Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Awareness")

September 1-7, 2024 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Awareness"

Opening Line of the Week

Over the years, I’ve seen many people refer to an important awareness that significantly influenced the direction of their lives, but never have I seen anyone use the phrase “two awarenesses.” That fact alone kept me reading. Block continued:

“I became aware of the world of realistic adult fiction, with all its power to inform and enchant and absorb one utterly. I became aware, too, of my own talent with words. I seemed to be capable of doing with them what I had been unable to do with a baseball bat or a hammer or a monkey wrench or a slide rule.”

Block, who is still going strong at age 86, is one of the modern era’s most prolific crime/mystery authors. I hope you also noticed that the title of his 2015 book cleverly tweaked the familiar saying, “The Time of Our Lives.”

For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

On September 5, 1916, this man was born in Augusta, Georgia. The child of an African-American father and a Scotch-Irish mother, he grew up in an intellectually stimulating and upwardly-mobile environment (his mother was a teacher and his father a hotel doorman who dearly wanted his children to have more opportunities than he had). Growing up, he attended the Haines Institute, Augusta’s first school for African-American children (originally founded by Lucy Craft Laney in 1883).

After getting his high school diploma in 1933, he went on to Augusta’s Paine College, where he majored in English and began writing poetry and short stories for the school newspaper. After graduating in 1937, he went on to Fisk University, obtaining an M.A. degree in English a year later. In 1938, he moved to Chicago, where he began post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago, worked at the Federal Writer’s Project, and launched his career as a free-lance writer.

He got his first big break in 1944, when he was awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award for “Health Card,” a powerful short story about racial prejudice in the South. Normally, such an award would nicely position a writer for a book contract, but when he tried to find a publisher for a larger novel on Southern race problems, he was rejected again and again. 

To make a living, he turned to writing novels set in the antebellum South, but featuring white male protagonists. His very first effort, The Foxes of Harrow (1946) was a great success, making him the first African-American to write a bestselling novel. A year later, after the premiere of the 1947 film adaptation (starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara), he became the first black writer to have a novel adapted into a film. 

Over the next twenty years, he wrote many popular romance novels—he called them “costume novels”—building a readership of predominantly white fans who had no idea they were reading books by a black author. In the late 1960s, he began to feature non-white protagonists in extensively-researched historical novels, like Judas, My Brother (1968) and Speak Now (1969). 

When he died in 1991, he was literary history’s most successful African-American novelist, with 33 novels that sold more than 55 million copies. In addition to his gifts as a storyteller, he also had a talent for composing aphoristic observations. An example is this powerful observation from Judah, the narrator of Judas, My Brother (1968):

Who is this person? (Answer below)

What Role Has “Awareness” Played in Your Life?

Many years ago, when I first came across the quotation in this week’s Puzzler, my mind immediately went back to a precise moment in my childhood. Because the experience was so deeply personal, I won’t share the details here, but what happened was perfectly captured by the powerful phrase—the onslaught of awareness.

I was twelve years old at the time, and the event is as clear in my memory as if it happened last week. About that experience, yet another quotation absolutely “nailed” what occurred that day:

Over the years, I’ve met many other people who’ve experienced a sudden onslaught of awareness in their childhood. In each and every case, the experience was like crossing the Rubicon: there was no going back to the way life was before the event occurred.

One of my early therapy clients described just such an experience when her first menstrual period made a sudden and completely unexpected appearance in the middle of a seventh-grade recess—just as she and her girl friends were trying to impress a group of boys with their skills at jumping rope. Another client, a man in his fifties, reported a similar “onslaught” when, as a high school junior, he discovered that his deeply religious mother had been having a longstanding affair with his high school football coach.

The concept of “awareness” or “being aware” has long been a source of fascination for me because I’ve struggled to figure out exactly what it means—and to describe what it is in clear and simple terms.

When we go to the American Heritage Dictionary, we find that awareness means “Having knowledge or cognizance.” Even when the AHD editors go on to explain that “Aware implies knowledge gained through one’s own perceptions, as of the attitudes of others, or by means of information,” this is a wholly unsatisfactory explanation. The same may be said of The APA Dictionary of Psychology’s definition of the term: “Perception or knowledge of something.” To my pleasant surprise, the Wikipedia entry on awareness was more helpful;

“Awareness is a term referring to the ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects, forces or patterns.”

What I like most about this definition is that it identifies awareness as an ability—or more precisely, a combination of abilities. Given this conception, awareness is all about using our brains and mental functioning to better understand the world in which we live, to more fully appreciate the wondrous nature of that world, and to help us function in a more effective and satisfying manner in it.

Compared to those who are unaware, people with high levels of awareness tend to be far more perceptive and attentive to what is going on in their lives. They recognize patterns, sense contradictions, recognize incongruities, evaluate competing points of view, and, perhaps most important of all, they tend to see familiar things from a fresh perspective.

