This one is open for students and families – if parents are free and willing (not required!).
Set aside about 20 minutes. Have your comp book open. Read this entire post before beginning.
When you are ready, click here.
You do not need to read the article (but can if you so wish); instead, when you are ready, click on “Listen.”
I’d like you to focus in particular on the section from around the 6-minute mark to the end, but please do also listen to the beginning. In today’s world, last week is old news, but it does help the stage for the reset of the interview.
While you listen, from the 6-min. mark on, take notes in your comp book of images and ideas that stand out to you (you can write or write and draw); however, when Dr. Maskalyk leads the audience through the breathing exercise, put down your pen/pencil and join in.
Afterwards, either on your own or with your family, if they joined in, discuss and/or make notes about what stood out for you. How might you use these ideas in your own life? What difference might it make? Can you make any connections to Richard Wagamese or other previous learning?
Then, use “Leave a Reply” to leave at least one idea of when what you just heard might be useful/helpful. Try to be specific. You can build off of others’ ideas if you like. Remember to use your class name in the Name field (if parents post ideas, they can perhaps use “Mr. [your child’s class name]” or “Mrs. [your child’s class name]”)
Please complete this by Monday morning. Bring your ideas to share in next week’s class meetings!
Now, breathe…
An idea I found helpful is having faith to let love in. This idea of trusting everybody to let good feelings in is something that I think could benefit my life
An idea that kept coming up and that may help some people is meditation because it helps you to relax and focus. This would be good because a lot of people in our society are panicking and stressing way to much.
Yeah, for example, the angry man who came in and was aggressive/abusive
I think an idea that was helpful and interesting to me is, the perfect place. I like the idea of how we are in this perfect place, looking out a window. There’s the past that will never occur again (exactly the same), and the future that doesn’t exist, you just have to create that space and stay there. I think it will really benefit me to not worry about the future that doesn’t exist or the past that has past.
the idea of a perfect place makes me think of richard wagamese’s writing space. i think that maybe if you work to create a perfect space, like richard wagamese did, it will be permanent and you can go back to it.
Something I found interesting was a sentence Maskalyk said briefly: Where we find the perfect space that fits us, where we recognize that the anxieties of the future, a future that never will arrive, and the past that will never again occur.” I think this quote is perfect, since all the talking and news and videos about the virus are only making us even more anxious, and leading us to worries like “What if this is the end of the world?” or “What if this is like the Black Death?” So it’s important to relax and recognize, or at least hope, that we will get past this, and become even stronger afterwards.
I think that the idea of staying dedicated is helpful because as Dr. Maskalyk said, “I know that people are afraid and anxious, but if we all stay dedicated to this, then what we see on the other side will be truly beautiful.” If we stay strong and we don’t give up, what we will see is a world where the CoronaVirus is gone and you can hang out with you friends and your family. I think this will benefit all of us to stay strong and to do everything we can do to help our country.
I think an idea that was helpful and useful to me was the concept of seeing things from other points of view. Like how Dr. Maskalyk saw through the angry man and realized he was just a little boy that got hurt so he wouldn’t accept love, I think we should all consider why people are doing things instead of just calling it “unreasonable” or “terrible”. Maybe you see a robber trying to steal the world’s second-largest diamond. You could call him names and throw bananas at him, or remember this idea and think about why he is stealing the diamond. Maybe he was in a class of 23 super-rich kids and him. You never know. Then you could reason with him to get him to stop stealing the diamond.
Something I found really interesting was when he talked about the abusive man actually being a hurt child who was afraid of letting love in. It shows us that we need to learn to look deeper to find the truth and that things aren’t always what the look like, it also teaches us how actions have consequences when you treat someone wrong during their childhood it could really affect them in the future. It’s like the ripple effect Richard Wagamese talked about, one mistake could lead to many more.
I agree. I recently read a psychology book, and it explains that human who suffer in their youth have a hard time recovering from it, and usually end up in mental illness or depression. When humans start off, they are in a blank state, and the people around them shape their personalities. This man must have been hurt as a child, and now lashes out his anger at others where he previously kept it inside.
I liked the idea of staying in the moment. Dr. Maskalyk talked about staying in the moment and creating the perfect sized space for your own personal needs. The present is a place that we know clearly, the future is confusing and cannot be predicted with precision and the past is often blurred and twisted. We need to stay in the present. We don’t need to think about what we did wrong in the past or what will happen in the future. The only thing we need to do is focus on what to do now. In terms of coronavirus, we need to stop fearing or panicking, we need to do what is best for us now.
