”), or refusal to grieve at having to let go of a cherished but outdated skill/aspiration/worldview. 

Examples of items to be let go of include:   the skill of being able to maintain and operate a good card index system, the aspiration of wanting to be the first human on the moon, and any worldview which includes the wrong notion that slavery is in any way, shape or form defensible, when it clearly is not. 

On the other hand, we can learn from others around the globe - something many people are aware of.

What I think hasn’t been fully appreciated yet is that we can share learning across time. 

To quite an extent that is still best done through books, but my ultimate audience when I started blogging was me in a future incarnation ... 

I wanted future me to read a succinct (well, I have got carried away a bit too much for that word to apply ... I’ll have to add that word in this context to my list of things to let go of) summary or distillation of what I have already been through and learned in this life. 

Now, that isn’t actually applicable, as my lessons in future lives are likely to be different and I will hopefully have integrated the key lessons during the in-between life phase (not to mentioned the blog will probably no longer exist except in some version of a WayBack machine), but the intention is useful to illustrate the concept of learning across time. 

History and education provide lessons from the past, but we need to remember we can formulate the lessons we want to pass on to the future - and do so best by the way we think, what we decide, and what we do or don’t do NOW.

Food for thought, I hope. 

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also Instagram. 

Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here. 

(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)  

Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/