They are often also adept at picking up on subtle social cues, like the atmosphere of a room, the mood of a crowd, or the “body language” of people they’re interacting with. With this heightened perception of what’s going on around them, they’re better able to adapt their behavior or modify their conceptions, often resulting in better decisions and more successful interactions.

High-awareness people are often “on the lookout” for potential risks and pitfalls, much like the captain of a ship sailing through potentially perilous waters. And simply by paying attention, they pick up on things things that low-awareness people don’t even notice.  In many ways, it is almost as if they have a special antenna that allows them to tune into channels that are unavailable to those without their abilities.

At this point, it is helpful to remind ourselves that low-awareness people not only don’t “see” the same things high-awareness people do, they see far less. Let’s play this out with what is now regarded as a truism in human psychology—without awareness, people would be completely unable to resolve personal or interpersonal problems.

For all of the reasons we discussed above, high-awareness people know when they’re experiencing problems—and, even more important, they grasp the essential notion that they might even be partially or largely responsible for the problems.

In stark contrast, people with limited awareness also have a limited view of human problems. For the most part, they see other people as responsible for the difficulties, viewing the situation as a them problem, not a we problem—and certainly not an I problem. Because of their limited conceptual abilities, they also find it extremely difficult to admit a mistake or acknowledge a weakness. The consequence is predictable. Unaware—often completely unaware—of how they’re contributing to the problems they are experiencing, there is zero motivation to change. It’s that simple.

“Heightened Awareness”

There’s one other kind of awareness I’m thinking about this week, and let me bring my remarks to a close with a few words on the subject of “heightened awareness.” I first got interested in the topic nearly a half-century ago, when I happened upon an 1887 observation from the French poet Charles Baudelaire:

“There are moments in one’s existence when time and space are deepened, and the feeling of existence is immensely heightened.”

Shortly thereafter, I learned that the subject was a source of great fascination to poets, as when Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Or when George Eliot wrote:

While nobody has ever literally heard the grass grow, the idea of being able to do so has always appealed to me, for it suggests a oneness with nature and an ability to get lost in the eternity of a moment. It also brings to mind an incident that occurred many years ago on a backpacking trip with two friends in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Midway through a particularly challenging portion of the trek, I stopped to catch my breath, savor the scent of the forest, and breathe in the fresh mountain air. While doing so, I glanced over to see one of my pals taking his pulse and looking at his wristwatch in order to calculate the progress we were making. Our other friend, however, was nowhere in sight.

Worried about his welfare, we backtracked about fifty yards when we spotted him lying face down on the side of the hiking path. Now greatly concerned, we ran the last twenty yards to attend to him. When he heard us coming, he looked over with a big smile on his face and said, “Check this out!” It turns out that he had stumbled on some kind of insect colony in a decaying log. After stopping to take a look, he became totally transfixed. And then, turning his attention back to the nest, he said with a tone of amazement, “There’s a whole world in here!’”

Later that evening, as we reviewed the day over a crackling campfire, our friend said that one of his college buddies had recently died in a car accident. The event stimulated a major reexamination of his priorities, he said, and instead of focusing like a laser on his career, he was spending more time “enjoying the present moment” and “smelling the roses.” He then removed a piece of paper from his wallet, unfolded it, and read these words to us:

This passage had become a motto for him, and the experience from earlier in the day was simply an example of his new approach to life. The entire incident now springs to mind every time the subject of heightened awareness is brought up.

Like millions of other people, I often find myself preoccupied—or even consumed—with my various goals and projects. And occasionally, when I feel the pendulum of my life swinging a little too far in the unawareness direction, I step away from my office, settle into the rocking chair on our back porch, close my eyes, and spend some time trying to hear the grass grow and the sound of a squirrel’s heartbeat.

So far, I still haven’t heard these specific sounds, but the fluttering wings of a hummingbird, the whooshing of the wind through the trees, the noisy territorial disputes of birds in the back yard, and the many other sounds coming from nature’s grand orchestra have been entirely satisfying. If you’ve done something similar, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, perhaps it’s time to give it a try.

This week, take a few moments to think about the role that awareness, unawareness, and “heightened awareness” have played in your life. As you do, let your thinking be stimulated by this week’s selection of quotations on the subject:

• Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future. — Eric Berne

• One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?” — Rachel Carson

• Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are. — Eric Hoffer

• Imagine that you’re awake and walking about amongst people who sleep; how can you communicate with them? You realize that they can have no idea about your awareness because they’re still sleeping. You used to be like that yourself. But now you are awake. — Hazrat Khan

• The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself. — Henry Miller

• The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. — M. Scott Peck

• Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. — May Sarton

• It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you deeper understanding. — Vincent Van Gogh

• Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. — Henry David Thoreau

For source information on these quotations, and many others on the subject of AWARENESS and LACK OF AWARENESS, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Frank Yerby (1916-91)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “SELF-PRAISE.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note