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Show McBride Says We Need Place We Can Be Alone The other day a friend told me that the few private mintues she spends by herself each day enables her to reacquaint herself with herself. She has learned the value of effective use of private time or what she calls "self time." Privacy is a dwindling dwin-dling resource that we need to protect. Without it, positive personal growth is hampered and maintaining main-taining our self-identity is jeopardized. by Dr. M. Ford McBride Do you have a place where you can be alone, a private place? Unfortunately, as society becomes more complex there are fewer places where a person can be himself by himself. him-self. Psychologist Sidney Jourard suggests that a free space shrinks the frequency of physical breakdown and mental illness will increase. In our country today, architecture ar-chitecture and living arrangements make it extremely difficult for people to find privacy or solitude. Even in private home, privacy is difficult to find because our homes are often built on the open plan so that inhabitants are seldom our of earshot. ear-shot. We need places we can go to whenever we find daily existence disheartening or discouraging. Wouldnt it be nice if each of us had a room someplace we could go and be quietly by ourselves? I have a favorite spot in the canyon I like to go when I need mental rejuvenation. Experiencing privacy is like a mental lemonade. lemon-ade. Its not only refreshing, but it enables us to keep in touch with ourselves and reassess our priorities. Self-understanding Self-understanding comes by privately spending time looking within ourselves. All of us have used the phrase, "I need to get away from it all." What we're doing is expressing ex-pressing a need for privacy, a need to step outside the humdrum routin of deadlines and schedules. |