Good Morning Thinkers!

Amazing Grace Movie

Don't miss this one ... it's an inspiring movie about a powerful moment in history.  This year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the UK and the leading force behind that change was British politician, William Wilberforce. 

While I knew the story of John Newton, the slave ship captain who became a minister and wrote the title song, I did not know how the slave trade actually ended.  It was interesting to find out that rather than being beat down by rhetoric and reason, the slave trade was sapped of its energy by a legal maneuver that took away the profit in stealing, transporting and selling human beings. 

The movie is a stirring reminder of how much one person can do.  While there were many people involved in this movement, Wilberforce was the catalyst that kept it alive and forced the vote in the political arena.  It also made me wonder how we might remove the profit from war. 

Lest we think slavery is only a nasty note in our past, however, one reviewer reminds us,  "But the work of justice and mercy continues. 27 million men, women, and children are still enslaved around the globe."

Are You Happy?

Before you read any further, stop and answer the question:  "How happy are you?" and answer it with a number from 1 - 10 (10 being the highest level of happiness).

While that question seems an arbitrary, non-scientific way to determine a person's level of happiness, some scientists are saying that the answers produced are valid and predict things about the rest of our lives ... for instance, how long we'll live and how effective we will be in our lives.  BBC produced a six-part series on happiness which you can see here.

So, what was your answer?

The Missing Stage

Perhaps it's a bit foolish to fly in the face of an established field of research and science but after my last post, I began to think even more about the stages of grief.  Kubler-Ross suggested 5:  denial - anger - bargaining - depression - acceptance and the JAMA article suggested a different 5:  disbelief - yearning -anger - depression - acceptance.  While the JAMA stages felt more like my own experience, I suddenly realized they both stopped with acceptance.

That's the best we can hope for -- acceptance of the loss?  I don't think so.  There are too many examples of people who suffer horrible losses and then turn the loss into something new:  Christopher Reeve and his work for spinal cord injury, Candy Lightner forming the MADD foundation after the death of her daughter, and thousands of other examples.  There has to be another stage -- new growth, transformation, something that gives the loss meaning.  Not that every loss has to turn into a charitable foundation but somehow the loss has to provide space for something new that is meaningful.  Acceptance seems to imply a stopping point.  It's over and we're moving on.  But, within loss there is a huge energy that can, eventually, be used to fuel new growth.

So, I think we need to change the model and give people something to hope for, something to watch for, a belief that the phoenix will rise out of the ashes.  My stages of grief proposal would be:  disbelief - yearning - anger - depression - acceptance - rebirth.

In the process of thinking about this, I had to remind myself about the Phoenix myth.  The Wikipedia entry is posted below.