He is at it again! My younger brother Nicholas, that is.
He obviously has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).
He can hardly sit still and his mind is constantly racing, so much input for one child’s brain. Anyways, he has been reading up on ADD in order to find out what the experts say about it.
As always, his version of what’s going on seems to be different than what most people are saying.
Nicholas is big into the concept of two qualities that complement each other such as yin/yang, light/dark, male/female, day/night, winter/summer, persona/shadow, entropy/syntropy (look it up!) He often uses the phrase “half promise, half prayer” to describe this harmonious balance of opposites. It’s one of his favorite sayings and he uses it a lot.
Connecting this to ADD is where this story is going. Fasten your seatbelts! Nicholas read a book entitled Data Smog which says that a person living in the 17th century would experience in his/her entire lifetime the same amount of incoming information as a person reading a weekday copy of the New York Times today. Our brain is being bombarded by stimuli. So are our senses. So much is coming at us that we can hardly digest and process it all. This is the essence of ADD. The flip side of this situation or the complement of ADD is IDD.
Intention Deficit Disorder or IDD (not a clinical diagnosis yet) is our inability to clearly identify and/or maintain a specific intention until a desired goal is met. It also includes our blocked access to the tools and strategies necessary for achieving intentions and goals.
Here are some examples to help explain how this works. On a mild level I may be so overwhelmed with information that I cant decide what I want to eat for dinner or what I want to do this weekend. On a more severe level I may not know what makes me happy or what my unique talents are. I may become so consumed with ADD that I don’t know what I want to do or how to make it happen, which is IDD. Nicholas says that this is what we need to understand and where we need to focus if we want to make our lives easier and more joyful. ADD and IDD are complementary and the path to self-care and healing must include both of these sides, not just one of them.
Nicholas also loves reading Deepak Chopra and one of his favorite quotes is “You can consciously change…your environment, your world. This conscious change is brought about by the two qualities inherent in consciousness: Attention and Intention. Attention energizes, and Intention transforms.” Attention is how focused or present you are in a given situation. Intention refers to your goals/desires/wishes for the given situation. There has been lots of focus on the conscious quality of attention and what happens when this quality is lacking (ADD.) Now it is time to give an equal amount of focus on the other conscious quality of intention and what happens when this quality is lacking (IDD.)
We all know how easy it is to become distracted while trying to accomplish any given task. Now we need to focus on relearning how to maintain our intentions until we can live more intentional lives, lives that have more meaning, purpose and joy.
Attention Deficit Disorder and Intention Deficit Disorder are complementary qualities. As Nicholas says, they are another example of something being “half promise and half prayer.” I think Nicholas is really on to something important. What do you think?
As always- Gita (Dr. Klein writes his blogs using Gita as his pen name. If you liked this one then check out the others.)
Alias “Gita”, Dr. Neal Klein is an esteemed author, professor, dance professional, and co-founder of the Possibility Detectives.