Another idea is trust and safety. We need to trust and feel safe in order to let love in. In hard times, it’s often very hard to feel safe or trust people, but in order to fight the Coronavirus, we need to be connected with others, we need to love as much as we used to do.
I found it interesting how effective something as simple as meditating is against something as dangerous as COVID-19. It reminds me that complicated questions don’t always need complicated answers.
I think something I learned from this is that sometimes you just have to breath and stop stressing about everything you could possibly stress about, whether you’re panicking about whether or not you’re going to die or thinking, “What if I failed my history exam?!? I’d be so royally screwed!!!” And yeah, RazPoutine, you basically used the phrase I was going to use, which is that complicated questions don’t always need complicated answers. (Of course, with calculus, that most definitely does not apply)
it most definitely does not prove true with calculus, but, regarding your first point, about how we should choose to be calm instead of stress out, I feel like it applies to our lives in many ways. And I think the reason evidently why a couple people chose that part, was because we can understand that, relate to it.
“We are deciding who we will meet on the other side of it”
This quote stood out to me because it reminds me to stay in the present while still thinking about the future and not totally demolishing it with today’s thoughts. It also reminds me that the future of this epidemic hasn’t been chosen for us yet and it is only going to turn out how we choose to view the problem.
What I found really interesting is how we can use meditation to create a space where we can just let go of all the stress, and that we can just take a deep breath, calm ourselves down, and think about the facts.
Something that stuck with me was the idea of being relaxed and alert at the same time. Hearing this, my mind immediately jumped to all the work we did on mindset and pliable awareness. I believe that being in this state is extremely beneficial in times like these where there is panic about COVID-19 and what to wipe your behind with… It’s quite like what Prof. Great Brain always says, “recognize those thoughts, and let them go”. This will help induce a sense of calm, while still realizing that the things going on in the world right now are scary. But unlike just being alert, being relaxed as well will also induce a sense of: we are going to get through this, sooner or later.
An Idea that stuck with me was to make your window, your perfect place, and take it with you. I resonated with this because I can relate to it, and I think most of us can too. We all had points in our life where we felt scared, or pressurized or even nervous, I think doing something like meditation can and most likely will bring some sense of calm during storms like being scared, etc.
when i think about that, i immediately think of the idea of palimpsest. i believe that when you can find that perfect space, you will be able to let go of some of the stress and worry building up inside you. and when you do that, you’ll be able to forgive others and write over the previous words.
Like many others have said, an interesting idea to me was how breathing gives you space and within this space is the room to grow. Although it’s a complex and terrifying subject, simple things like setting aside some time to breath/meditate can help.
The whole idea about meditating and making a space where you’re just existing and already know everything you need to know could be really helpful in a stressful situation. In my life it could be when I have a bunch of things I need to do, and I’m trying to think about them all at once, when really it would be more effective and save a lot of brain power if I instead focused on things one at a time.
An idea I found interesting was when Dr. Maskalyk said something along the lines of, “Future will never arrive, a past that will never recur.” It helps you understand that the current time is the most important. You can’t change your past, or fix your future, if you don’t fix the current time.
I found it interesting, that a change in perspective could make such a difference, for example, the angry man who came in, instead of looking at him as an abusive, aggressive man, he looked at it from a different perspective, a child that was hurt and not willing to accept love.
I like the idea of “we decide who we comes out as after this” (not an exact quote, a general idea) because I think it is sort of up to us to decide how to treat this new corona virus and what our response and reaction will be. I think it also helps us remember that we have been though this together as a race, and we came back from it.
I also think that the idea of being comfortable with uncertainty is helpful because I think I will have a lot of uncertainties in my life.
i think, building off the idea of the ‘perfect space’, that maybe the space isn’t actually perfect. at least to me, i was thinking about it and an idea came to me that it’s perfect for you in that specific time and mental place, however if you were to come back to it, you would find that it is no longer perfect.
I think the idea of having faith to let love in is an important idea to understand because it tells you to trust others and remember to feel good about yourself and everybody else.
One interesting I got from listening to it was how it can create space for you to think and space for you to calm down. This seems to especially useful now with the Pandemic and it can also be useful when you have a project due or other normal stress causers.
Something that stood out to me was that Dr. Maskalyk said “we’re ready” even though the rest of what he said sounded more like “we’re not ready and we’re panicking”. He was describing the situation and the situation looks grim (to me), but he still seems upbeat and confident. This proves that relaxing and thinking about something from a new angle helps a lot. It could be meditating, or even as simple as looking at funny memes to take your mind off things. It all depends on the person but the basic concept is the same.