20240415 Memory Improvement from Injury

20240415 Memory Improvement from Injury

 Usually by 3 PM each day, my thinking ability has pretty much evaporated.  

My memory is slowly getting better.  I have discovered in last few days that exploring new environments such as getting coffee in Concord, visiting the lawyer for our moving to a new home, exposes to me a lot of my forgetfulness.  My bad memory is very bothersome to me and probably others when I am away from home and in a new situation.

After we bought an agreement to live in Concord, we learned that Douglas Hatfield lived at “HHH” and he is the head of the project committee for the homes.  Douglas Hatfield was a good friend of my father.  He had a son that I was aware of but didn’t know very well because he was about 6 grades behind me at my school.

I spent some time reviewing my memories and physical records of my father's relationship with attorney Douglas Hatfield and it brought back many memories from the last 40 years about Hatfield, his family, Sunday Church services in Hillsboro and one of his female attorneys who I met in the 90’s when I was visiting my parents in NH.

I am grateful now that I did not dispose of “old” records because they were “old.”  They just fill boxes and boxes of writing that I had completely forgotten I had ever written.  I was reminded of them when I started going through them to find and clear out junk.  Not much junk, but a lot of personal history that I had forgotten.

Potential organization into my personal autobiography, or at least a few short stories over the future years.  My example is “I. Asimov."

Sermons of Meister Eckhart, Counsel 21. Of Zeal

Sermons of Meister Eckhart by Meister Eckhart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Valuable book for review. I learn something new every time I reread sections or paragraphs. I have his best for me paragraph taped to the top of my bathroom mirror.

Counsel 21. Of Zeal, page 274,
"People ought to learn to be free of their works as they perform them. For a man who has not practiced this, it is hard, learning to attain to a state in which the people around him and the works he performs are no hindrance---and much zeal is needed to achieve this---so that God is present to him and his light shines in him undiminished, whatever the occasion, whatever the environment. For this a lively zeal is needed, and, particularly, two things. One is that a man should have his inwardness well protected, and that is mind be on its guard against the images that surround him outside, keeping them out, never letting them intrude to occupy him and accompany him, never letting them find a home in him. The second is that a man does not allow himself to be weakened or distracted or alienated by any multiplicity, not by his own inward images, whether these be his own imaginings or an exaltation of his perceptions, not be outward images or whatever else it may be that he has present to him. To this he ought to apply and turn all his power."


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The Sense of “I”

 How do I relate these two quotes to explain that they both have the same metaphysical position? LaShan is abstract, Peters is concrete examples.  I am not sure that my point comes across.

(I can write my notes fast and best in email before I share them, by blogging or writing in a comment block on Facebook.  My memories for current stuff is difficult but older stuff, like typing, engineering and department head of Navigation or Weapons in the Navy or juggling are just as strong as always.)

What I want to write about is the relationship between reading about the sense of “I” in chapter 8, page 98 of How to Meditate A Guide to Self Discovery by Lawrence LeShan and Tom Peters essay “Quality can be had in an instant: keeping it every day is the real achievement” from Washington Times November 1993.

Lawrence LaShan writes The Meditation of “Who Am I?” Section of chapter 8, page 99.  He says “I am the person who feels tired,” the reply is “No, that is a sensation I feel. Who is the I who has that sensation?”

Tom Peters writes ON EXCELENCE in the Employment Guide. 

He writes for a restaurant waiter  “… you can become excellent in a nanosecond, starting with your first guest tonight.  Simply picture yourself, even if it’s a very fuzzy picture, as the greatest  waiter ever — and start acting accordingly.

“For the first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to do it, and not to compromise, no matter what sort of roadblocks those around you (including peers) erect.

“… (1)  keep your morale up amid inevitable storms, 

(2) learn something new every day, and 

(3) practice that something, awkward or not, every day, no matter what.

“How long does it take you, as boss, to achieve world-class quality?  Less than a nanosecond to attain it, a lifetime of passionate pursuit to maintain it.

“… the deeper point is that you’ll either change in a nanosecond — or never. It’s true with booze, smokes, fat and world-class quality.  The determined shift of mindset is an all-or-nothing deal.

