Discipline

Today began my first day of summer, and a this I had the privilege of enjoying a cup of tea while reading "The Road Less Traveled" by Scott Peck, enjoying the comfort of my home. In the first chapter of his book Peck expresses the idea that a person that has learned to disipline him or herself through a healthy process will prove to show a healthy mental stability. The introductory sentence to this famous work of Peck is, "Life is difficult". In this statement Peck concludes that once we begin to accept that life is difficult it will allow us to further discipline ourselves into growing into a mentally healthy state of life. With life being difficult as human beings we naturally will be subjected to a myriad of suffering throughout the entirity of our lives. Some chose to ignore this suffering by avoiding even the thought of it, while the healthy way as Peck agrees is to embrace the suffering and deal with the problems that continually face our lives. This act of disciplining our minds to not avoid suffering will allow us to develop and grow psychologically and spiritually. The more we begin to avoid suffering we will further hinder our growth remaining stagnant in a state of unknowing ourselves. Through suffering is where we begin to understand and produce a healthy psychology.

Peck went on to explain that a child learns a form of discipine by the age of 10 through a proper parental guidance. A child should be taught to discipline him or herself in the simple act of doing homework before watching television. This diciplinary process taken on by parents will show trhough a child when there are no parental figures around, he or she will know that it is important to get the hard work done first so that they can enjoy the leisure time. This process bleeds into other realities as well. Take a child eating a cupcake or whatever food it may be for example. A child that has been disciplined to delay gratification will save the better half for the end, such as saving the frosting for the last few bites. As this diciplinary process correlates across many dimensions, the dicipline of delaying gratification will prove to promote a healthy developed mind in all categories including work ethic. A child that has not properly been discplined to delay gratification is the child that procrastinates until being completely stressed out. For example a patient Peck described was one who enjoyed herself at work for the first hour while leaving the next 6 hours to be subject to stress. If this patient simply disciplined herself to get the work done first, then the remaining time in the office will prove to not be so stressfull, but more often than not enjoyable.