It is easier to tell a person what life is not, rather than to tell them what it is. A child understands weeds that grow from lack of attention, in a garden. However, it is hard to explain the wild flowers that one gardener calls weeds, and another considers beautiful ground cover. Shannon L. Alder
About This Quote

If we want to explain something, we must first describe it. This is easy when the thing in question is something that is obvious. An example that comes to mind is a child who doesn’t understand weeds because he or she has never seen them. I’ve seen this happen all the time with students and parents alike.

They can’t quite wrap their mind around concepts like “self-esteem” and “eating disorders” and they always ask me to explain what these terms mean. Now, I can make it very simple and tell them what I think “self-esteem” and “eating disorders” mean: Self esteem: The idea of having confidence in oneself. It means that a person says to himself, “I am good at this, I am good at that, I have been successful in my work or studies,” etc.

In other words, self-esteem is having a good opinion of oneself. Eating disorders: In some cases, a person can have a fixation with food and become obsessed with eating foods they shouldn’t be eating. This is an unhealthy obsession with food and someone who has an eating disorder may be physically addicted to food or have a distorted body image about their body shape or size. When we explain things in this manner, it makes sense for us to ask the child to help us move the weeds from the garden so that we can grow beautiful flowers instead of weeds. It also makes sense for us to tell him how great his job is helping out the gardener by clearing away all of those weeds from the garden because he will get paid!

Some Similar Quotes
  1. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. - Pierre Dos Utt
  2. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use... - Wendell Berry
  3. If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to... - Bertrand Russell
  4. Most of us try to do too much because we are secretly afraid we will not be able to do anything at all. - Rick Aster
  5. Moments are the elements of profit - Karl Marx
More Quotes By Shannon L. Alder
  1. It is clear that both at home and abroad producers have been unwilling to trust their fortunes entirely to the unrestricted play of competition. Both in world and domestic markets businessmen have sought security by substituting collective controls for the free play of market forces.
  2. Either on a competitive or a cartel basis.
  3. The term cartel was virtually unknown to the American language a generation ago. Like most borrowed words, when first taken over it meant different things to different persons. Time was required to crystallize its meaning. In this country it now commonly refers to international marketing...
  4. The German and Japanese governments heavily subsidized their chemical industries for war purposes. Government subsidies, direct or indirect, spurred German developments in synthetic rubber and plastics, synthetic fuels, light metals, and various other substitutes for natural materials. However, the world's chemical industries would have grown...
  5. The basic principle of capitalism: that the penalties (losses) no less than the rewards (profits) of risk taking shall go to those who embark on a productive venture.
Related Topics