A wonderful story about a 18 year-old boy, struck with a terminal cancer, who is wise beyond his years.
John Challis.
Teen is running out of innings, but the game still isn't over.
After the walk, John addressed the crowd.
"He spoke from his heart," Mr. Wetzel, the coach, said. "He said, 'I've got two options. I know I'm going to die, so I can either sit at home and feel sorry, or I could spread my message to everybody to live life to the fullest and help those in need.' After hearing that, I don't know if there were many people not crying."
Later in an interview he was asked where he gained his wisdom.
Through cancer.
"They say it takes a special person to realize this kind of stuff," he said. "I don't know if I'm special, but it wasn't hard for me. It's just my mind-set. A situation is what you make of it. Not what it makes of you."
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"I guess I can see why people see me as an inspiration," he said. "But why do people think it's so hard to see things the way I do? All I'm doing is making the best of a situation."
John then raises his voice.
"Why can't people just see the best in things? It gets you so much further in life. It's always negative this and negative that. That's all you see and hear."
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Through his own thoughts and through his deep Catholic beliefs, John believes he has "figured it out." He answers questions with maturity, courage and dignity, traits that have become his trademarks.
There's a fine, new-to-me blog on The Art of Manliness where lessons in manliness are next to practical tips like Nine ways to start a fire without matches.
When all else fails, a coke can and bar of chocolate will do
Some like John McCain need no lessons but can teach some. Of course, he'll never do it and so it rests on others to tell.
Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I told you I would make you a cripple."
The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day's will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at "a goofy angle," as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.
But it didn't heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day's splint in place.
Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complimented the treatment he'd gotten from his captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was Dr. McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again.
I can remember hearing that willpower is a muscle that must be exercised to grow strong.
Now it seems that studies prove that consistently doing one activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower.
Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind
In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.
After giving up candy and chocolate for Lent, I found easier to control my sweet tooth by eating more fruits and vegetables for snacks and that effect has persisted after Easter. Even though I now can eat all the chocolate I want, I 'm still cutting up cucumbers and celery for snacks.
The season for graduates has begun. My niece Jessica is now a proud college graduate of Western Washington University. Congratulations Jessie!
Because so many cross the threshold to adult life at the same time, it's hard to resist offering a few words of advice. The Few Words, Much Wisdom Siggy found are a good start for any parent.
Stop asking children what they want to do, and start asking them who they want to be.
The first question speaks to occupation. The second speaks to character.
One of the biggest problems in caring for old people who live on their own is making sure they take their medicine. One in three adults fail to take their prescribed medication.
New technology may help where nothing else does. The Magnetrace.
Sensor necklace records when pill is swallowed and prompts patient when it is time to take another.
"Forgetfulness is a huge problem, especially among the elderly, but so is taking the medication at the wrong time, stopping too early or taking the wrong dose," said Maysam Ghovanloo, assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Studies show that drug noncompliance costs the country billions of dollars each year as a result of re-hospitalization, complications, disease progression and even death."
There's a lot more going on in our guts than we know.
Diabetes may be disorder of upper intestine: Surgery may correct it.
Dr. Rubino, who is a professor in the Department of Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College and chief of gastrointestinal metabolic surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell.... "When we bypass the duodenum and jejunum, we are bypassing what may be the source of the problem,
Those gut feelings we have? Researchers at Leeds have reviewed the literature and say Go with Your Gut
intuition is the result of the way our brains store, process and retrieve information on a subconscious level and so is a real psychological phenomenon which needs further study to help us harness its potential.
Researchers have found a protein in embryonic stem cells that inhibits the growth and spread of malignant melanoma, the deadly skin cancer.
And Training in the Arts Makes People Smarter.
“A life-affirming dimension is opening up in neuroscience,” said Dr. Gazzaniga, “to discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn and more enjoyably and productively to live."
This just knocked me out. I was stunned.
Citing the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey, Gatto in his book "Underground History of American Education," reports only 3.5 percent of Americans are literate enough today "to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today."
Locking a nation into permanent childhood by Vin Suprynowicz via phi beta cons
When New York's Teacher of the Year resigned in 1991, John Taylor Gatto sat down and wrote an essay for the Wall St Journal saying he was "tired of working for an institution that crippled the ability of children to learn"
"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history," Mr. Gatto begins. "It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
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"David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first -- the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel 'learning disabled' and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, 'special education' fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever.
If there any wonder why home-schooling is so popular and effective when public schools are a "Prussian system of coercive schooling ill-suited to a free people".
"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be 're-formed.'
There is a trough in middle age that is truly depressing as everyone who has lived it can tell you but reports a study in England.
