The Overwhelm - Prognosis, Pedagogy and Parachutes

The Ten Thousand Things

We return for Season 2. Life before and after ADHD treatment / Sam on learning / You are falling through the air without a parachute, but don't worry, there is no ground.

1. Joe asked, so Sam explains that before treatment for ADHD, getting things done was endlessly frustrating and chaotic. It's not magically better now, but there's been many improvements and achievements in around nine months. To be fair a lot of that is also coming from a lot of groundwork done in therapy before drug treatment. We also talk bipolar disorder, and some differences in experience between conditions with highly acute aspects such as bipolar and a condition with mainly chronic aspects such as ADHD

Joe worries about 'overwhelm' not being correct English, but that word has been very well established for quite a while now. Columbia Journalism Review has a great piece from 2017 about 'overwhelm' entering English!

2. Sam goes off the deep end about education, ticking all the manifesto boxes. Total rebuild of the education system - tick. Paolo Freire - tick. Learning is hard. No, you're not bad at maths. You need to learn how to learn. You must build a range of qualities and skills, not just stuff you're already good at. You must learn to engage critically with reality. Know where you're at and when in history you are situated and what might be coming. Understand you are a being capable of knowledge and ignorance. You must construct your own means of self-liberation, by engaging with reality, and with others. Joe says 'so you Robin Williams them?'. Not really, but yes, sometimes.

3. Quotation corner is a doozy. But it always is. The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground. Attributed* to Chogyam Trungpa Get that into you. It's a high mountain breeze. It'll change your life, really let it settle into your being.

The things you're worried may not be real, and even if they are real enough, they may not be the problem you think they are, or a problem at all. Having said that Buddhists do theoretically believe in reincarnation and maybe that comes into this quote. But Sam's says it's not strictly about death not being final or not a probem, but about the relationship between experiencer and experienced, and how we can get past a sense that life is an intolerable nightmare, and just deal with it as it is. Also, you're literally truly just endlessly falling through space, but also in a metaphorical sense. And that's actually pretty cool when you think about it. Also terrifying. Definitely that, as well.

*Stack Exchange can't find the source. Wikiquote has no parachute for Chogyam Trungpa, who mentioned parachutes once, which may have inspired Ram Dass, a Joe favourite: "You only suffer if you are attached. If you think you’re young and you start to grow old, you suffer because you’re busy thinking you’re young. If you’re not standing anywhere, where is the suffering? No pain. So, you finally realize it’s as if you jump out of an airplane and there’s no parachute, but there’s no Earth. You could just keep doing it. It’s all skydiving from there on in. So, for a person who realizes that, suffering — although you don’t go after it because you’re not a masochist — isn’t pushed because you realize it’s teaching you something."

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Joe @joefanebustloh, Sam @toomanypictureswillneverbeseen and Ali @ali_from_reso

Image courtesy of Craig Wishart

Image: Edward Coley Burnes-Jones: Sisyphus