Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 1914, two women open a public library. The first two kids registered as borrowers, a girl of 13 and a boy of 7, soon read all the children’s books, so are actively encouraged by the women to move on to more adult-type books on a range of topics. The girl develops an interest in people of different cultures that becomes a passion and influences her life’s work. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, author of 20 books and recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from 28 universities.
The boy lives in poverty. Abandoned as a baby, he is raised by a widow with a child of her own and several other orphaned or abandoned children. The widow earns barely enough money to keep them fed by washing other people’s laundry ten hours a day. To keep a roof over their heads, she works for a real estate man who moves her and the children from shack to shack “to clean them up and make them saleable”. The widow encourages reading, understanding that it may lead the children in her care out of poverty, and take James’ mind off things she cannot provide. The boy reads everything he can, and it does make him a good student for the short time he spends in school. The need to help his mother provide for the eleven children in her care, however, means he is working by the time he is a teenager.
James kept his love of reading despite the long hours of tiring work at fairgrounds, factories, and farms. One kind employer notices the breadth of Jimmy’s knowledge, a learning way beyond his years, and arranges a scholarship exam for him. Jimmy does well, and is accepted into college, and later into the Navy. The war years come and go with Jimmy writing of his experiences. The book wins the Pulitzer Prize, and was later made into the Broadway hit, South Pacific.
For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much else what they find.
Michener, J. The world is my home: a memoir.
Random House, New York. 1992
Michener, in his early 40’s, made a conscious decision to ‘find’ himself, to put in place a map that would guide his choices for the rest of his life. During the war, he describes being in an overloaded aircraft, attempting to land on a tiny Pacific Island airstrip between huge mountains, at night, in a tropical thunderstorm, the third and final possible attempt before fuel ran out. The pilot succeeds, slumps over the controls, too exhausted to hear the heartfelt applause. Michener is too tense to eat, drink or sleep. Hours later, he walks the airstrip in the darkness from end to end, and in his mind creates a map for the rest of his life. He sees the mountains and the stars above them, and he swore:
I am going to live the rest of my life as if I were a great man. I am going to erase envy and cheap thoughts. I’m going to concentrate my life on the biggest ideals and ideas I can handle. I’m going to associate myself with people who know more than I do. I’m going to tackle objectives of moment.
And in the nearly fifty years since that night, I have steadfastly borne testimony to all my deeply held beliefs.
Michener, J. The world is my home: a memoir.
Random House, New York. 1992 p264.
Michener’s defining moment on that dark island airstrip has the vital ingredients for life-affirming patterns – sensory rich, it was his own not a copy, and there was no part of him that night that was not fully committed to the image of who he was, what he will no longer be, and what he will do. He would dream that night, and subsequent nights, and the expectation of it being fulfilled was preserved. Those life-affirming patterns kept him on track as a writer, resulting in more than 40 books that collectively sold more than 100 million copies. He was granted 32 honorary doctorates in 5 different disciplines and his cash donations to public libraries and universities exceeded 153 million dollars.
Mind Maps
You will probably be familiar with the term. Google gave me nearly 30 million entries in less than half a second so they are somewhat common. What I present here is a simple map that has proven to be remarkably effective in enabling young people to visualise and record life goals. My version of a mind map is simply a way of representing the direction of our thinking, a ‘target’ sheet, a guide to enable us to focus certain thoughts, and discard others. Essentially allowing an internal capacity for orienting our minds with feedback and correction to stay on course, rather than a random array of influences to steer us all over the place.
I start with a ‘wheel of life’ which prompts thinking about important dimensions of our lived experience. The various dimensions are not fixed, some people write their own depending on what they see as important. Each of these dimensions are presented as a satisfaction scale – ‘how satisfied am I regarding this aspect of my life?’ There is, of course, an implied understanding that a line drawn through each of these points on the scales somewhat resembles a circle – not too many low satisfaction dimensions.
