“The world is so full of a number of things I’m sure we should all be
as happy as kings.” Robert Lewis Stevenson
But often we aren’t, are we. The world is so full of so many things and all those things are live streaming into our consciousness every moment we're awake. I've become exhausted trying to keep up with it all, getting a grasp on it, assimilating the onslaught, that sometimes often really, I just can’t deal with it. Can’t sort out what to pay attention to, what should be first, what’s most important. Add to that in these times, discerning what the heck is actually True!
Ask someone of a certain age like me who, decades ago after having my children diagnosed with the curse of ADD, was told that it was because their parents both had ADD. We all had ADD. All these years later I now wonder who doesn’t? How can we not, in this information-saturated world we inhabit now?
My sweethearts couldn’t sit still in school. It was recommended by the teachers that they be medicated so they could fit in and not flit about or play too much, which was deemed highly disrupting to their ability to learn. My darlings were bothersome. They were also brilliant and creative, loved to laugh and move their bodies. They enjoyed life.
But then we discovered we were all ADD. We had a big problem. To fix our 'problem' children and I looked for palatable remedies. In our case, fixing this problem spawned an unprecedented plethora of more problems. Labels and categories were invented. Now we had more than just ADD to deal with, we also had ADHD. We had drug pushers. We had Time-outs. We had punishments. We tried everything because at school we had problems.
Soon each kid, in their own way, began to not feel brilliant. Their creativity was criticized and unappreciated. They colored outside the lines with the wrong colors. Their streams of consciousness burst beyond the boundaries of proper paragraphs. Tapping their toes as they hummed songs of their own creation to help them concentrate was incompatible with the rules of concentration in school.
It didn’t take long for each of my kids, being precious, unique, and astounding in their own way, to rebel in their own way. None would cooperate with taking the ADD medications. They said they didn’t recognize themselves. They said they felt funny. Behavioral modifications were primitive, punishing, and exhausting to implement in those earlier days before medications became the easier-to-implement norm.
Those kids, and now their parents, were not laughing much. Child #1 dropped out of the mainstream. #2 raged against the machine. #3 saw the retaliations the first two experienced and focused on nothing but sports. By the time #4 came along and was ‘diagnosed’, there was an extensive battery of tests that sub-categorized the ADD/ADHD into twenty new areas of disability with names and unflattering labels.
It was insinuated that our lives were ruined because we are (not have) ADD/ADHD. Now it’s late and we have ADD grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We may not be able to save them from the archaic educational model they are still stuck in. But I am now strongly suggesting to my darlings that by changing the ADD acronym they’ve been assigned and imprisoned with, to my more accepting and pleasurable EAA, they can enjoy a more expansive relationship to education as a lifelong learning adventure, in spite of what they’ve endured in the past.
Our brains are incredible, aren't they? The brains we were all born with are fantastic. Our brains are not the problem. In fact, instead of sinking into the self-admonishing world of problems associated with ADD, we can choose to celebrate a life-affirming world of possibilities associated with being EAA.
Technology is catching up with us, not the reverse. We can learn the way we need to learn. There’s an app for that. We can learn the way we want to. We have the technology. Instead of dropping out because we don’t fit in, we can learn to love this world and the world.wide.web. We can all find a place to fit in somewhere. Your tribe is either already gathered, or is waiting for your call.
Find your best place with your own Enhanced Attention Ability. Put some fun in your former dis-fun-ction. Live Love Laugh and be Happy! I am convinced this is the way to be ready for the colosal transformational changes still coming.
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