Middle-age is truly depressing, study finds
In a remarkably regular way throughout the world people slide down a U-shaped level of happiness and mental health throughout their lives," Andrew Oswald at Britain's Warwick University, who co-led the study, said on Tuesday.
The researchers analyzed data on depression, anxiety levels and general mental health and well-being taken from some 2 million people in 80 countries.
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"It happens to men and women, to single and married people, to rich and poor, and to those with and without children," Oswald said. "Nobody knows why we see this consistency."
I think it's because they are unhappy with all that they had to do because those were the rules, that's what their parents said to do, it's what they had to do for their children or their career. Somewhere around 50, with all the intimations of mortality that brings, they begin to think for themselves, about the unlived parts of themselves and about their legacy.
In their fifties they begin to climb out of the trough and start to become themselves, the people they were meant to be and as they do so, they become happier each year.
The good news is that if people make it to aged 70 and are still physically fit, they are on average as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year old.
There's no place to go but up . In great relief, you begin to experience the pleasures of maturity.
As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned. - Agatha Christie
Today's single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood writes Kay Hymowitz in Child-Man in the Promised Land.
Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”
But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men.
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That’s too bad. Men are “more unfinished as people,” Kunkel has neatly observed. Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.
Benedict Carey's New Year's Day piece in the New York Times, Regret with a Dash of Bitters, ruminates on the nature of lost possible selves, the person you might have been or could have been.
Surprisingly, or maybe not depending on how old you are, what people most regret is not what they did but what they didn't do.
In a series of studies, Laura A. King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, has had people write down a description of their future as they imagined it before a life-altering event, like divorce. She has found that those who are able to talk or write about this lost future without sinking into despair or losing hope tend to have developed another quality, called complexity.
Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.
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“To elaborate on loss, to look for some insight in it, is not just what a psychologically mature person does,” Dr. King said. “It’s how a person matures.
My favorite Swiss critic, Henri Frederik Amiel was unsuccessful and unnoticed during his life. After he died, a friend published his Intimate Diary, Journal Intime, to great acclaim because of its "scrupulous self observation" such as
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
"I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”
Archie Leach in Becoming Cary Grant
Acting as if you were brave works.
Acting as if you weren't shy works.
Acting as if you were kind works.
Acting as if you were happy works.
Acting as if you were loving works.
Acting as if you were your best self works.
"Gratitude is the seedbed of joy," wrote Peter Kreeft.
If we practice more gratitude, we will all be happier.
Yet sometimes when we feel a sudden rush of gratitude, we do nothing because it's awkward and we don't know quite what to do.
Say you're in an airport and you see a bunch of soldiers walking by.
You want to say thanks for your service, but you don't want to make a fool of yourself or of them.
The Gratitude Campaign has devised a simple gesture that says it all.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Put your hand on your heart, then move your hand down and out extending it towards the person you're thanking.
Watch the movie if you want, about a minute long.
Spread the gratitude. Thank you.
They love their own libraries, read philosophy, history and fiction and when they need a great manager, the call goes out, "Get me poets".
CEO Libraries Reveal Keys to Success
If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.
Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. “I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,
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Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli’s treatise on how to overthrow republics, “The Prince.” Churchill retreated to his library to heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 — and after reading for six years came back to power.
The National Endowment of the Arts reports that reading is declining especially for young Americans and so are their test scores in data said to be "simple, consistent and alarming".
The number of books at home correlates with academic achievement which makes sense to me.
students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.
Home libraries are predictors of success.
Print by Jessie Wilcox-Smith
Last week I wrote Life Imitates Art, this week there is a much finer piece in The Boston Globe about the situation facing Sandra Day O'Connor called A love supreme finds space in dementia.
So this, in the end, is what love is.
Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor's husband, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, has a romance with another woman, and the former justice is thrilled - even visits with the new couple while they hold hands on the porch swing - because it is a relief to see her husband of 55 years so content.
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And despite the stereotypes, researchers who study emotions across the life span say that old love is in many ways more satisfying than young love - even as it is also more complex.
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Researchers trying to understand aging and emotion performed brain scans on people across a range of ages, gauging their reactions to positive and negative scenes. Young people tended to respond to the negative scenes. Those in middle age took in a better balance of the positive. And older people responded only to the positive scenes.
"As people get older, they seem to naturally look at the world through positivity and be willing to accept things that when we're young we would find disturbing and vexing," said Dr. John Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT and one of the researchers.
"So I just ran over it with my wheelchair until she apologized"
I am quite impressed with Disaboom which I happened upon yesterday, a site that delivers on the promise of the Internet.
