Maslow One of the Peak Experiences I

Maslow

One of the peak experiences I have recently had, according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, was teaching a young friend of mine to ride a bicycle. I remember my own first, formative experience of this kinesthetic learning event quite well. By remembering this event while teaching another, I was able to truly ascend to the top of the pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

On a very basic level, my functional needs, when I learned to ride a bicycle, were satisfied by my bicycle-riding experience, given the fact that my immediate physiological needs were completely satisfied -- on the day I first rode a two-wheeler I was not hungry or tired, and the sun was shining. I loved my new bicycle, now shorn of its training wheels, and even just getting on its seat, standing there, I felt I had made a tremendous improvement, given that the bicycle until recently had only had to have training wheels, and that it was not a tricycle. Yet I was also secure in the knowledge that it could be like a tricycle, if I needed the wheels put back on, and that I could return, safely, to the comforts of three or four wheels, if I felt a need to do so. Thus, my needs for safety and security were fulfilled as I embarked into the unknown of the 'two wheeled' experience of riding.

Learning how to ride a bicycle also fulfilled my need for belonging, as I knew, once I learned how to ride the bike, that I could participate more fully in the social life of my school, which often involved cycle-riding as a form of social recreation, and also would enable me, if I chose, to commute a slightly longer distance to my friend's homes, rendering me less dependant upon my parents. But I did not have to give up the care of my parents to ride a bicycle. Rather learning how to ride a bicycle was just simply a very positive experience of independence for myself.

I felt very good about myself, after learning how to ride a bicycle. My self-esteem was notably improved. However, I never felt so positively about riding a bicycle myself, until I had the peak experience of teaching another person that same skill. At the time, it had been quite a while since I had ridden a bicycle. But it's true what they say -- you never forget how to do so, and to teach someone a skill is to learn how to do that skill one's self, even better. I knew, that by educating my young friend in the skills of bicycle riding, that I was conveying an important social and physical skill to another human being, and giving this friend of mine the same gifts that bicycle riding had given to me.

After teaching this skill, I felt like a good teacher. But more than that, I felt as if the skills I had learned as a young person had not been learned in vain. Once an individual proceeds out of the world of childhood, where physical activity is of such importance, it is easy to forget the basic joys conveyed by the physiology of sun, warmth, and pleasure in a physical skill well done. I experienced a sense of fulfillment and self-actualization by teaching this skill to a child, because I knew that I had not forgotten one of my old skills, and I enabled another person to feel the same sense of pride that I did, in accomplishing something that was once frightening, but was now easy.

I also like to think, that when teaching this skill, I conveyed a sense of security to the person I was teaching. The child seemed to feel relaxed and comfortable, even though the act of removing the training wheels from the bike initially seemed to create a certain anxiety in the eyes of the individual. It made me proud that my presence gave the young person a sense of security and fulfillment that transcended the possible physical anxiety and nervous tension that might come with the first few moments of rolling on two wheels across the blacktop. During the first few minutes, of course, I clutched the back seat of the bicycle, to ensure that the child still had a sense of my presence, and even if the bicycle tipped over, he would not fall.

Assignment 2: Maslow and the Sitcom -- The last episode of "Friends" -- France vs. Ross for Rachel

Rachel, from the popular sitcom "Friends," perfectly exhibits Maslow's hierarchy of needs over her development as a sitcom character over the course of the last episode of "Friends." Her self-actualization as a character was perhaps best demonstrated in the last episode, where she was able to put the past behind her, and to embrace Ross, with all of his imperfections, and accept the mistakes the two of them had made in the past.

The beginning of "Friends," saw Rachel as a character in a constant state of neediness. Along the lines of Maslow's theory of personality, Rachel could not fulfill her most basic needs in the first episodes of the series. She was not even on the most infantile part of the pyramid of Maslow's personality theory of the hierarchy of needs. Rachel did not have her own job. She was dependant upon her family for her food and shelter. She was entering into a poorly though-out, permanent marital relationship with a man she did not love out of desperation, not because she felt that he cared about her, but out of a desire to simply continue the relationship she had with her own parents as providers for her physiological needs. However, the end of the first episode saw her getting her own job, however meager as a waitress, and establishing herself not as a wife, but as a single woman, living alone, in a shared apartment.

But, this apartment, as the show famously proclaimed, gave Rachel "Friends." In other words, Rachel, by getting her own job and cutting up the family credit cards, did not simply establish her own sense of safety and autonomy, apart from her parental environment. She was not only protected, and able to satisfy her physical needs and needs for safety, but she had an intense sense of belonging with other individual "Friends." She not only provided this sense of belonging for others, by bestowing nurturing at the "Second Cup" in the form of coffee and muffins, but received nurturing through a secure, created community of dependant and interdependent others her own age, whom might have different interests and abilities to her, but still had regard for her as a person with needs and wants.