Happiness: Use It Or Lose It: An aptitude with an attitude

By David Loomis and "Doc" Dave Loomis

HAPPINESS: USE IT OR LOSE IT is a reminder of a priceless gift we all received long ago, the gift of wonderment with its capacity to explore and savor each and every moment of life. Wonder?s buoyant... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1413453996
• ISBN13: 9781413453997
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Xlibris, Corp.
• Length: 162 Pages
• Weight: 0.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.4" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Attractng Elusive Happiness

David "Doc" Loomis explores happiness as life's basic pursuit, in "Happiness: Use It or Lose It" (2nd edition. Toronto:White Knight, 2005, 160 pp.), an autobiographical collection of many persons' life narratives, Madam Maria first. His theme unfolds. "Everyone of us is capable of happiness." (xi) "Every season of happiness is a natural happening born of wonder's primal embrace of life." (82) "To be sure, wonder's embrace of life does not always bring joy, life being imperfect as it is." (69) "How can severely handicapped people be as happy as they are when so many other people often find life to be barely tolerable?" (xiv) ". . . the two most basic ingredients of human happiness, life and wonderment, pose no threat to our remaining ground zero humble." (35, 17, 68) "Three facets of our genius for happiness emerge full-blown, one the pleasure we find in being caressed, thanks to specialized skin receptors, the two others, our delight in melody and rhythm." (75) Loomis's book is a natural reader for life's injured and also caregivers alike. Behaviorally, happiness is a premack reward principle, that is, a reward in itself, with more to come. Freed from a half-millennia's obsession with Descartes' body-mind split, Loomis portrays happiness as a self-chosen state of mind rather than a cause-and-effect formula. This state of mind is self-and-others dance of compassion. As the late Doris Humphrey told her dancers, "Don't just do something, stand there"--reflect. (153, 154, 157 et al.) And throughout history: "For as [a person] thinks in [the] heart, so is [s/]he." (Proverbs 23:7 KJV) "Finally, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." (Philippians 4:8) ". . . that among these rights are . . . the pursuit of happiness." (Declaration of Independence, 1776) "Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be." (Abraham Lincoln) Often the world today operates by action-reaction habits, and yet happiness requires a pattern of action-reflection-action. (per Carl Jung's and Warren Lamb's information reflecting) As a Presbyterian pastor and nationally registered Dance/Movement Therapist, on the last night of the annual fall national American Dance Therapy Association Conference in Atlanta I first attended, I saw Dancing Wheels of Cleveland Ballet perform. Cast: six developmentally delayed and six in wheel chairs along with two normal dancers. Choreography: guitar music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Even though their limbs were shaky, they moved in remarkable unison and grace, and left me breathless. The Spirit of God danced in them. A story tells of a third-century Roman General visiting a local bishop in Rome and saying of his troops, "Here is my army, where is yours?" The bishop led him into the church's courtyard and pointed to lame, and sick, and blind, and deaf, and w