For anyone who is living with a disability, this is the place to find others like you, to learn from their experiences and find resources available to help like a career center as well as the "largest collection of accessibility reviews on everything from restaurants to travel hot spots".
For those who have been paralyzed by an accident, the videos showing adaptive sky diving and may be especially inspiring.
Founder Dr. J. Glen House knows whereof he speaks because he specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation and is also a quadriplegic. His mission
to create the first comprehensive, evolving source of information, insight, and personal engagement for the disability community.
Two of its core beliefs are close to my own.
Expertise comes in many forms. Often the best advice comes not just from medical experts but also from “peers” – others who’ve walked the path you’re on. That’s why in addition to providing solid medical expertise, we’ve also put together the largest online network of individuals to share their personal experiences with you, providing honest, practical answers to hard questions.
Knowledge is power – and so is community. Disaboom.com strives to provide you the tools and guidance you need to live active, engaged lives. But when it comes to sharing stories and personal insights, there’s nothing stronger than the power of community – which is why we’re connecting the millions touched by disability to both information and each other.
Ronni Bennett over at Time Goes By has posted a two-part interview with Dr. William Thomas, a young geriatrician and author of What are Old People For?
"What Are Old People For?: How Elders Will Save the World" (William H. Thomas)
Here is one excerpt.
We human beings live a long time after our reproductive peak. This is no accident. Our species took the necessity of aging and, from that, refined the virtues of elderhood. Elders are an integral, biologically determined element of the human cultural fabric and it is time they understood this role and begin to play their part.
And another on the two most important things he's learned from elders.
1. Wisdom lies in knowing what to overlook. 2. In the end, no one gets out alive and so, for the time we are here, it is all about relationships. Nothing else really matters.
Part One
Part Two
David Warren quit school at 16 and hit the road.
In retrospect, it was the best personal decision I ever made, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to the young of today; at least, to those whose minds are not already imprisoned. Get out of that education “system” while you still can, and before it has made you into a spiritual corpse, mouthing politically-correct clichés along with all the other zombies. Get yourself a real education, in what you can find of the world, and see what you can accomplish without participating in the credentials racket. Make your “core relationship” with God, rather than with some Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Discover a vocation in which you can advance the cause of the good, the true, and the beautiful. And raise children -- in poverty, if necessary -- who will also defy the zombism of our post-modern age.
Education reform
UPDATE: Gaghdad Bob points out that Joseph Campbell did the same thing.
".... So I said to hell with it. I went up into the woods and spent five years reading.... It was from 1929 to 1934, five years. I went up to a little shack in Woodstock, New York, and just dug in. All I did was read, read, read, and take notes. It was during the Great Depression. I didn't have any money...."
Importantly, this wasn't just aimless reading, but what someone else once called the "mystery school of individuation." Perhaps you're familiar with the concept. You find one book that speaks directly to your soul, which tips you to another one that does the same. Pretty soon you're embarked on a wild nous chase, not for any "exterior" purpose, but for the purpose of trying to articulate the idiom of your own soul. The end result -- among other things -- is that 1) you know you have a soul, 2) you are aware that your soul is very specifically yours (i.e., it has its own language, so to speak), and 3) you don't want to do anything in life that would interfere with the intrinsic joy of living from your soul.
So did he. Wandering, Wondering and Blundering into the Mystery
I can relate to Campbell's story, because in my case I quit college in my junior year (before they could expel me), and spent the next five or six years wandering, but not idly. Rather, it was a period of intense non-doodling, as if my soul were on fire and I was looking for water. By the time I entered graduate school in 1982, I was an utterly different person than I would have been had I spent all those years in the idiot factory. In short, I never would have become me. Whether it was luck or destiny, I cannot say.
Only 5% of high school seniors sleep 8 hours a night. Half of adolescents get less than seven.
Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.
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Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact of this single lost hour. Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.
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Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
It seems as though lack of sleep makes adolescents stupider, fatter and gloomier.
How to describe "life stages" today has been on my mind as I am - I hope to God - finally finishing my book, so I am quite intrigued by David Broooks' column on The Odyssey Years
There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.
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...the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
The maxim "Bad money drives out good money", otherwise known as Gresham's Law, stands for the concept that when spending money, if both good money (higher in silver or gold content) and bad money (lesser in intrinsic value) are exchanged at the same price people will hand over the 'bad' coins rather than the 'good' ones, keeping the 'good' ones for themselves.
The same thing is happening in our mainstream media where the 'bad' is driving out the 'good'. Stories about celebrities - Lindsay, Britney, Angelina - drive out stories about real heroes. When have you ever read about a story of a Congressional Medal of Honor winner?
The consequence is that people have fewer guides about how to lead a meaningful life, one of purpose, one that transcends ego and by so doing finds a place of belonging in society a and a way of making a difference in the world.