“… It takes forever to maintain change … ; it takes but a flash to achieve change of even the most dramatic sort.

Peters is providing instructions for the sensations and action, but knows the “I” cannot be changed.  The I has the ownership of all of it?  {Actually the I cannot even be spoken about.}

LeShan, Lawrence. How to Meditate (p. 98). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

Tom Peters in an essay I tore from the Washington Times in 1993.

The Powerful, Unexpected Impact of Memory Notes Dec 4, 2023

 On Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 12:57 PM, Frederick Vogt wrote:

Essay I am making an effort to recall new stuff

My memory is getting better, but still very weak in that not everything is recalled.  Last night at supper, Amanda taught me that we were eating “Zucchini.”  I was calling it “Zen” because I could not recall the actual name for the vegetable.

Due to bad memory I am writing notes, and as of Wednesday memory cards, to hold onto things that I want to recall.  Today I have written about the philosophical (?) sense of “I" as done by Lawerence LaShan and in 1993 by Tom Peters.

My notes are not as dense as my steno pads listing what I was doing every few minutes.  The last couple of days my short term memory has been much better so I don’t need to make the steno pads as full of details as I have been doing the past two months.  The notes and memory cards carry ideas and facts that I want to know and recall.

The powerful, unexpected impact of my memory notes is that as I review them during the day and evening I develop a much better understanding of what they say.  The first example of this is the memorization of the first three definitions in my math book.  They seemed trivial, and what was their real purpose?  I had the idea because our math instructor in 1975 said we would skip them because they were obvious and should have been acquired as part of our abstract algebra course, so he would not waste his time by going over them with his advanced calculus class.

What I discovered as I read my current memorization notes in pencil on scratch paper was that these three definitions at the start of the book covered three concepts that could be well expressed with Venn diagrams.  They also presented an obvious, now that I knew them, layout of sets.

1. Venn diagram one is nothing: Math definition is the empty set.
2. Venn diagram two is overlap of two circles: Math definition is that part of one set is part of another set, complements.
3. Venn diagram three is one circle inside of another: Math definition is for subsets.

Post of 20121215. Winning Raffle at Waynes' Pub

20121215 Friday a week ago, I won a raffle! A nice tote bag full of class beers and great glasses and other items.  I have never won a raffle on my own before. But as the Maryland Lottery keeps telling us, "You have to play to win!"  I have never played, or rarely played a raffle before. 

How did this happen? I walked into my favorite bar when I got home from work, about 8 pm. Amanda Peake was still working that night so I was by myself. My second most favorite bartender (after Shayna Clevenger), Alice Kistner, asked me if I wanted to buy a raffle ticket for the SPCA? (That was where all the young people crowding my favorite home away from home were from.) I said OK, I'll by one for a couple of dollars.  Alice said "You can have three for $5!"  Since she is blonde, friendly, and one of my favorite bartenders, I said OK, and handed her a five.

I forgot about the raffle and focused on the famous Mahaffey's Pub beer list.   After a while Dennis came you to me and said, "Hey Fred, is your last name Voight?" I said yeah that's close enough. Dennis said "You won the raffle!" H"e set a big, big, tote bag full of stuff and a box of a dozen glasses on the counter in front of me.  I looked up. A bunch of young people that I didn't know where cheering.  I young lady came up and shook my hand "Thank-you for supporting the SPCA!"  A asked her her name, she told me and I said thanks [her name].  They a young man stepped you and repeated the ceremony. I didn't ask him his name. Just said "I'm always glad to help."  

I didn't feel like I deserved all the stuff I won. I felt guilty. I bought the tickets because I like Alice, not because I have anything for the SPCA.  But that can be our secret.  It was a wonderful gift; I go wandering off into the dark, hand out five dollars and come home with a tote bag full of beer! 

Life doesn't get much better than that!

20121215

Training People in Fitness

I see that you are taking a role leading your fitness classes?

Very inspiring for an “natural” introvert like me.  I have always preferred solitary exercise so that I can make ad hoc changes to my workout without it having an effect on anyone else.  

