Ericksonian birthday or christmas presents

Dear reader,

Sidney Rosen has in his book "My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson" one story ("Calluses"), which is about a construction worker, who had fallen and was left totally paralysed and in pain. He asked Erickson, what he could do. Erickson said, that there's not much he could do. Develop calluses on his pain nerves, so he wouldn't feel the pain so much. Erickson suggested to him to collect comics, jokes and funny sayings and make scrapbooks out of them, which he could give to fellow workmen when they were in the hospital. That's just what the man did.

That's just what I did last year for one of my aunts with a strenuously collected collection of comics with Snoopy from the Peanuts. My aunts had a dog for many decades. Not anymore, because it's a bit easier to travel without one. I asked my dad, if he believed she'd enjoy reading comics. He had doubts. After I told him what I had in mind, he believed she'd like it for sure. So I collected and glued a thin notebook full of those comics and wrote her a card saying basically, that my dad had told me she won't read comics. But this one here was a very special one. She called me later to say thank you and that she reads one or two pages every day.

Our daily newspaper has a quote on the front page, which relates to one of the bigger articles on the page. I collected some of them over the past months for another notebook, which I had stumbled upon in our flat some time ago. No one wanted that notebook anymore, but it was small and nice and read. My friend and colleague from work likes read and quotes. The notebook is just big enough for one quote on each page and the pages are perforated, so you could rip them out. So I spent the past days now sorting the quotes fitting in such a way that one on the front the one on the back of a page were in some way or another somewhat related to each other. Yesterday I went through them one final time and cut the quotes straight. I wrote down many of them for myself, so I'd have them, too. I was up until half past two in the morning yesterday. Time passed unnoticed. I had written in german and listened to Derren Brown in english reading his book. It must have been hypnosis. Apart from the fact that time had passed so quickly, I couldn't remember consciously either which quotes I had written down or what I had heard Derren Brown say even a short time later when I was in bed. Amnesia. Trance is a natural phenomena and I don't think about it much, that I hardly can remember consciously the quotes or the audio book. It had been fun and after all the book is finally ready before christmas. That's what's really important.

I want to give the reader a warning: such notebooks, even small thin ones, need time and if you don't already have a big collection of quotes, you should plan long ahead of time for such a present. I have taken my time with those two books for that reason. I had to. The newspaper only came once a day and I couldn't use every comic or quote in it. Planing period: at best months ahead.

Until next blog,

sarah