Too many of us can't see the upside of growing older, the development of maturity through the unexpected trials of life, and the great satisfaction of a life of meaning. Too many try too long to be young and hip and cool, stuck in a perpetual adolescent mire.
They don't see a way out.
In the early days of the women's movement, there was much talk about the need for new role models so that young women could pattern their thinking and the behavior after older women who had struggled and succeeded in a man's world. The Catholic Church employs the lives of the saints as role models for the faithful to show how different people in different times struggle to achieve good and holy lives.
Joseph Campbell found in the stories of heros across all cultures, the archetypal myth which he called monomyth consisting of several stages. Often called the hero's journey, the fundamental structure includes
Robert Kaplan examines why the media is reluctant to understand Modern Heroes , preferring instead to see them as victims and feeling sorry for them.
Every journalist has a different network of military contacts. Mine come at me with the following theme: We want to be admired for our technical proficiency--for what we do, not for what we suffer. We are not victims. We are privileged.
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An army at war and a nation at the mall do not encounter each other except through the refractive medium of news and entertainment.
That medium is refractive because while the U.S. still has a national military, it no longer has a national media to quite the same extent. The media is increasingly representative of an international society, whose loyalty to a particular territory is more and more diluted. That international society has ideas to defend--ideas of universal justice--but little actual ground. And without ground to defend, it has little need of heroes. Thus, future news cycles will also be dominated by victims.
Barbara Nicolosi, a scriptwriter in Hollywood, has posted notes of her talk on heroes in storytelling and in society. Heroes in Storytelling
She asks what does a kid (and by extension, a society) look like who has heroes.
Idealistic, hopeful, imitative, open, eager to please, reverent, grateful
And what does a kid look like without heroes.
Cynical, haughty, suspicious, jaded, irreverent, entitled, self-absorbed.
To a child, she writes, a hero provides a teaching example of a life worth living.
To an adult, heroes
should engage us in a holy rivalry; to shame us into being more generous and tireless in doing good. Mother Teresa shamed me into facing what a schlep I am. In some ways, because she could pick a maggot ridden poor person out of a gutter, I was able to be kinder to the annoying guy in the next office.
To boomers she says
Try and make the last years of your lives heroic. Just heard the other day from one of my students how her 53 year old father just walked out on the family – two teens at home and an eight year old – and moved in with his 26 year old receptionist. He told his daughter he was bored and feeling unfulfilled. Enough of this nonsense! We don’t want to hear about your need to be having fun anymore! We need you to be brave as you face your elderly years – you will be wrinkled and sickly and forgetful – and your heroism will be to be uncomplaining, and wise and solicitous and serene for the rest of us!
There's much more including this wonderful quote, One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." May Sarton
Via Instapundit comes the list of 25 Skills Every Man Should Know.
1. Patch a radiator hose
2. Protect your computer
3. Rescue a boater who as capsized
4. Frame a wall
5. Retouch digital photos
6. Back up a trailer
7. Build a campfire
8. Fix a dead outlet
9. Navigate with a map and compass
10. Use a torque wrench
11. Sharpen a knife
12. Perform CPR
13. Fillet a fish
14. Maneuver a car out of a skid
15. Get a car unstuck
16. Back up data
17. Paint a room
18. Mix concrete
19. Clean a bolt-action rifle
20. Change oil and filter
21. Hook up an HDTV
22. Bleed brakes
23. Paddle a canoe
24. Fix a bike flat
25. Extend your wireless network
I can do about half of them which is why I guess I need a man. I'd be interested in what else a man should know how to do.
The list is put out by Popular Mechanics, clearly geared to guys. I wonder what magazine would put out a similar list for gals that women would seriously pay attention to. Oprah's my first guess. I
Tony Snow found unexpected blessings in cancer.
Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live—fully, richly, exuberantly—no matter how their days may be numbered
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The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense.
I find this very disturbing, another example of a fraying social contract among citizens.
Around 1 in 6 Americans Do Not Pay Their Taxes.
This is evading taxes, not paying your fair share, not carrying your load. And every single one of those evaders will have an excuse as to why the law does not apply to them.
It's simple. Pay no more than what you owe. Even be aggressive in taking tax deductions,
but pay your taxes.
"..whenever I had a problem, I went to something wholesome to solve it."
One of the “wholesome” things that helped, he said, was bowling.
That's about as good an explanation of dealing with problems as I have ever heard.
The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis in the New York Times Sunday magazine.
