Saturday, April 30, 2016

What If Life Was Spherical?

Fellow blogger Susan presents "What If Life Were A Ball of Yarn" in which she discusses the possibility of a person with dementia being able to experience life as a sphere rather than linear. I like the concept, it can help the person caring for and/or loving the person dementia to be better able to "cope."

Finally, I tweaked it a little.

Click here to see Susan's post. (Opens in a new window.)

This is my reply to Susan:

First, your "disclaimers" are appreciated as that allows one to approach the "Ball of Yarn" theory with a more open mind. Second, I love the model!

While most of us look at time as a linear event, and therefore the passage of our lives as linear, there are also schools of thought that look past that to life in the past, present, and future all existing at the same time. I like that.

Let me tweak your model just a tiny bit, if I may, by saying that to perceive the way in which a person with Dementia/ Alzheimer's might perceive her life doesn't necessary mean their rearranging the bits of life's yarn and reassembling them but rather that they develop the ability (which most of us are not able to do) to perceive the entire ball of yarn at the same time thereby condensing past, present, and future into existing all at once and which could be called the "New Now!"

Since most of those of us without Dementia/ Alzheimer's are not able to do that, we perceive the person affected as "confused, disoriented, befuddled, random, and disorganized" as Susan says. Maybe the person with Dementia/ Alzheimer's is closer to the truth than we are!

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