Getting a Life: Strategies for Joyful & Effective Living [Paperback]

Copthorne Macdonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 2001

This book is about crafting full, rich, creative, and enjoyable lives for ourselves - lives that are significant, lives that contribute in some way to the world around us. Getting a Life is rooted in the idea that some steps toward wisdom require nothing more than a fresh look at common life situations, nothing more than an appreciation of the difference between skillful and unskillful ways of dealing with those situations. Its premise is that a few truths about everyday life, if pointed out and taken seriously, can make a significant difference in the quality of day-to-day living and our enjoyment of life.Getting a Life is about applied, practical wisdom - the kind of wisdom that Coleridge called "Common sense in an uncommon degree." To Copthorne Macdonald, wisdom comprises a mix of extraordinary attitudes, value-based ways of being, and ways of seeing. He takes the position that growing wiser is not something than must be left to the whims of fate; wisdom can be developed intentionally. Getting a Life reinforces our best intuitions and intentions, leads us to some fresh insights about everyday life, and helps us develop that uncommon degree of common sense that is practical wisdom.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Is Copthorne Macdonald a Renaissance Man, or a Millennium Man? Close on the heels of his Toward Wisdom: Finding Our Way to Inner Peace, Love & Happiness, this versatile electrical-engineer-turned-sage has come up with Getting a Life: Strategies for Joyful and Effective Living . . . . it is imbued with a nineties sensibility, some very good advice and a certain universality. -- Atlantic Books Today, Fall 1995

Macdonald stresses his belief that wisdom and contentment develop incrementally. There are no quick fixes; like physical conditioning, mental and emotional health is a gradual process. More specifically, Macdonald recommends that people run "experiments" to determine which things give them pleasure in life, what skills they have and how best to use them. As he explains it, "What I am advocating is getting in touch with what's really important to us, and what our strengths are." Part of this, he explains, is meeting our basic needs: physical health, security, belonging and self esteem. Once these needs are met, a person can experience a "meta-need -- the desire to realize one's purpose and full potential, "a deep need for our lives to matter."

In his book and his life, Macdonald's primary goal is to promote the concept of wisdom in our culture. A cynic might invoke the old clich that Cop's theories and a dime could buy us a cup of coffee (and not even that thanks to inflation), but Macdonald's reply is swift and emphatic: "Wisdom and a dime will get us the world we need." -- The Buzz, November 1995

This book doesn't deal with the ethereal or intangible, it deals with using the path to wisdom -- paying close attention to everything we do -- and charting out a plan for our lives that could allow us to be the most that we can be. -- The Guardian, November 14, 1995 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

This book is about crafting full, rich, creative, and enjoyable lives for ourselves -- lives that are significant, lives that contribute in some way to the world around us. The book is rooted in the idea that some steps toward wisdom require nothing more than a fresh look at common life situations, nothing more than an appreciation of the difference between skillful and unskillful ways of dealing with those situations. Its premise is that a few truths about everyday life, if pointed out and taken seriously, can make a significant difference in the quality of day-to-day living and our enjoyment of life. GETTING A LIFE is a book about applied, practical wisdom -- the kind of wisdom that Coleridge called "Common sense in an uncommon degree." To Copthorne Macdonald, wisdom comprises a mix of extraordinary attitudes, value-based ways of being, and ways of seeing. He refers to 24 of these elements of wisdom, and takes the position that growing wiser is not something that must be left to the whims of fate, as many in the past have assumed. Wisdom can be developed intentionally. We can chose those elements of wisdom that we would like to develop, and integrate them into our lives.

GETTING A LIFE reinforces our best intuitions and intentions, leads us to some fresh insights about everyday life, and helps us develop that uncommon degree of common sense that is practical wisdom. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse (October 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595202462
• ISBN-13: 978-0595202461
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,300,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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