song for theme #3: Focused Vision

                                                    “If I Grieve Completely” by Stephen P. Cook

        to be sung to the tune of “She Smiled Sweetly” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards / The Rolling Stones

Why do these tears fill my eyes again?¹

There’s pain, it hurts, there’s a hole in my life

You were my best friend and also my wife

If I grieve completely

Pain and suffer discreetly

Let go bittersweetly

My life can go on

How to find closure, bring an end?

Wall off the pain, compartmentalize²

Respect this wall, I won’t hear the cries

Wall off hurt completely

Confine thoughts concretely

Live humbly and meekly

My life can go on

Beyond surviving to thriving?

Prepare the soil, focus on here and now

Plant tasks in a list and through it I’ll plow³

Remove anxiety completely

Order my mind uniquely

Bask in the sun so sweetly

My life will go on

On and on and on

My life will go on

SONG—NOTES / COMMENTS     (this song is part of the author’s personal story)

1—This is an autobiographical song relating to the summer/fall 2013 period in the author’s life.

2—This is perhaps the emotional equivalent of a general problem solving strategy: if facing the big overriding problem is simply a

      too difficult and intimidating task, then an oft employed way to proceed is to break it, into several smaller more manageable

      problems, and work on them one at a time.

3—Concentrating on small, mundane tasks or generally losing oneself in work can be a welcome alternative to thinking about

       bigger personal problems or big picture type concerns. A danger associated with narrowing one’s viewpoint is becoming out

       of touch with the reality of a situation. One way of bumbling into that would be adopting childish wishing thinking in which

       ignoring problems seemingly makes them go away.  This simplistic, fairy tale, magical, childhood fantasy way of dealing with

       problems is to be contrasted with the planning/hard work/needing to perform repeated trials before success situation that adults

       solving real problems more typically are faced with.  Appreciating all that, one should nonetheless realize there can be times

       when keeping emotions under control requires purposely narrowing one’s focus. 

Comment: this theme has value as emotional armor.  The song gets at how compartmentalizing can shield you from pain (walling it off!). This is part of a maladaptive coping mechanism called dissociation. It may work in the short run, but won’t get at root causes or help you break painful associations.  More emotionally positive: “focused attention” meditation provides an extreme application of one aspect of this theme. The cover of the November, 2014 issue of Scientific American advertises that “the neuroscience of meditation” shows that such practice “changes the brain, boosting focus and easing stress.”