Let me explain three dimensions you may not recognise: peers, buddy, mentor. It is from the work of Schumacher (?) as I remember it from my uni days. (I have not been able to find reference to it since, so probably I have the name wrong). In any case, it was from a large scale research project in the sixties that broke from the usual focus on ‘juvenile delinquency’ (like I said it is the 60’s) to examine the factors consistent in young people who make a straightforward transition from high school, through college and early adulthood. Three factors stood out. Each of the successful young adults had positive ongoing relationships with their peers (not isolates); had a close personal friend of either gender; and benefitted from a close relationship with person representing an adult version of what they held closest to their heart. Not a pin-up poster of a sport or rock star, but someone, usually a relative, who had periodic contact with the young person who played the mentor role.
The ‘wheel of life’ exercise usually stimulated thinking around the various dimensions of their lives, and from these dimensions, the young person would select six or eight to focus on for their mind map. These usually formed a progression of statements from the late teens to adulthood along that theme, with several aspects I classed as essential:
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- state it in the positive, as if it has already happened
- keep it sensory rich and specific – see it, hear it, smell it feel it
- it must be individual – your thing not a copy from elsewhere
- include lots of detail, colour, photographs.
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Here is an example. Take note of the moped in the lower right corner:
Here is the statement from the text box beside it:
I place my helmet on my head and get on my moped. As I start it up I smile as the wind whips the hair out of my eyes. I drive around town, and when I st
op to buy lunch, I pack it in the compartment under my seat.
This moped is my pride and joy. As I drive out into the woods, I remember when I was young and how I tried everything to get one. Now I feel like that little girl again.
© Roseleen Lenehan 2006 Used with permission
Now I am not claiming this process guarantees the writer will tour Italy on a moped. But what I can be sure about is that with this map on her bedroom wall as a constant reminder, the sensory-rich descriptions, and her emotional connection to the content, the chances are high. Knowing what we do now about the way patterns are preserved intact in the subconscious, about dreaming discharging unfulfilled expectations and preserving others to maintain emotional integrity and provide an internal guidance system, we can be sure the map becomes more than colour on paper.
Let me give you another example. One of my students prepared a great mind map. On it was his objective to be a doctor; pictures of him in his surgery, degrees on the wall, rich in sensory language all very real. Later in the year, all the students organise their work experience, and this boy, not surprisingly, wants to do his with a doctor. Not any doctor, but a surgeon. He was told it was out of the question. The hospital could take him in the garden, the kitchen, the maintenance team, but nothing like what he wanted. Everything the boy heard was steering him away from his target, so he made an appointment with a surgeon, took his mind map and showed him. The boy’s commitment and explanation of self-image impressed the surgeon, so he agreed on the condition that if the patient did not consent, he had to absent himself. No patient made that call so the boy became the surgeon’s shadow for a week, with patients, hospital rounds and in the operating theatre. He even observed a caesarean birth.
Some time later his mother told me he had bought a stethoscope on e-bay. “He wears it around the house, he finds it hard to watch TV now, the stethoscope won’t let him!” “It directs him to his study desk instead” she said. I said I would love a photo and soon after my inbox had a message with ‘The importance of symbolism’ in the subject line:
Not only symbolism, but the mental exercise of already being a doctor. I think you will feel as I do that his subconscious contained an expectation seeking fulfilment in the environment. Not only that, but he has a pattern, a neural element/self-image that he is emotionally committed to, a pattern that during his dream state will be preserved, and next morning his target will still be intact. Oh, you ask about the photo:
© Joshua Saunders 2005 Used with permission
He sent me a message recently to say that on a busy shift at Monash he lost his stethoscope, and remembered the one he kept in his drawer, the ebay one. “It had come the full circle” he said. Joshua is now a GP at a busy medical clinic in rural Victoria.
There are many ways to explain how a girl becomes an activist and anthropologist; a boy raised in poverty becomes a writer and philanthropist; and a schoolboy with a stethoscope becomes a doctor. I am not suggesting reading books, making a life plan after a near-death incident, or preparing a mind map as I have described, brings in its wake a life of remarkable good-fortune. Nor am I proposing that a mantra such as: Where the attention goes, the energy flows, will create a future of health, wealth and happiness.
What I am suggesting, is that, if we make sense of everything we see, hear, taste, smell and feel by matching it with a neural element (pattern) already on file, and we have some understanding of how these patterns are formed and preserved, then it follows that any process that adds life-enhancing ones to the repertoire, is worth consideration.
