From cleath@u.washington.edu Thu Sep 25 09:07:46 1997 Received: from jason02.u.washington.edu (root@jason02.u.washington.edu [140.142.76.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id JAA22902 for ; Thu, 25 Sep 1997 09:07:45 -0700 Received: from dante07.u.washington.edu (cleath@dante07.u.washington.edu [140.142.15.9]) by jason02.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id JAA50352 for ; Thu, 25 Sep 1997 09:07:44 -0700 Received: from localhost (cleath@localhost) by dante07.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.04) with SMTP id JAA15580 for ; Thu, 25 Sep 1997 09:07:43 -0700 Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 09:07:43 -0700 (PDT) From: "C. Leath" To: being-l@u.washington.edu Subject: Meetings and ... Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Hello, We got some prime meeting space: Room 200A in the hub. It is a corner, open-space room, and has lots of windows. Unfortunately we don't have it for next week. So let us hope that it does not rain next week, and plan on meeting at Sylvan Theater. If it does rain we can meet at the herb garden garden shed and figure out what to do. Also, on the 22nd of October we have no meeting space, so let us plan to do the same thing that day. But for all other Wednesdays we can meet in HUB 200A from 4:30 to 6:30, and we will be meeting during finals week (Dec 17) if people are here then. This information will be on the web page. Other than that... I will be having a house dinner at my house October Fourth, two weekends from now. If you are interested in coming let me know, mostly because if no one comes I might try to do something special that evening, --although there is little that I could think of that would be more special than having dinner with you. Does anyone have anything interesting to say? On a scale of 1-10 (five being neutral) how are you doing, in general, right now? as an example, I'm probably a 7 with variation down to four and up to nine over the course of a week. This variation would be due to my ever-changing life situation, and also my way of being in the world. I am reading an interesting book called "Existential Psychotherapy" by Irvin Yalom (1980), and I am working on writing a review paper on Purpose and Meaning in Life research in psychology. Existential Psychotherapy is about asking people questions that catalyze them changing their lives to a more fulfilling way of being. The questions are about death (non-existence), freedom and responsibility, will, isolation, and meaninglessness. Also, I have learned something startling, in Baumeister's "Meanings of life" (I don't recommend it) Baumeister reports that, in general, when people have kids they are less happy than before, and they are happier after their kids leave than while they had them. This finding was disbelieved by a lot of people who set out to disrepudate it, and only ended up supporting the previous results. Baumeister suggests that while people may be less happy when they have kids, they may be having a more meaningful existence. I wonder if, in general, manic depressives have more meaningful existences than people who are generally happy. It is always a question how these people measured happiness, and how we would go about measuring meaning. I hope you all are well, Colin .