meaning Archives - It's a New Day

A Short Course in Human Nature

In short we are like icebergs. It is an applicable and useful analogy for self understanding.

This analogy is brilliant. I first came across it at an in-service training by someone else where I worked in community mental health. I don’t remember who that was any more. I don’t know where the analogy came from, but I have elaborated on it over the years. I have overlayed it with other systems of thought I find useful for describing and understanding how you operate in the world.

I found pretty pictures of icebergs and used them as teaching tools. It is a short course but enough to be useful. With it, navigation and evolution of your personal growth, self understanding and wellbeing is possible.

Behavior

We begin above the waterline. What is behavior, really? It is what we can observe about our own actions and what we can see in others. Behavior is accessible to the senses. That is all that is above the waterline of our individual icebergs.

We can see gestures, posture, gait, hear vocabulary, voice tone, feel skin, hugs, stiffness, ease. Smell perfume, taste kisses. All of that is behavior. You can understand what you see and respond to it. What it means is up to interpretation. That comes from below the water line. There is so much more going on underneath.

Thoughts and Feelings

A little bit below the water line are thoughts and feelings. We can deduce these to a certain extent. We know our own. The meanings of facial expressions are global. While body language is also somewhat global, culture also plays a part.

People from out own culture are easy to read. People from different cultures can pose a challenge. But someone can speak a sentence and mean none of it. Someone can wear a mask and their emotions are inscrutable. Still, they are closer to the surface.

Attitudes Values and Beliefs

Next up and deeper into the iceberg are attitudes, values and beliefs.

Each of these three are less mutable within a person although they can be emphasized or muted or changed with effort. They are deeper in the iceberg, not easily unfrozen.

Attitudes.

People have a dominant attitude. Some are idealistic. This is a tough attitude to have in this world. To want the shining city of idealism would create and to have those ideals dashed is not my idea of fun.

To have a spiritualist attitude, to ever be considering what could be, is the way of the optimist. There are realists, who examine what is, stoics who seek to handle or endure what is, skeptics who investigate what is, cynics who challenge what is, suspecting fraud, and pragmatists such as myself who are about figuring out what works and going with that.

(This particular set of core attitudes comes from the Michael Teachings which a philosophic framework that describes human personality and evolution. I have been a not particularly serious student of this framework for many years but serious enough to integrate it into my own wok where it fits well)

Values

Values are those qualities we find intrinsically important to us. These are things like family, honesty, excitement, fun, financial success, loyalty, friends.

It is a great idea to look into lists of values and consider which are the most important for you and whether you are living in alignment with them. People can feel good about their lives even in the midst of great difficulty if they are living in alignment with their values.

Beliefs

The majority of our beliefs are not even truly our own but were given to us by parents teachers, neighbors, clergy, others who were an influence early in life. They became the framework for “the rules” of survival after leaving that blissful infant period where there was nothing we need do but exist to be worthy.

If you snooze, you lose. The early bird gets the worm. It is a sin to be angry. Loyalty above all. Santa’s elves are watching you. If it doesn’t apply, let it fly. Some, people outgrow. Others are ours for life. Some are useful. Some hold us back from our best life.

The Challenge of Change

As such they are entrenched. When we look to change thinking or beliefs, it works for a while until survival brain kicks in to stop us. “this is what got you here”. This is what kept you alive” it is dangerous to change this!

And so we go back to what our nervous system finds familiar and comfortable instead of the better future we really do want. We get up and eat that snack at midnight for emotional comfort , or doom-scroll to reinforce our belief that the world is going to hell and we are right or other behaviors that make us miserable but it feels safer somehow.

The Deepest Layer Hides the Answer

Ahh and then there is the deepest layer, The part of us that is consistent throughout our lives, changeless. It is always there, but so covered with the rest of it, it is not surprising to be out of touch with it except rarely.

It is what it feels like when you breathe in. Notice how this feels the same, that it has felt the same forever.

I thought, “I will feel different when I am sixteen”, or twenty-one or thirty. But I didn’t it was the same as the day before and the day before that. And it has remained the same the entirely of my life. Examine, is this is not also true for you when you choose to pay attention? This is the Observer. Consciousness. It is who you really are.

Consciousness

All the rest of the levels are overlay. Consciousness is calm. Even. Peaceful. And it is possible to access it through simply noticing your breath and only noticing your breath for a few minutes.

Another way is to notice only sound or to expand your vision as wide and high as it will go and let go of all the words. The rest of our being is mutable. From this deeper place, the power, not to change, but to become who you really are, exists.

What That Sky and My Dog Had In Common

Chelsea was my master, teaching me honor beauty in difficulty like I could in a gorgeous sky reflected in water.

So many things pass through my mind as I gazed at those gorgeous clouds above the water that reflected them back to the sky. Present at that moment in Spanish Fork, Alabama, I recognized the beauty I wanted to honor by capturing it with my camera. It was beautiful like Chelsea, regardless of her difficulties.

