the Wakefield Doctrine

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

It’s Friday, and time to play spin the bottle with our innermost thoughts and feelings and attitudes towards life and such.  Rumpus room in a finished basement with one too many hormone enriched adolescents giving off waves of desire and fear pheromones? Hell no! we’re  mature, accomplished and secretly-under-satisfied adults, playing with language and telling each other stories about our lives, both real and dreamed. Not that this is a bad thing.  No, No it’s not! It’s a good, self-empowering form of expressing ourselves, sharing life, uplifting the spirit and other positive enhancing things.

…and then there is Finish The Sentence Friday. They might as well say, ‘hey!  we lost all the cool ink blot cards, so tell you what, here’s a phrase. we need you to tell us the first thing that comes into your mind. And, with any luck, 60 or 70 people can look in and see if they agree that it looks like ‘2 mother squids wrestling in a pool of blood’, or …’a pretty butterfly’.  Good luck.

So keeping with tradition and all, we must be at Janine’s parent’s house and Kate has just gone ahead and taken the bottle from the built in bar for use in our little game. Stephanie she has that look again and her friends know that something unexpected will happen somewhere just as things seem to be winding down and Kristi…. lol  Kristi you know she’s here somewhere, she has her own car (at least she say’s it’s her own car)… she seems to have disappeared when those older kids showed up…

The Best Part of my Day is…

Easy ‘Finish’: …early mornings because it is not only the quietest time of the day, but it is the time of day when hope and optimism has the most credibility. The time to make plans for the coming day, the night preceding having the effect of erasing the disappointment and under-acheivement and lowered expectations of the previous days. Mornings are the Time for Goals and Good Attitude

Less Easy ‘Finish’: … the incredibly fleeting moment when a difficult task is completed and those around me feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. For that moment I stand among them and forget the past (triumphs and failures) and the future (fear and expectations) and feel like I belong.

Wakefield Doctrine Quick Insight #4

If the day had to be divided up according to which of the three predominant worldviews (aka personality types) were most ‘at their best’ it would be as follows:

Early Morning- until shortly after Lunch: clarks

Late Morning- until Mid Afternoon (short interlude and then) Mid Evening until Whenever: scotts

Early Afternoon until Late Evening: rogers

Hey!  Don’t forget this afternoon!!  After School Special Call-in!  you have questions? call us! you have complaints? call us! you don’t have the phone number? call us…. 218-339-0422  access code 512103 followed by the # sign

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

Today is Sunday, Day 2 of the TToT. One of the coolest things about this blog (for me) is that it does not stop until late Sunday night. Come on! you remember! that one party that you were at once  (and tried and tried to re-create for the rest of your life) that was and incredibly good Saturday Night Party  and  how it almost stopped at, like 2:30 am (when you either give up on getting lucky or you get lucky), but it didn’t stop! …and you found yourself talking to interesting people and they were interested in what you were contributing and it seemed like you never repeated yourself and then it started to get light out and you found that other people wanted to get breakfast too and even after breakfast someone came up with an idea and the day took on a new energy and you went through the day as a continuation of Saturday Night  just different in a better-yet-equal sort of way and then you ended up home on Sunday Night, exhausted but happy, nothing broken (literally or figuratively) with no regrets (about what you did or even about having to go to work the next morning)…the TToT is like that! Just a teensy bit different.

…speaking of different.  lol  So, I was thinking this morning, ‘but, …but! I came up with a list on the basis of the whole preceding week! do they have any idea how much work that is? they’re (mostly) women  they have talent for sensing emotion and putting it in words!  not fair!’  So, being the clark that I am, today I will present my TToH&RO List.  I started out with ‘Hope’  but that was too… wishy, un-grounded or something, so I added the ‘RO’ which stands for Reasonable Optimistic. Not quite Goal Setting, and not dreamy Hopes… just what I plan to try to find in the world in the coming week.

In the coming Week I will be open to:

1) looking forward to work, as an opportunity to improve my understanding of those I interact with,

2) exploring my desire to understand those I interact with, it can simply be a way to deal with others that it will require me to better understand myself

3) enjoy the weather, which is expected to remain moderate, so I will be optimistic about how ‘bad’ a Winter we will be subject to in this part of the planet

4) work on a project with Cyndi, well it’s actually I’m working on an idea of a project with Cyndi… to figure out how we can manage a live video Post with the 2 of us somehow in it (involves the use of technology, but in a good way…lol)

5) looking forward to TMT Tuesday ( Jen and Kristi ) and will make every effort to find out the prompt before Tuesday morning!

