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Therapeutic Repetitions

So-back in therapy, physical not psychological. After a stroke caused by undiagnosed diabetes followed by CABGx4 (that's coronary artery bypass graft a/k/a cut your chest open and cut-n-paste some arteries) it leaves a person in a state where they are at the mercy of the medical establishment, well-meaning though they are. This is my third go-round with the therapy thing-a-ma-jig and I should be getting used to it, one would think. It's all about repetitions, therapy that is. In order to get the brain and muscles working in synch again you have to do REPS about 30,000 times. Yes, you read that right: THIRTY THOUSAND. Like learning to play the piano, or hit a baseball, or catch a football, it's all about developing muscle memory, or that's what I was told by my therapist.

So-this goes against my nature. I figure if I just do it correctly once, that should be enough. I've learned it, mastered it, and can move on to the next thing. That is the idea when I write computer programs, after all. Plan it out, write it correctly, and you get the gold star or pay bonus. But of course that's not how most things in life are. To truly learn something takes practice, and practice takes repetition, repetition, and more repetition as you seek to master the task. Sometimes you even have to go back, start all over and learn again. Even computer programs are often written that way-that's why we have Version 2.x of things.

So-everything, including things like politics and religion, takes some repetition to get right, or to even get close to getting right. And, even more cumbersome, every generation seems to start from the beginning and repeat the mistakes of the past. Sure, there are some things that SEEM to be the same, and other things that are passed down to the next generation, but we have to learn that through repetition of past mistakes.

So-why all this repetition? Why can't everything be right the first time so that we could not have to worry about doing it over to get it right. Because…

Life is an adventure to be lived. It's therapeutic that way. I shall try to explain. If we always knew in advance what the outcome was going to be then we could predict the results of our actions. Knowing the results, assuming we all knew what the perfect result would be, leaves us no choice. We would all do the same thing the same way. And then what? With everything done perfectly it would get pretty boring. But therapy is about setting goals, seeking to accomplish goals, and gaining the satisfaction of achieving goals.

The greatest goal to be achieved is to live a good life. Seeking that goal is our mutual therapy, often requiring a community to achieve. Interestingly, seeking that goal often puts us in apparent conflict with others who are convinced the goal that the community should achieve lies along a different path. This can lead to violence, even war, as some become convinced there is only one target to be achieved. To achieve peaceful coexistence as each reaches for a different conclusion, requires great tolerance for others and their opinions. To do that requires a lot of allowance for what we perceive as errors in others.

July 2015