The popular image of the Wise Man usually does not include a guy in a bowling shirt, but several qualities have emerged again and again in older people like J. who score high on Ardelt’s wisdom scale. They learn from previous negative experiences. They are able to step outside themselves and assess a troubling situation with calm reflection. They recast a crisis as a problem to be addressed, a puzzle to be solved. They take action in situations they can control and accept the inability to do so when matters are outside their control.
so how do academics define wisdom now that they have begun studying it? For one thing, you don't have to be smart or accomplished or even old, though most older people are more even-keeled and emotionally resilient.
Certain qualities associated with wisdom recur in the academic literature: a clear-eyed view of human nature and the human predicament; emotional resiliency and the ability to cope in the face of adversity; an openness to other possibilities; forgiveness; humility; and a knack for learning from lifetime experiences. And yet as psychologists have noted, there is a yin-yang to the idea that makes it difficult to pin down. Wisdom is founded upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet detachment is essential.
Vivian Clayton whose research has made many breakthroughs in understanding, first analyzed the Hebrew bible
“What emerged from that analysis,” she says, “was that wisdom meant a lot of different things. But it was always associated with knowledge, frequently applied to human social situations, involved judgment and reflection and was almost always embedded in a component of compassion.” The essential importance of balance was embodied in the Hebrew word for wisdom, chochmah, which ancient peoples understood to evoke the combination of both heart and mind in reaching a decision.
Another researcher Birren boiled it down to the "Berlin Paradigm" and defined wisdom as
an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.
Ardelt who's now doing research in Boston analyzing Harvard University graduates says
People who rated high in wisdom, she adds, were “very generous,” both financially and emotionally; among those who rated low in wisdom, “there was this occupation with the self.”
What is very clear is that old people with a more positive attitude towards old age lived seven and a half years longer.
They can regulate their emotions better, registering the negative, focusing on the positive.
It may be that the seeds of wisdom are planted early in life with exposure to adversity or failure, that one called a "stress inoculation" that enhances the person's ability to regulate emotions.
If you ever wonder about the impact of your actions on others, read Just Doing My Best.
Good advice from Paul Graham
The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?...No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.
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I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone.
Good and Bad Procrastination
Update. I forgot to give a hat tip to Armed Liberal for the link. And to add this a propos quote from Carolyn Myss.
You cannot change anything in your life with intention alone, which can become a watered-down, occasional hope that you'll get to tomorrow. Intention without action is useless.
It looks as if the "good" procrastinators found a way to make their most important stuff, urgent.
If you're single and alone this Valentine's Day, it's time for some Aimless Love.
AIMLESS LOVE
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.
But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.
After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.
- Billy Collins
From Fast Company comes The Three Keys to Change, an excerpt from Alan Deutschman's new book Change or Die
This isn't a another self-help book, but a serious explanation why people don't or can't change, why heart attack victims don't take their medicines or why prisoners once released commit crimes again and go back to prison.
Why is it so hard to change?
Facts don't seem to help.
Fear doesn't either.
Few can change and transform themselves on their own.
Alan writes the keys to change are relate, repeat and reframe.
The first key - Relate
You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope....you need the influence of seemingly "unreasonable" people to restore your hope--to make you believe that you can change and expect that you will change.
The second key - Repeat
The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you'll need. It takes a lot of repetition over time before new patterns of behavior become automatic and seem natural--until you act the new way without even thinking about it. It helps tremendously to have a good teacher, coach, or mentor to give you guidance, encouragement, and direction along the way.
The third key - Reframe
The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn't have made any sense before you changed.
New hope, new skills, new thinking.
Robert Paterson calls it a revelatory book with the key to change to be found in the human heart.
Alan has reviewed the vast body of literature on what works in therapy to help people confront and then move through their belief barriers to a better life. There seems to be many different approaches that work. One on one. Groups etc. But the one thing that the successful paths had in common was a person who truly, sincerely believed in the capability of the other to make the change. This open hearted person often knew this before the subject did. The magic that crossed over was that truth of the feeling that this person loves me for whom I am now in all my misery. He loves me for me now not for what I should be. He sees in me the person that I can and could be. He gives me the gift of hope.
I would add only that the change in the heart takes place only in relationship, be it another person like a football coach, a group like AA or God. In that relationship you are not only loved for who you are, you are given the support to become what you can be.
Last week the Pope said the saints have not 'fallen from heaven'.
"They are men like us, with complicated problems. Holiness does not consist in not making mistakes or never sinning," Benedict XVI continued. "Holiness grows with the capacity for conversion, repentance, willingness to begin again, and above all with the capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness.
Saints Weren't Perfect, Pope Says
Today in the Wall St Journal, Jeff Zaslow tells the stories of three people and the lessons they learned from the losses they've endured.