6) am reasonably optimystic that I will continue with my new exercise regime that I started last week…(speaking of optimistic outlook, the good thing about not exercising is that when you do get back to it your ‘threshold of exhaustion’ is so much nearer to your rest state! so I can get a great workout feeling in half the time!)

7) still dealing with the state of flux that I am in about my blogging. …fortunately this is a never ending cycle for me: i.e. I say, “what the hell, I’m gonna have fun” then it becomes “oh man, I better be careful not to alienate the Readers I have” which leads to, “jeez I gots nothing to write” and finally (so far)  “the hell with being successful, I gonna have me some fun!”

8) the Video Brunch this morning…every Sunday with Michelle and them, has been fun and interesting  …can’t wait

9) continue the Wakefield Doctrine ‘hey!-this-is-an-Effective-Tool-see-watch-the-effect-it-has-when-applied-to-a-live-Subject’

10) that Lizzi and Christine the other Hostini will sense the true spirit of my efforts here (of course, Dyanne, she a total wildcard… damn, just have to take my chances!)

* TToH&RH:  Ten Things of Hope and Reasonable Optimism

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

The is the 19th installment of the bloghop series Ten Things of Thankful.

Started by Lizzi Rogers (aka Considerer),  the Ten Things of Thankful (TToT) invites blog writers and others to share the things, events, people and experiences that have cause them to feel grateful in the course of the preceding week. The format is open, although the recommend list is comprised of 10 such items that engender a feeling of Thankfulness. So every Saturday, we (in this case, by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’) will dash off a list of Ten things that I can imagine feeling grateful for and then I run out the door to work. As anyone who has participated in the bloghop-that-Lizzi-built before knows, the fun is in the give and take, the conversations that grow from the Comments and Replies and, only like other pleasures of life that, while the enjoyment never diminishes, the frequency does… you can come back and see new Comments and Post through out the weekend and…and! if you want to jump into a Comment Thread…have at it. As Aleister would have said,”…do what you will…yo”

Not that I would feel any need to do something different this week, (lol) but here, in b-quotes is a shout-out to people as relating to my favorite Doctrine…every week I hope to find an understanding and appreciation of one of the co-hostini and write about them in a fun and somewhat charming way. Enjoy

So this week a shoutout to: Kristi (who writes exactly as I would, provided I possessed: a) her rhetorical/writing skill; b) a different gender; c) the perspective of a parent (of a human child),  for providing me with the very simple fun of seeing an idea that was in my mind (sorta…a potential the first intimation of a good time, if you will, especially when it comes to bloghops like TMTT or FTSF (and) Christine who, by virtue of the worldview that she would appear (to me) to have* is every bit the encouraging and challenging, frustrating and annoying, helpful and demanding a member of a blogging group  you could hope for, she manages to keep it young and fun and (somehow) despite it all, no one breaks a lamp or spills anything on the couch that will get us in trouble when the adults get home and zoe who, while (relatively) new to the group, appears to have a secondary aspect that is not all that common, at least among the people we have gotten into ‘the conversation’ with so far and, for that reason, holds the hope and the fear that the boundaries of this here Doctrine here will be expanded and (therefore) the understanding of how to put it to the best use as a tool to understand the world as we relate ourselves to it.**

To the List!!

This week’s List of Ten Things. I am thankful/grateful/appreciative/relieved and ‘are-you-sure-that’s-all? for:

1) new insights into the dynamics (including a clearer picture of the role of  ‘re-expressing’ as it applies to reaction of a person of one predominant worldview vis-à-vis a different worldview) of the relationships between a clark and a roger

2) the persistence of ‘spell-nanny’ to try to get me to use the word,  lithe’ when I try to type ‘little’,   as in  ” …while the Principles of the Doctrine are fairly straightforward, it does demand a lithe effort on the part of new followers”  (is it just me or does anyone dream of writing a Post that is built on using these incorrect corrections?)

3) nice weather ( laughter in the room on the other side of the screen you’re reading, ” Items 1 and 2  and then the weather, that’ll get the new Reader sitting up a little straighter in their seats!”)

