Each of Us has Significance

Super Bowl Sunday yesterday - congrats to the Saints! The day got away from me yesterday and so I write this very early Monday morning. I think the commercial I liked the best was the bull breaking down the fence to get to his friend the horse. It is nice to see creative writers and designers who can cut to the core of what really matters in life.
My pastor did that in church yesterday. He is doing a sermon series on what he is calling American Idols, discussing each week what we in America often focus on as important with the question for each of us to ponder – How important is this in my life and has it become an idol?
Yesterday he touched on three things that, to me, are at the center of all of us and relate so much to why I love what I am blessed to do when working in the field of activities with those who have memory loss and the care providers at their sides.
It would take too long in this post to discuss the background leading up to the main points in his sermon but he talked about all of us wanting to be significant and these are the points that give us the sense that we are:
#1, We all want to be loved.
#2. We all want to know we matter. And
#3. We all want to belong.
The truth of it resonated with me in my own personal life but also thinking of the many lives I have met in nursing homes and day centers and even in homes in the community in the lives of so many of our senior citizens experiencing dementia, as well as many who are doing quite well cognitively but have declined physically.
These touch the heart of what is now being mandated through the regulations dictating so many of the standards in health care and it’s given the name person centered care. In one of my presentations on activities I talk about four motivations for getting out of bed each morning. They include having a sense of purpose, feeling useful, having a sense of belonging and having a sense of accomplishment. Everything we do each day can usually fit into one of those categories. When that is gone, and we haven’t the ability to go in another direction in order to recapture them, then lacking that feeling of significance gives us no reason to want to get out of bed
We all want to be loved. To me, that is at the essence of who we are as human beings! Without feeling loved and being able to love outwardly, nothing else makes sense – life becomes existence. And wrapped up in that is relationship – knowing we belong and wrapped around that is the feeling that we are useful and have accomplished something, even if that something is intangible – which is knowing that we matter; our lives still have importance.
What is so beautiful to know is that through the pursuit of activities, many of these feelings can be evoked in the person with dementia. Just because the memory is going or even gone, there are so many ways to tap into that nucleus to let a person know that they are loved, they matter and they belong. Of course, the sermon was about trusting and believing that no matter what our day to day experience is in this world, if we have a belief in God, He is the quintessence of our significance. I think that is why so many of our seniors, even when memory eludes them, hold onto their faith and spiritual beliefs. And it especially through spiritual activities that we can impart back to them the truth that they are important. And even those that have a different experience of what is spiritual to them, I have found that tapping into who they are can lead us to unraveling what they need to give back to them that feeling of significance. Mary Ann