Former Army Staff Sgt. Robbie Doughty lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Iraq. Thomas Sullivan lost 96 colleagues in the Sept. 11 attacks. Laurie Johnson lost her husband and young son in a small plane crash that left her seriously injured.
And yet today, all three of them remain positive about life. They even seem upbeat.
Mr. Doughty, 32, will host a grand opening today of his new Little Caesars pizza franchise in Paducah, Ky. Since his 2004 injury, "I've done so many things, even skiing," he says. "If there's something I can't do, there's always a way to work around it."
Plane-crash survivor Laurie Johnson sells stylish crutches.
Mr. Sullivan, 35, is now an Army Reserve captain in Iraq. In 2001, as a Fiduciary Trust employee, he worked on the 95th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower, and escaped minutes before it collapsed. Yes, he feels survivor's guilt, but serving as a wartime officer helps to ease that.
Ms. Johnson, 46, is now an entrepreneur. That 2002 plane crash left her on crutches for two years. Since then, she has created LemonAid Crutches, which sells "designer crutches" with comfortable fabrics. It was her way of "turning lemons into lemonade," she says.
Are there lessons for us in these people's experiences? Researchers say yes, because the root of resilience is an ability to keep adversities in perspective, while making peace with things that can't be changed.
Being creative with what life deals you is key.
Dr. Zausner says that her own greatest achievements came after surviving ovarian cancer. "We don't know how strong we are until we have the occasion to find out. Our strengths are like icebergs, mostly hidden." Her new book, "When Walls Become Doorways," details her research into artists "who turned setbacks into launching pads."
Key too is pressing on, helping others and finding purpose.
Sounds something like saints-in-the-making doesn't it.
Is a courtesan, not a prostitute, but a courtesan the ideal archetype for a truly modern woman?
Robert Paterson and his sister Diana will be exploring the lifestyle of courtesans in a short series on Trusted Space that looks very interesting.
Here's a taste.
Looks are transient. A beautiful woman becomes a faded beauty, something sad to behold.
A clever, witty and kind woman ages without her age being noticed, and she, has maturity, and good sense and a great deal to offer younger women and she knows well her time has passed and she loves nothing more than to pass on her experience to a
younger intelligent woman she respects.
Age is no obstacle for her. She has no need of plastic surgery because she takes on her new role as grand dame with great relief.
She has had many men and many experiences, and she is happy to live with her memories and move forward with her personal interests. She does not need to diet because she is now fulfilled by things that feed her mind. Her pleasure of the body has been replaced by the utter pleasure of all things interesting to her.
She sleeps alone and comfortably. She leaves the fretting of love and not love to younger women. She has no more of those thoughts to cloud her mind and take away her sleep. She is comfortable with herself.
One movie isn't going to change their lives, but it will give some of them hope and hope belongs to everyone.
Homeless Brought to See "Happyness."
About 100 homeless people were guests of the mayor's office Thursday for a screening of "The Pursuit of Happyness," the real-life story of a homeless man who worked his way to becoming a millionaire.
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When Gardner, who gets evicted along with his young son, is finally offered the stockbroker job he painfully strove for, the audience burst into applause and wiped away tears.
Blogging as the Dawn Patrol, Dawn Eden, author of The Thrill of the Chaste, writes in the London Sunday Times, Casual Sex is a con: women just aren't like men.
Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.
It took me a long time to realise this.
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It left me with a brittle facade incapable of real intimacy.
I'm a big fan of Pat Conroy, having read all his books, The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and Beach Music.
My respect for me has grown even more since I read An Honest Confession by an American Coward.
In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the '60s, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird.
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I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong.
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After hearing Al Kroboth's story of his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be.
"He was misogynistic, mercurial, unpredictable and violent. But he was also my daddy, and sometimes, when he held me close, I looked into his big sad eyes and I knew he loved me. And that's the part I want to remember."
Richard Pryor, the comedian married seven times to five different women and had six, maybe seven children.
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the money went to the hookers hanging out at his house -- "Daddy, the whores need to be paid"-- and not to paying child support to his many ex-wives raising kids far from the Hollywood Hills. So hers was a childhood of abundance and of lack, of private jets and welfare checks, of elaborate vacations in Hawaii and a gig selling hot dogs on the beach when she was 13.
What's so interesting about this piece is how well daughter Rain is doing. Good for her.
Somehow, over the years, she managed to shake off the craziness and the pain, to integrate her dual identities -- finding an outlet and mining a few laughs from it all in her new memoir, "Jokes My Father Never Taught Me: Life, Love, and Loss With Richard Pryor."
