Stop and Smell The Roses

What I have specialized in for 30 years as a scientist and practitioner is exactly how the body, mind and spirit represents structure and function. For the mind it is information. That information takes on 3 fundamental forms…visceral, logical and logistical or VLL. Every step of information processing is important. Any distortion of information along a logic processing path can cause the information to be misrepresented at the next step and causes a cascade of increasingly erroneous perceptions, interpretations and actuations. This means that what every conceptualization or representation people start with about anything they have experienced will then go through many iterative processes in a multivariable/multinodal progression. The more capable the mind is at making sure information is both accurate content wise and pertinent context wise, the more valid and useful it is to the process. I call that first information representation the proximity thought. Two people can observe the exact same phenomena but by the time it has reached the terminal end of the information processing, people can have constructed completely different VLL representations that they make assertions and decisions about and therefore take action on and create consequences as a result. This is due to differences in basic structure function systems in the brain including sensiometric, psychometric, biometric and tensiometric. Notice how we use the word "metric" in each case, indicating the ability to measure and adjust. Sensiometric means that which pertains to sensations. Psychometric means that which pertains to the psyche…thoughts and emotional feelings. Tensiometric means that which pertains to movement and tensile systems like the musculoskeletal system. And biometric pertains to concentrations of chemicals in the body such as HPA axis regulation of body chemistry. The mind and brain at any one time is processing on the sensiometric, psychometric, biometric and tensiometric level all at the same time all of the time. It is amazing it can keep such disparate functionality sustained in such coordinated and analogical ways.

For example years ago when I was living in Florida I was out taking my dog for a walk around 11 am. I came by two other gentleman walking their dogs but were peering up at a tree. Curiously I started peering at the same tree not knowing what I was looking at. Finally I asked one of them since I could not draw any conclusions as to what was so important that they were taking time out of their day to stare up at a tree, what they were looking at. One man replied that it was a very rare white bird up in the tree which was actually considered to be extinct. He said he was a bird watcher. The second man had come along and had the same experience as me when he encountered the first man and did not know what he was looking at. As we all stood there staring at this rare bird, myself being a lover of nature and animals, I was suddenly much more appreciative of my surroundings because of this neighbor who was a bird watcher. If I had seen it first it would have been just a white bird sighting. I would not have known the significance of this one white bird. And usually after a few moments, that would have been that and we would have all moved on. Be we all continued to gaze at this wonder of nature despite the fact we had greatly different perspectives on the role of nature in daily life. What was proximal in this instance on an information level was caused by the conjunction of one bird lover and a rare bird. But it went beyond that. The second person also had to have a general appreciation in nature to participate on any active level in the process. Myself being the inquisitive human observer asked both men, other than just this basic appreciation for nature, what became the other reasons why we were all standing there looking at a bird while other people are at their jobs? The answer…. because we could. We discovered we were all self employed.

That meant we had more freedom than most to structure our time according to our needs and wants. The bird lover was a former web designer now turned web design author. The second was a former engineer now freelance technical manual writer. And I was a practitioner who had been in practice for 17 years and was in the process of writing the first comprehensive treatise on the computational semantics, linguistics and chemistry of the brain. Despite never meeting before we had all in our own respective professions and interest areas, had decided to share our knowledge so we could transfer the intelligence we had developed with others to help them with their challenges and purpose creation in our own ways. We all have to make a living but we had all honored an inner calling to some higher form of altruistic expression which is called advocacy. Some people come out of the womb with a stethoscope around their neck and there is no question what they came here to be…..a doctor. For the rest of us the path to discovery is more convoluted, less straightforward, confusing and frustrating.

Despite profound differences in ornithological knowledge and appreciation, we all shared an analogous state where life should be about appreciating the present and especially nature and not just preparing and living for the future. That in fact the present experience becomes the inspiration for future creation and without enough shared present reality, it is very hard to be creative on any level regardless of the content matter. So we shared those minutes of freedom, excitement and recognition that it feels good despite all of the challenges to be ultimately the designer of your own future. That is what we shared on a creative synchronicity mutuality level. We met many times in the future on a daily morning walks with our dogs and shared a lot of insight and inspiration about the similar challenges our creative writing professions exerted on us especially how it impacted our other primary focuses in life and how shared knowledge was the key to success. That no matter what the information basis is whether it be sensiometric, biometric, psychometric or tensiometric we shared a lot in common and had chosen a path to experience all four of those internal realities at the highest level.

For every relationship we have, we develop identities to interact with them on the most constructive level and each of these identities requires a shared sensiometric, biometric, psychometric and tensiometric reality which is why profound long term relationships can be sometimes very challenging on a neural processing level but very rewarding. Modern technology and diversity of identity role models in relationship has expanded people's notion of positive expectancy of things like satisfaction which is good but it has made it exponentially more complex on a neural level. That is why people are tending now back to "quality" relationships after a decade of being indoctrinated to a more "quantity" of relationships valid relationship sustainability model because of social media. It is not that social media is not useful for building higher quality relationships but every technology has its down side. People my age were raised in the information technology area where computer technology was about improving decision making but not in the social media age where information is now very unstructured and the person not the technology determines what you use it for. So just remember the technology that allowed humans to come up with all this sophisticated computer technology that is obsequious in our lives now was originally driven by the need to move, create tools and socialize on a direct and personal level. To have real relationship satisfaction, it has to have proximity, affinity and parity that simply does not exist innately online. So don't forget that 'stopping to smell the roses" in life (or literally watching the birds) is not only good for your health and happiness, it is good for relationships. That is the only way any VLL representation will matter in our minds eventually, that it is palpable and connectable on a psychometric, biometric, sensiometric and tensiometric level which means "in person".