Perceived Needs

These would be the key elements that inform and influence a perception of what is essential to personal, community and/or species survival.

Primal Physical Survival  - secure access to food, water, and shelter as shared universal living needs.

 

Physical Security - to be safe from physical harm, from acts of hostile aggression.

 

Social Status -  As a female and single parent, there is a need to be able to ensure and safeguard the future and ongoing primal and physical security of my 3 children, even now that they have become adults.  Their children, should they breed, will also kindle my nurturing protective instincts.  Preservation/nurturing of the tribe/clan/species.

 

Age -  Aging, and its associated ailments and infirmities introduces the need to have assured access to incremental community/medical support, as has cancer treatment (beaten too! Hurray!) There is also a fascinating liberation and emotional autonomy that creeps in with age. 

 

Afterthought on that last - I keep overlooking the impact Cancer has had.  It haunts all my thoughts at some level.  I could find myself facing rapid decline and early death from metastatic disease next month/next year - or I could die disease free at the ripe old age of 110! (women in my family are all long lived)  In either event, the awareness has profoundly coloured my choices and perceptions of threat and opportunity.  It has also brought an interesting clarity of purpose and new value for the quality of life, whether it be day to day or long term.

 

Another after thought - My mother was a polio survivor 1953 and raised all four of us from a wheel chair.  This has left a much stronger awareness of the physical, psychological and social limitations and capabilities associated with a chronic physical disability.

 

Still another afterthought - I have never before seen myself as particularly vulnerable but in one week the screen from my bedroom window was stolen right out of the frame (in the afternoon) and a stranger simply walked in to my living room through the patio while I was working around the apartment late at night.  A middle aged woman alone is perceived as vulnerable, easy prey.  This made me angry.  I am also moving to a safer location.

Freedom from fear (there's that Cancer shadow again . . )

 

Freedom of information - to read, watch, learn as interest and curiosity dictate

 

Freedom of thought and expression

 

Freedom of movement - to travel and congregate 

 

Interesting note to self - on the basis of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, I appear to be at the self actualizing point.  Explains a great many things.