me in 5 years…no but really.
autotelic personalities.
autotelic activity: one we do for its own sake because to experience it is the main goal.
To explain…
“Yet without disinterested interest life is uninteresting. There is no room in it for wonder, novelty, surprise, for transcending the limits imposed by our fears and prejudices. If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life…There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don’t become actually interesting until we devote attention to them.”
pong.
In my Occupational Therapy class, one of our lectures was on health; what and who defines health, the characteristics of healthy people, and how we can live healthier lives.
One of her points was your mental state, and the impact your mental thoughts and mental imagery can have oneself. To explain her point, she told us this story:
“Once there was a little boy in the 80’s who was very sick with a brain tumor. The doctors knew that surgery would be the only way to cure him.” She digressed…
“This may be too old for some of you, but a new video game had recently come out, called ‘Pong.’ It’s a simple game where a ball bounces between you and a wall of bricks and shapes; the goal was to keep the ball bouncing until you made all the shapes disappear.” She continued back to her story:
“On the day of the surgery, the nurses came in to prep the little boy before his operation. However, the little boy simply looked at the nurses and said, ‘My tumor is gone.’ The nurse felt bad for the little boy, sympathizing with him and simply saying, ‘I wish it was that easy hun, but your tumor is still there. It can’t just disappear.’ The little boy continued to insist the tumor was gone, enough to cause the nurses to take one more x-ray before he went under.”
“To the nurses and doctors surprise, the tumor was completely gone. No sight of it at all in the little boy, as if he had never been sick. In shock and amazement, the doctors asked the boy how he knew his tumor was gone. He simply said, ‘I kept playing Pong every day in my head against the tumor, until I had destroyed it.’ “
Never doubt the power of positive thinking.
