thinking thursday

June 20, 2013 in thinking thursday

MIND

Really, it’s okay to say “autistic”: “There is continued across-the-board insistence that person-first is the only respectful way to refer to people with any disability. This is simply not true, despite it continuing to pop up in the curriculum and policies of most education, government and non-profit agencies. These policies need to be updated to reflect that there are exceptions to these person-first guidelines. That people who choose to use the word autistic are not being ignorant, offensive, politically incorrect, disrespectful or insensitive. That even if you personally don’t want to use the word, other people do. People who have the right to choose the words they use to refer to themselves and their community.”

As a devoted fan of “Gilligan’s Island,” I loved this list. I’m a new Fan Girl of thinker and writer Andrew Solomon. And I loved this reflection on meeting him from another new Fan Girl.

This might be the most effective (and literary) bad book review I’ve ever seen. Not that it will hurt sales.

BODY

Putting this on my reading list.

Thanks to my friend Grace in New Zealand who posted this recipe for creamy yellow pepper soup.

I like it when these four words are used together: Rustic Blueberry Tart Recipe.

“Let’s go find a container large enough to bathe a puppy in and fill it with booze and laugh and laugh and laugh.”

SOUL

You’re going to have to do some big soul work if you find yourself in this situation.

A better way to die: “The message that the palliative care team is trying to convey to the world of aggressive medical intervention is a straightforward one: healing people doesn’t necessarily mean saving lives. ‘More and more we are refusing to acknowledge important aspects of what it is to be human, including death,’ Seigan points out. ‘People want to talk, they want to be heard and understood. But a lot of the time what we see in health care is a breakdown of communication.'”

WORD

“It is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you are turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off with the first strong wind, making you less and less. Some people accumulate more emotional rust than others. Depression starts out insipid, fogs the days into a dull color, weakens ordinary actions until their clear shapes are obscured by the effort they require, leaves you tired and bored and self-obsessed- but you can get through all that. No happily, perhaps, but you can get through. No one has ever been able to define the collapse point that marks major depression, but when you get there, there’s not much mistaking it.” ? Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

1 comment to " thinking thursday "


Something Good | A Thousand Shades of Gray

June 24, 2013 AT 1:33PM

[…] 27. A Better Way to Die: Bringing together medicine and spirituality for end-of-life care, shared by Patti Digh on her Thinking Thursday list. […]