"You're either going to go down the path of self-destructiveness," Pryor says today, chic in black high-heeled boots and a cape, her riotous ringlets flatironed into submission, "or you're not. . . . Success is the best revenge; it's the ultimate ha-ha. Statistically, I should be strung out . . . but you won't see me in a hospital anytime soon."
It was too simple to be effective.
That's what Harvard graduate, motivational speaker and executive coach Caroline Adams Miller thought about thinking of three good things that happened during the day.
But she did the homework assignment and found
"The quality of my dreams has changed, I never have trouble falling asleep and I do feel happier,"
she said in Researchers Seek Routes to Happier Life.
Seems like a lot of those exercises suggested by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania work like
* think of three good things that happened during the day
* find your personal strengths and apply one or more of them in a different way every day for a week. (You can take the test and find your strengths at authentic happiness.)
* savor the pleasing things in your life - the first cup of coffee, a hot shower
* practice random acts of kindness for 10 weeks
* write down what you want to be remembered for. (This suggestion falls into my idea of your Personal Legacy Archives and keep your life aligned with your legacy)
For a full understanding of Seligman's work and his own journey nothing beats Eudeamonia, The Good Life by Martin Seligman, published in Edge.
About 25 years ago I began to ask the question, who never gets helpless? That is, who resists collapsing? And the reverse question is, who becomes helpless at the drop of a hat? I got interested in optimism because I found out that the people who didn't become helpless were people who when they encountered events in which nothing they did mattered, thought about those events as being temporary, controllable, local, and not their fault; whereas people who collapsed in a heap immediately upon becoming helpless were people who saw the bad event as being permanent, uncontrollable, pervasive, and their fault. 25 years ago I started working on optimism versus pessimism, and I found that optimistic people got depressed at half the rate of pessimistic people, that optimistic people succeeded better in all professions that we measured except one, that optimistic people had better, feistier, immune systems, and probably lived longer than pessimistic people. We also created interventions that reliably changed pessimists into optimists.
There aren't many general essayists anymore, though some bloggers come close. There's an art in writing about complex ideas in an engaging fashion.
The News Hour features two essayists, Anne Taylor Fleming and Richard Rodriguez. Unfamiliar to most Americans is the Canadian David Warren who writes Essays on Our Times.
Here he is on Regeneration.
The question is, how do we find our way out of the wilderness that has grown in the heart of man? How does a society, a whole civilization, that is on the skids and bound for destruction, arrest its slide? I pose this today in the broadest possible way, because I think it is the one, common, practical, and even political question that should remain near the front of all minds capable of charity and goodwill.
The obvious answer, to those who realize that our civilization was built not only by human hands, but under the guidance of Church and religion, is to counsel a re-centring, a return to God. But for those who have moved and been moved so far away, that the very idea of God chills them, what paths lie open?
I think there are quite a few, and that all have in common this mysterious element of joy. I think art, broadly, offers many alternative means to the kind of regeneration -- moral, and ethical, as well as aesthetic -- that can help us out of our enclosed spaces. Learning to draw, from nature; to sing, in key; to dance, in pattern; to write, metrically; even to sew, or to master carpenter’s joints -- all such enterprises offer the lost soul an individual direction out of the jungle.
The reason why, is that each is a discipline that restores us to harmony with the natural order of things. Each offers a way of seeing into God’s creation, and puts us in the presence of what is infinitely greater than ourselves.
To be able to draw a single flower, with full attention to all its colours and parts, is to be lifted out of one’s tawdry self into a realm where good, truth, and beauty still prevail. It is to recover joy.
Is Kindness the Secret of Success?
'There is a widespread belief that ruthless and self-centred people are the most successful when it comes to their careers. But being prepared to do anything to get ahead does not mean you will succeed in your ambitions,' says Stefan Einhorn, author of The Art Of Being Kind, to be published this week by Little, Brown. 'True success is not achieved by those who are smart or inconsiderate, by hard-baked egotists or psychopathic bosses,' says Einhorn, who is also chairman of the Ethics Council at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
'On the contrary, being kind to our fellow human beings is a precondition to becoming truly successful. Goodness and kindness are the single most important factors when it comes to how successful we will be in our lives.'
Sometimes the only way you can be brave is to act as if you were brave.
We are better actors than we know. By acting as if we were brave or kind or gentle or careful, we ease ourselves into being brave, kind, gentle and careful.
This commonsense application of a truism we all know is making its way into corporate management."The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives" (Richard Tanner Pascale, Anthony G. Athos)
From Richard Pascale's book Delivering Results:
"People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than think their way into a new way of acting.
via O'Reilly Radar
From an interview of Nora Ephron in the Wall St Journal (subscribers only I think)
I was just with someone complaining about his mother. He's 70 and his mother is dead. I sat there thinking, 'This is unbelievable.' He was complaining about things she did to him when he was a kid. There are also a lot of divorced people who five years later are still walking around angry when they should be grateful. They love being victims. You get to a certain point in life where if you were younger you'd say, 'Think about getting a shrink.' Then you get older and want to say, 'Pull up your socks. Get over it.'
