Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This week marks the start of the holiday Season, with the first of ‘the Big Three’. Thanksgiving is a holiday that mirrors the theme under-lying our own little ‘bloghop-that-Lizzi-built’. Of course, the official holiday allows people to take a day off from work, the better to celebrate gratitude. In contrast, the TToT serves to provide a place where the exercise of (deliberately) choosing to focus on the positive  aspects of life, both good and bad is supported and encouraged. While arguable more practical and directly beneficial, the TToT,  unlike our copycat holiday, does not require or otherwise promote pie ….or stuffing, or  gravy…. or, for that matter, there’s on special silverware and/or plates (“no! you can’t put those in the dishwasher!! they have to be hand washed…they were left to me by your grandmother!”). On the plus side, when the TToT is celebrated, we are not required to:

• watch parades,
• go to a semi-stranger relative’s house to spend the entire afternoon
• … in over-crowded living rooms, thinking about being back at the dorm, where your new friend said she might be get back early too  after
• …sitting at a full-on, more-forks-than-you-need, cloth-napkined dinner table where you can see (in the reflection off a mirror on the wall) that Pulp Fiction is on the un-watched TV in the living room

But…. we do have our fun here, at the TToT. You’re invited to come join us and we promise that we will not laugh and/or judge anything you might write. (Seriously! you’re reading this Post, right? you don’t hear any disapproval or anything, right? …well, not precisely, the ‘tsk tsking’  that you think you hear is totally in the best of intention.)

1) & 2)    Celebrating Thanksgiving with my family (i.e. Phyllis and Una) and gaining an increased appreciation of the role of secondary aspects!

3) (hypo-Grat Item)… my poor photography skills. The ‘cover photo’, (on the Doctrine homepage, not this page), that black shape with the triangular ears?  That’s Una in her second favorite seat, (#1: the couch in front of the picture window)…. sitting at the table, watching Phyllis prepare food. The thing about Una is, she’s like, almost, totally black. (A couple of small, beige patches above each eye, that it!). Not so easy to photograph with a phone.

4) the Friday Night Vidchat…. with Summer ending* we’re enjoying old vidchat-friends returning to the virtual clubhouse… last night, one of the founding members (and one of two original hostess) Michelle joined us for a short time… (Michelle is on the other side of the globe and so, while we start the chat at 7:30 pm EST,  it was actually early morning Saturday for Michelle….cool)

5) (damn!  almost forgot to explain the photo above! see that baster-thing? look closely…. the silver strip around the middle?   duct tape!  yep, you read that correctly! duct tape!  and therein lies our subtitle.  Phyllis is, as most of you know, a roger with a significant secondary clarklike aspect. In her rogerian world, ‘there is a time and a place for everything’, (if you) measure twice, (you need only) cut once… a stitch in time saves nine’ and….and! ‘there is proper tool for every task’. The thing of it was, 9 am on Thanksgiving morning and the baster-thing decided to develop a split in the rubber bulb part, rendering the thing non-functioning. Of course, I got in the car and drove around to the closed supermarket, the open Cumberland Farms and even the local-giant-drugstore…. no luck. Not a baster to be found. Returned home. It was Phyllis who said, after staring at the non-working kitchen tool,  ‘well, we could use some duct tape’.

6) …questions from new TToT Friends that not only deserve a response, but serve to remind us of the good things that we have at this here bloghop here!

7) in the course of last weekend’s TToT, Kimberly M (@momgosomething)  asked, (in a Comment), about the Book of Secret Rules (aka Secret Book of Rules). What she was asking was, I believe, something to the effect, ‘hey! your secret rule book, do you, like, have Cliff Notes** or what?!’   Great question, Kimberly!  The thing about the BoSR/SBoR, is that while it’s whatever you need it to be, (as you write your TToT Post), the Book of Secret Rules  is not a simple carte blanche, a ‘yeah, go ahead do whatever you want‘. While you can, in fact,   ‘do whatever you want’ in the exercise of the TToT,  the Secret Rule Book permits anything, provided  you’re able to cite the Secret Rule that applies to whatever you need…exception from….the Rules. (and yes, Kimberly, you do see something funny in my own List of 10 things. Fortunately for me, SR 81.3 clearly states, ‘when explaining the BoSR or illustrating the SB0R to newer participants, writer is allowed to count as an Item something surely is not an item….is it?’)

8) Being a semi-post-holiday, with-intimations-of-classical-music-being-appropriate allow me to share the following:

9)  hey! that certainly fun!  (about the embracing of secondary?  oh that!  well  the thing is the photo at the top of this Post is what prompted, in me, to realize that deliberately embracing/encouraging/not-wishing-it-would-go-away, our secondary aspect**** is a good thing! Wait! I already covered that in #5?  ok…. time to get out to work, I guess.

10) SR 1.3***

Join the Ten Things of Thankful Facebook Group

* how’s that for staying in touch with reality?

** Cliff Notes :  from the days before there was an internet… well   try to imagine: ‘youtube without the video….or the audio… just information‘, but they were written like a fast forward button was pushed (before there was such a thing as ‘fast forward’).   Example: you were assigned Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ to read over the Thanksgiving weekend, but never quite found the time? There would be a Hamlet Cliff Notes (“Mel Gibson gets like all mother-fixated, but it’s olden days so the characters mostly just stare at each other, but then some people get killed and things get moving, then most everyone gets killed. Lots of famous quotes. The End”) Like that, except the cover was always yellow and black.

*** the first and still the best of all the Secret Rules!

**** the Wakefield Doctrine: we all find ourselves in one of the three worldviews at a very early childhood age and this becomes (and remains) our predominant worldview. Our predominant worldview is the reality that we experience as we grow up. Our ‘personality types’ are simply the strategies and styles of coping that are best suited to (this particular) reality. However, we retain the potential of ‘the other two’ worldviews and often one (of the worldviews) runs a ‘close second’ to our predominant worldview, this we call our secondary aspect. The thing is, we don’t need to have a secondary aspect. It’s not a math thing, like, say ‘well we have a predominant worldview 93% and so the secondary must be 6% and the tertiary…etc. Many people do not have a significant secondary or tertiary. However, most of you, do.
(and New Readers? if you’re having trouble deciding which of the three is your predominant worldview because it seems most of the time you are one but sometimes another? That’s the indication of your secondary.  A footnote is probably not the ideal place to explain it… but, what the hell it all fun and that’s why god invented Comments!)