Here we are, having a seafood lunch caught from the local waters here in near Mobile, Alabama. I am visiting this area where my sweetheart grew up, for the first time. I had no idea how magnificent the sky could be.

Life is good! There is so much beauty to honor in the world, I thought, until I remembered that I found out only yesterday that my precious Chelsea Belle had cancer. “She is twelve”, I thought to myself. That is a pretty great life span for a dog.

And it is. I gave her a good life. She’d been dropped off at the vet tech’s house. I heard about her close to immediately. I had only recently decided I was willing to get a dog again. My last dog was only four when he died, also from cancer. He was a rottweiler, and also a rescue.

I am ready for a dog, again, I explained to my vet. My kitty Otter, had lost weight and she wasn’t that heavy to begin with. The vet felt concerned for her health too. Testing showed nothing amiss, but I knew. She was suffering heartbreak from Leon’s death. She needed another dog to replace Leon in her life.

My son had called me about Leon the Rottweiler. I felt skeptical. ” But, Mom, you gotta see this dog!” he pleaded. So I drove to Jacksonville. And I fell in love with him when he licked my hand. When he died I felt bereft like we pet owners do. I didn’t want to replace him. He cannot be replaced. My cat was lonely too, though, as evidenced by the lost weight. “She needs a dog to keep her company while I work”, I reasoned.

So I made a bargain with God. This dog needs to weigh less, maybe fifty pounds. Leon had been a lot to handle at almost ninety. This next dog also needs to be less fearless, I calculated. Leon gleefully sought to round up Fed Ex trucks like they were cattle he was in charge of. Once he literally threw himself at a pick up truck while I sought fruitlessly to keep him in check. “I’m so sorry!” this hapless driver proclaimed. “No, I assured him, my dog ran into you”. He was not hurt. It was cancer that got him.

I got my wish this time. God listens. I got an exactly fifty pound dog. And, instead of overly fearless, Chelsea turned out to be an anxiety queen. She was not afraid of nature, but sliding glass doors? Basketball hoops? Garbage cans along the street? these were fearful objects.

One morning in the predawn darkness a mylar balloon tied to a mailbox to announce a neighbor child’s birthday party startled her. She took off, ripping her leash from my hands! I couldn’t find her and I had to go to work.

She returned home by way of the wetlands behind our house about a half hour later. Dragging her leash behind her, covered in swamp mud, she spent the day in the garage until I could get home and clean her up. It took a lot of work to settle her down, to teach her the world was mostly safe.

And then there were the shoes. I lost 8 pairs of good shoes to her 8 month old teething. “This, I thought to myself, is why she lost her first home”. I eventually learned to put my shoes away and to make sure she had dog toys to chew. She wasn’t much on fetching balls, but she was fast! She even caught a squirrel one time.

And as expected she and my kitty Otter were best friends. It felt amazing. I still cherish and honor the beauty of witnessing their friendship. Their eventual deaths can never take it away.

While she improved, she had that streak of anxiety. Always. New manmade objects were a challenge. I saw my own mental state reflected back to me. We grew together. She traveled both the Southeast and West Coasts with me. When she survived a rattle snake bite, it was a lesson that taught me that we were both tougher than we thought. She always would rather go home than anywhere else but grew easier with the world and was now a friendly dog.

All these things pass through my mind as I gazed at the reflected glory between the water and the sky. I noted what this sky and my dog have in common. The reflections between the water and sky, my dog and my own being. The way you’ll notice life mirrors your thoughts back to you, the way it will honor your beauty and sometimes your flaws, over and over again if you contemplate such things at all.

Sometimes what the world reflects is the beauty we can find in difficult relationships, the ones that require us to grow. I see this picture and remember where I was. What was going on in my world at that moment comes back to me as something precious and beautiful despite the sorrow of impending loss.

Stop Optimizing. Start Being. Your patterns aren’t problems to fix.

Back From The Grave

Finding meaning in small acts of repair

I try to figure out how to make the little red ears stand up. They did, when this cute little stuffed dog toy came out of the package.

Stuffed lamb chop sits propped up by a container of sewing notions. A spool of thread and small pair of scissors lays in front of it. Marian Haftel Smith Copyright 2026 — I’m Healed!

He had a loud and wonderful squeak when he was brand new, less than a week ago. But that squeak, I know this, that squeak is engineered. It hits a frequency that sounds like distress to a retriever’s ears. It is no accident. The toy companies know exactly what they’re doing. They design these toys for destruction.

And Jesse? Jesse is just being what we humans bred him to be. Apparently no retriever dog’s toy is officially dead until the squeaker has been torn of its cloth body. This must be accomplished! Our retriever lives by this law and then mourns the loss of his prey. It’s no fun anymore!

