Feminism

I saw this on facebook this morning and it really resonated with me as a perfect explanation of what the feminist movement is all about. Perhaps rather than feminism it should be genderism. The point isn’t to make woman and men into one homogeneous gender, its to relax the gender restrictions we’ve placed on ourselves with our culture so that the women who wants to do something that falls into the male realm can do so without de-feminizing herself and the man can take the opposing path without emasculating himself.

The World is a Great Place, and it’s Only Getting Better

Surfing Reddit the other day, I came across this image.

It’s a comparison of the gold-medal winning vault from the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia and the winning vault from the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England. My thought when I saw this was, HOLY COW, we are getting SO good at everything! Granted, I know that there are all sorts of things wrong with the training methods used to get gymnasts so good at gymnastics, but still, the fact that we can get it done is astounding. So often I see pessimism about how awful the world is and how everything is getting worse all the time. But that is completely false! Everything is getting better! We are producing more food, keeping more people healthy, preventing more fear and showing more love than we ever have in all of history.

This is not just my opinion either. In the last three months I have read Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Leiberman, and many other books that all confirm the constant, upward direction in which humanity has progressed. As horrible as school shootings are, for example, the very fact a few dozen murders constitute de facto national news means we don’t have anything worse to report.

So be grateful! Be positive! and SMILE!

A quote I want to hang on my office wall

 

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

I don’t remember where I found this quote, but I really really appreciate it. Something that I’ve struggled with in my marriage is learned to love my wife for who she is and to chuck all my preconceptions about what should be into the garbage. Its not that I had never heard that you have to love people for who they are, but it takes a lot of time and experience to really learn how to do it.

The source for this quote is No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton. I’ve never read the book, but I suppose I ought to. It can be purchased here if anyone is interested.

Hopefully, this is just the beginning . . .

I have been itching to get a decent blog going. One that will be interesting to write and maintain but also that people might find useful and might even read! I am starting this therapist’s resource notebook for an assignment in one of my first year MFT classes but I hope to continue developing it to become a significant resource in the future. But only for therapists named Tim. I believe I’ve made that perfectly clear. Except you, professor Daniels, you can be here . . . at least long enough to grade me :D.