ADHD and self development
published: September 19th, 2008
ADHD and self development
image: e-chan
I attended a seminar today on the prevalence of ADHD in young people. Among other things that I do in a professional capacity, I have helped and supported kids like this for some years now. It’s extraordinary to discuss with other people those things that become acquired skills and how, as we evolve as individuals, those skills become a part of the portrait that our lives represent.
In many respects a responsible adult surrogates their sensibilities into the world of an individual who may be experiencing a chaotic reality. Their own cognitive process and ability to rationalise what their sensory apparatus is telling them is compromised by a range of factors. These range from the genetic to the stalled or simply dormant.
For us all the process of personal development has its mechanics rooted in the programming of our neural pathways. Put simply, the more we energize a particular route the more established within our repertoire as individuals it becomes. Given poor guidance, the absence of positive mentors or a compromised education we grow in an incomplete way. The pathways that become charged are those that are often the least beneficial to the person who has become their host. In pop culture this is known as the development of bad attitude. A fragmented development occurs, some things become accentuated and some things neglected which gives rise to a disjointed process characterised by the manifestation of inappropriate behaviour and poor decision making in our lives.
The art or the skill is in developing a sophisticated inner compass that negotiates the highways and byways along which we travel. There will always be opportunity for conflict and drama, but likewise there will be the opportunity for seamless passage from one chapter to the next in the unfolding of our lives. These things are seen in the skills present within the diplomat, the negotiator, the orator and the leader who seems to have the ability to make complicated processes appear simple and glaringly obvious.
In our own lives we must strive toward the assimilation of such skills, we must learn to be accomplished in the business of living so that our lives give the impression of being very simple, harmonious and gliding through the turbulent waters of the ocean of humanity like a sleek craft. When that impression is conveyed successfully the natural magic of life is such that the act will have become real, we will have powered those neural pathways, those synapses in such a way that a crystaline structure forms in our own mind and our own behavioural patterns.
For those who share a love of the esoteric, your reference here is the mummer’s art, the craft of Shakespeare and the ability to sublimate oneself to the already proven and demonstrated. In the movie Patton, the general surveys the scene of an ancient battlefield where the Carthaginians were defeated by the Romans and suggests that he was there, two thousand years before, this before he defeated Erwin Rommel, the finest military strategist in the German army. His allusion being that great warriors were in some way immortal, destined to reincarnate and fight military campaigns throughout time.
I do not know. However, the inference here is that the record of greatness exists and may be somehow accessed by any of us. That is a powerful notion, a singularly immense concept suggesting that we are all, in some way, washed by the same stream of life and that by proxy we are interconnected in a way that transcends the spatio-temporal concepts of here and now.
What we each have in our grasp is such a magnificent opportunity, I can do no more than salute those of you who pioneer the human story in your own way, whatever that may be. Strength, resilience and fortitude.