All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.
Interpretation
Worrying is a natural result of our intelligence, as it allows us to foresee potential problems.
In this quote, Norman Doidge highlights the dual nature of intelligence, which empowers us to think critically and creatively, while simultaneously making us prone to worry about the future. Our ability to anticipate outcomes, both positive and negative, stems from our cognitive capabilities, drawing attention to the fact that worry is not just a burden but also an integral part of being an intelligent human.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a mental health seminar to discuss the nature of worry and its relationship with intelligence.
Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.
Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.
We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
If our body is a perfect expression of our thought about body, and if our thought about body is that it’s condition has everything to do with inner image and nothing to do with time, then we don’t have to be impatient for being too young or frightened of being too old.
Do not be fooled by one who recites the Qurân. His recitation is but speech – but look to those who act according to it.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
I know who I am, I know what I can and can't do. I know what I will and won't do. I know what I'm capable of and I don't agree to do things that I don't think I can pull off.
I looked at all friends, and did not find a better friend than safeguarding the tongue. I thought about all dresses, but did not find a better dress than piety. I thought about all types of wealth, but did not find a better wealth than contentment in little. I thought of all types of good deeds, but did not find a better deed than offering good advice. I looked at all types of sustenance, but did not find a better sustenance than patience.
Remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action.
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