Today I begin the learning of the Positive Psychology which is one of the famous Harvard Open courses. The Professor show a modest impression to me. He mentioned a lot about that Positive Psychology will not have lots of ” wow”, but it does help of change.
Here I want to share some points that I learn from the Intro class. The first thing is the “the lack of stillness”. I’m not very good at silence in the daily life. I always keep on saying something even I know all that words are nonsense. I don’t know why I like to do that until today I hear this class. Silence is something that we miss from our culture. Silence can help us to feel our inner side and perceive the potential. So this could be the meaning of the old Chinese saying : speak less, do more.
The second is the “The soul grows by subtraction,not addition-Thoreau” It seems easy to do the subtraction, however, it’s not so simple to do it in daily life. We always have under lots of pressure from the outside world and sometime can’t have the right judgement about what is the most important thing to us.
The third is the about the ” Right questions” , there is an funny saying” Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.-Neil Postman” We have all went through the childhood and we have lots of questions. And we become less curiosity when we gradually grow up. But they say “ Education is the quest for information (external) and transformation(internal), and therefore must begin with a question” . So the main purpose of the education should be like “The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.-Bishop Creighton”
The forth point I interest in is the ” studying other and ourselves” . We sometime want to know others more and forget to study our inner side. But to know oneself is the best way to know other people, because we are the same, to some extent, as a human being in this universe.
The Fifth point is about the “change”. I can’t more agree that change itself is a very difficult thing. In fact, it a totally overthrow the former one and embrace the new life. People don’t like to deny their own deed. We trying to find proper excuse about all our deed and make sense of everything that we have done. If someone want to Change, it not merely about he/she wants to change, but they have to change both cognitive as well as the emotion and pay some courage and make the different. To make different is the key point.
