It’s not easy to be taken seriously and be funny. Nor is it easy to entertain without resorting to shock and “awe no don’t go there”.
Bruce Morton has been walking this thin line for years – intelligent observational comedy that makes you laugh.
Anyway today I got to meet him for coffee and thrash out some ideas. I don’t think there is anyone who understands the human condition more than a comic.
As a psychologist I have a lot to learn from our comedians.
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Just been listening to a health care worker and a cancer survivor being interviewed.
The survivor was big on mental attitude, having learned that there are three legs to the cancer survivors stool;
Mind
Body and
Spirit
The hospital takes care of the body but mind and spirit are up to the patient.
The health professional kept going on about “being realistic”.
The survivor had a much more interesting message, as he had beat odds of 410,000,000 to 1.
There is a lot I could say on this subject but I am going to restrict it to “being realistic”.
There are a number of flaws in the health professionals approach.
Firstly there is an assumption that they have all the facts correct.
There is an assumption that all things, including the cancer patient, are the same.
The truth is that everything is subjective. Nothing so complex is measurable or predictable. What I see as being real and what you see as being real are not the same.
So the health professional was taking a stance that her perception, her view of the world was more accurate than anyone else’s. But this is how we all feel. We all believe our own paradigm is the true paradigm.
The cancer survivor had a very different paradigm and all the health care worker could do was relegate his paradigm to hers. She called this “being realistic”.
If the cancer patient had listened to the people advising him to be realistic, he would have been dead, as the odds were against him. Expecting to survive was unrealistic for him. Thankfully he didn’t and he worked on mind and spirit and survived.
So the next time someone tells you to be realistic, ignore them. Better still knock them on their ass. It’s dangerous talk and it could get you killed.
Create paradigms that serve you. Yours is every bit as valid as anyone else’s. Do not be persuaded by their uniforms or status. Do not let their arrogance and blinkered view cost you your life.
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