The Lamb Chop laid sprawled on the floor, those cute little red ears hanging by the proverbial thread. One arm, torn off at the seam, was visible across the room. I found its squeaker, surgically removed through the armpit, when I stepped on it in the kitchen. That woke me up before I even had coffee.

What am I doing? There are so many other things I could be doing. But here I am I repairing a dog toy when there is so much to do. Important things, perhaps. Things that would require deeper thought than this hand sewing with needle and thread.

But my hands are already moving. Threading. Stitching. Repairing something I know full well will be destroyed again. It may by tomorrow. I might save it for then, But maybe I will give it back this afternoon.

I want to call this wasteful. Part of me does call it wasteful. Still, another part of me knows that Jesse will be thrilled when his little Lamb Chop returns from the grave. I can already see his face when I give it back to him. I anticipate his eyes imploring me to go outside RIGHT NOW. His whole body will come to attention. He’ll grab it gently at first, almost reverently before our game begins again.

I will throw it out across the yard. He will seek to catch it in the air, which he often manages to do. Clever dog! When he misses, he will pick his toy up off the ground and shake his head violently as if he’s angry with his failure. He will bring it back for me to throw, again and again. And again. And again, yet another time.

How wonderful to be so excited! This, I think, is why we love them. But here’s what I’m sitting with: I’m part of a system I am only dimly aware of as my fingers are stitching.

The pet industry wants me, expects me, to throw this away and buy another. That’s the design, toys that last a week or maybe two. Squeakers are engineered to trigger prey drive so intense the toy cannot survive it. They are inexpensive enough, especially at Christmas time that replacement feels easier than repair. The whole cycle repeats forever and ever amen.

I’m disrupting that cycle, only slightly. I already bought the toy. I’m already in the system. My small rebellion, this Sunday afternoon, doesn’t change much.

Except that it changes something in me. When I repair instead of replace, I’m practicing something. It’s about refusing the convenience of this toy being disposable, at least for this moment. Perhaps it is also demonstrating love for Jesse in a way that feels right to me, even if it’s terribly inefficient.

And definitely, I think I’m maintaining a cycle that serves me more than I want to admit. Jesse destroys, I repair. Jesse destroys, I repair. He needs me to fix what he breaks. I need to be needed. I should not need to be needed, should I?

What if I just bought him toys that last longer? Indestructible rubber instead of cloth? I have done that. Those toys are not warm and fuzzy. Those, I do not have to sew, and he’d still have toys. But they aren’t cute.

And then I wouldn’t have this. This quiet Sunday afternoon with needle and thread, with its anticipation of doggy joy. I have this small act of care that feels like love made visible.

Does that make me devoted or stuck? .

Our pets live in the present moment in a way we humans often don’t manage. They remind us, like the emissaries from the angelic realm I believe they are, that the present moment is the best place to be. They may not literally be angels, but they are pretty darn close.

Jesse doesn’t wonder if playing fetch is a good use of his time. He doesn’t calculate the value of his joy. He just… is. Present. Fully alive in this moment.

And here I am, trying to learn that from him while simultaneously asking myself if sewing his toy is worthwhile. The irony isn’t lost on me.

I finish the last stitch. The red ears don’t stand up quite the way they did when the toy was new, but they’re attached. The squeaker is back inside. The arm is reattached.

Lamb Chop whole again, for now. I know this won’t last. I know I’ll be doing this again soon, or the toy will finally be beyond all repair and I’ll have to let it go.

But for now, I’ve kept something from the grave. I’ve said, “Not yet. Not today”.

And perhaps that is enough. Maybe the question isn’t whether this matters in the larger scheme of life. Maybe the question is what else am I keeping from the grave? What else am I repairing that’s meant to break? What other cycles am I in without fully seeing them? This is a lifelong pattern of mine. And I have not let it go.

Sometimes I think I ought to, like the leftovers I insist on putting in the refrigerator well knowing my husband is likely to throw them out before I am ready for that to happen. This is ingrained within me. I don’t have answers yet. I don’t know if I ever will, actually.

Sometimes I have an insight and gleefully nourish it for a time, only to lose sight of it. Then later after some error in thinking that causes me pain, or causes someone around me pain, I find that same insight again and hope to maintain it this time. I wince when this happens, more often then I would like.

But today I have a repaired toy. Our dog will be thrilled, and this moment of completion, temporary and small as it is, is mine.

It is designed by a system I want to buck, a pattern I’ve begun to question and wonder if I will ever have an answer. It is also meaningful yet possibly meaningless both at the same time.

I’m still learning to hold all of that without needing to resolve it.

For now, put away my scissors, needle and thread. I take the picture I will put at the beginning of this post that I will write. Jesse will come running when I call him with this toy in my hand.

He always comes, simply trusting that something good is coming. Maybe that’s the whole lesson right there.