4) having the previous work week nearly complete, it was, to no small a degree, very frustrating. It was not that there was a tremendous amount of work and frustration, but my response at times was to get really pissed off…at things that I could not control. What made (my response) unpleasant (to me), was that I happen to believe that, we are responsible for how we feel…

5) indulging in negative emotions and getting all mad and such at work, to the extent that when I mentioned to a co-worker that I was less than happy, she replied, ‘I know, that’s why I’ve been avoiding coming anywhere near you today’. I felt gratitude and pride at my accomplishment

6) the Wakefield Doctrine, for allowing me to explore parts of my self that I generally do not pay much attention to, i.e. the emotional side.  (as a self-development tool) I am increasingly impressed at how much potential there is in this thing for bringing parts of my personality ‘on-line’. Having said that, I am impressed by how totally difficult the process is! Simple? yes, (just take the tools of the Wakefield Doctrine and apply them) easy?  lol not even close.

7) my….  collaborators, correspondents,  co-writes, co-hotties, fellow bloggers, co-participants in blogation, friends, with whom, I feel comfortable enough to write an item like this one.

8) grateful for the comfort of the (momentary) delusion that the weather might not continue to get cold and unpleasant

9) glad that my admittedly personalized way of viewing the seasons holds forth the promise that winter will be over in 82 more days!

10 Hey! new Participant!! if you had the foresight to read Posts before trying to write a List, it is permissible  to use ‘finish this list’ as one of the Ten Things of Thankful. Just in case there are any clarks out there struggling.

* Wakefield Doctrine Secret Rule #1.6  ‘your worldview is your(you did not see an apostrophe here, you should have you’ eye’s examined)s to recognize, understand, accept and use as you would, no one can tell you that you are a clark or a scott or a roger…even if they know the answer, it is for you, not them’

** New Readers Alert! sometimes I write things that upon re-reading, I have no idea what I meant  lol  but part of the licentious fun here is I can leave it as it is and (maybe) correct it later.

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

From the beguiling, yet insidiously insightful question trove of the 4 bloggerini… Janine (“...would you like to see my etchings?“) and Kate (“no, really it’s true! here, wait! I’ll show you!”) and Stephanie (“…most people don’t understand, you seem like you do.”) and Kristi ( “…yes! no, it’s going to be like nothing you would have thought“) here is this week’s mirror of the soul:

Once, in public, I saw somebody…

…who was, as it turns out, not me!

… one morning, back in the 1990s, I found myself on a sidewalk in the middle of the commercial section of a small town in New England. I can’t recall the reason for being in this part of this particular town at that particular moment, but there I was walking along the sidewalk, past an Emporium India shop, approaching a curio/gift shop ( the sign read, ‘gifts small and dear‘). Not only did I have the sidewalk to myself, there was virtually no cars or trucks on the street, which actually was named, Main Street. As I walked past a small consignment store on my right, from the corner of my eye, I caught the reflection of my side  of the street in a plate-glass shop window on the opposite side of the street. I saw a man walking along the sidewalk and I didn’t recognize him.

The time that elapsed, between my observing the reflection in the storefront window and ‘recognizing’ myself was just long enough for the question to form in my mind, ‘well, Clark who were you expecting to see?’

I am grateful for that ‘pause’ and especially (for) that question, because it lead me to realize that I have, somewhere deep in my mind, a set physical image of myself. Not so much a picture as a ‘oh yeah, that’s me‘ and it it was this set image that did not correspond to what I saw in the plate-glass window. Being the clark that I am, I was able to hold off on returning to the real world, I did not do what the majority might do, which would be to laugh and discount the experience as being ‘the sun in my eyes’ or (perhaps) an imperfection in the plate-glass. No, I was off to try to learn just who I was expecting to see in the reflection and, near as I can determine, I was expecting a man in his late 20s in the ‘mirror’ across the street that morning. Now I should say, this ‘expecting to see in the mirror…’ this is not looking in the mirror and wondering who it is facing back to me, this is more like how you can run up a flight of stairs without needing to look at my feet, it is like playing an instrument or lifting a child in the air without having to think about how much they weigh. We’re talking about a pretty close to unconscious assumption about my physical appearance. You might say that it’s a baseline conception of my own physical self. (Well, you might if you are a clark, lol)

Since that moment in October years ago, I have discussed this concept with people, people who I judge have that… joy in the challenge of the odd and unusual, the curiosity-philic sort of people who I find coming to this here blog here, and once they get the idea of the ‘baseline’ image, the conversation gets even more interesting. There seems to be no one stage of life for this self-image lock in to occur, it varies a lot among the people I have talked to, centering on the late 20s and 30s, but there is always a ‘lock in age’

Maybe this is why, for many of us, we never feel like our parents.