I understand the value of training others from my work experience over the years, it deepens my own understanding and skills.  I look at my current efforts to keep fit, and I wonder why certain things that I take for granted now, were never taught to me by adults when I was growing up,  things like deliberate practice, breaking a skill down into pieces learning the pieces and putting it together for better performance, setting goals and measuring results, figuring out how to do better.  I know many adults that try something, like a fitness workout and quit it because “it is just too hard,” “it is too difficult,” or I tried that for a few days (or weeks) and I didn’t see the results that people claim so I stopped.  Reflecting on these encounters, I recognize the value of playing sports, team sports, and learning a musical instrument when I was in school.  I recall workouts that the basketball or soccer coach had us do, and has a child I considered them boring and a waste of time.  Only now do I begin to see some of the real value that was being shown to me.

The skills I needed were demonstrated but never put into worlds.  Without the words I was slow to generalize ideas that could cross over from sports to music to academic studies.

Since my move to NH, I have paid more attention to other people and why they do the things they do, People I meet, people I recall, and occasionally fictional people.  I some people have an understanding of what it takes to maintain and keep a kind of fitness.  I was profoundly influenced by reading “Tarzan of the Apes” when I was a child, and stories my mother told me about the athletic skills of my great-grand father.  Other people either never participate in sports, or if they did, do not apply the ideas to their current lives.

 

Journal Writing, second try

 Thanks for the journal writing posted by James Clear.  I like his footnotes, but I haven’t taken the time to read all of them.  Thanks.

I still have not figured out the web page format for journalling.  I just found this, I’ll try it out but use my email a a personal backup for my journal entries that are not hand written on paper.

https://penzu.com/

(I inserted a comment in your previous email of Nov 4th.)

Text format history in IT world:

I didn’t print out hard copies all the time.  What I did was save my files in “text” format, a feature that all word processing programs had, but in some of the programs, like Word Perfect, it was hard to find text as an export choice.  

The benefit of text was that text is readable by anything that we have used since the 90’s (maybe earlier, I took some computer programming classes at Old Dominion College night school courses in 1987, and it usually worked there for the large computer, main frame, that each student had an account with.  These were the days before “expensive” personal computers, PCs, could be made available to a individual students, unless you could get through the line of waiting students at the “workshop".) 

Text is a translation of computer language in order to make it readable by humans.  How many people do you know that can use the classic 1,0 format for their communications?

For years, the 70’s and 80’s,  I did not want to get involved with computer language, tape with holes punched in it.  Only when the text output/input computer main frames began to show up on Navy ships was I inspired to take the IT courses at the local college in Norfolk Virginia.

The computer programming course that I took in college consisted of taking the punched tape of a machine that looked like a keyboard communications device, run the punched tape through the mainstream reader, come back the next day to get the results from the main frame output.  If there were any errors in the punched tape, need to fix them and run the 24 hour reading again.  What a pain in the ass that was.

Journal writing:

I still have not figured out the best media/format to use for my journals.

I wish I had known that you kept and wrote journals.  I gave away all my journal writing books this past year.  I had several good books about journaling, how to write journals and different practical needs for journals. Most of these needs had to do with personal growth and psychological/emotional welfare.  I never read any of these books thoroughly, just the table of contents and interesting chapters.

I kept one journal book, that was recommended to me by one of Lorraine Fertch's friends who I met at medical seminar one weekend.  The book is Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Comanpanion To The Inner Worlds.

( Ha, Ha, I just learned how to underline on my personal computer.  I have been so sloppy at learning the features of my personal products.  I know nothing compared to what I knew about computers, etc., when I worked in IT guiding groups of young folks to do IT support.)

The book is by Deena Metzger.  I only read the first 21 pages, I enjoyed them and marked in the margins what I thought was valuable.

I just put this book on my daily morning reading list.  I can at least finish reading the first chapter. 

I bought myself a 3 ring binder earlier in the week and filled it with 100 pages of lined white paper. The intention is to have a convenient paper journal, where pages can be removed or added as necessary .

Your discussion led me to 

https://iajw.org/how-to-journal-complete-guide/