Exhausted are you?
You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?"
"The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest," I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence. "What is it, then?"
"The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."
It's David Whyte on meeting Brother David. A remarkable essay
You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly to rot on the vine.
We instinctively know that how a question is "framed" - think leading the witness or negative ads - can distort our decision-making. Now scientists have brain images that confirm what we know in our guts.
Emotion rules the brain's decisions.
But Following Your Gut is a good thing when it comes to life decisions and choices.
In Gut Reactions,, Jesse Prinz argues that emotions are embodied appraisals - they are perceptions of the body, but, through the body they also allow us to literally perceive danger, loss and other matters.
"Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Philosophy of Mind)" (Jesse J. Prinz)
A fine and exhaustive piece on the positive psychology movement can be found in this week's New York magazine. Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness or do New Yorkers want to be happy.
Writer Jennifer Senior interviews a number of psychologists and researchers including Martin Seligman who kicked the whole positive psychology movement.
She reports on the number of colleges now offering courses in positive psychology after the immense appeal of the course offered at an instructor at Harvard, Tal Ben-Shahar. Naturally, when Harvard Teaches Happiness, a lot of people pay attention.
While I read Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert, I never got around to posting anything on it. What follows in a nutshell is all you need to know about it, thanks to Jennifer Senior. Me, I preferred by far Jonathan Haidt's book, The Happiness Hypothesis.
And no matter where they live, human beings are terrible predictors of what will make them happy. If Stumbling on Happiness tells us anything, it’s this. “Imagination,” says Gilbert, “is the poor man’s wormhole.” Our imagination has an odd knack for Photoshopping things in and airbrushing things out, which is why we think that getting back together with our exes is a good idea; it also tends to mistake our present feelings for future ones, which is why, when we decide to marry the right person, we find it unthinkable we’ll ever be tempted to sleep with anyone else.
At the same time, we forget that our imagination has a miraculous ability to rationalize its way out of grim situations—which is why we’re more likely to take a positive view of things we did than things we didn’t (so go ahead and ask that woman to marry you), more comfortable with decisions we can’t reverse than ones we can, and more apt to make the best of a terrible situation than a merely annoying one.
Because our imaginations are limited, we can be disappointed by the things we covet most. But it also means—and this is the gorgeous part—that we’re much more likely to cope well with situations we never thought we’d be able to survive. Perhaps the most profound study Gilbert cites is about the disabled, showing that those who are permanently injured say they’d be willing to pay far less to undo their injuries than able-bodied people say they’d pay to prevent them. It’s possible, as Gilbert notes, that they may even find some silver lining in their experiences, as when the late Christopher Reeve memorably said, “I didn’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now.”
I've posted a lot about The Science of Happiness because I believe we have a Moral Obligation to be Happy to make the world a better place.
Forget the Market for Zombies. We know that Angry/negative people are bad for your brain. We don't want to be Soul Less.
So Who's Happy? People who are Hungry for Meaning. People who want to swim in a River of Joy, choose the Uphill Climb, sing at the Church of the Divine Road Trip, and Go Straight to the Good in Everything. They want to Look to the Good Things, and Find What We Love.
Even if they're just An Ordinary Guy, they learn Lessons from a Billionaire and look at their Wealth in 3-D. They know When Just Enough Is All Your Need and what their First Business is and they look at Investing in their Net Worth as Human Beings.
They don't need a Quaker Powerpoint to know What Really Matters , that Meaning not gadgets brings happiness, so does embracing the Five Things We Cannot Change. They Love More, Have Less.
They can transform an horrific act by Teaching Kindness. They believe in Paying It Forward. They hope some day to experience a luminous Moment of Grace Above all, they know it's Empathy and the Golden Rule.
Another chilling essay that makes you think from Patti at 37days.
"Leaving's not the only way to go.... Either commit to the swim or go" Unpack your boxes.
The fear that makes us resist change because we think we will die of the pain that change will bring keeps us closed in a box created by our own minds.
Sometimes the pain is so great, the threat to the ego we have constructed so frightening, that the mind will jump to anything to distract itself. in a frenzy, the mind will turn to something that soothes, drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, internet surfing, books, TV, anything to keep from feeling the pain. Or the mind shuts down, withdraws, turns off.
It's the edge, people fear. What's outside the box.
Sometimes all it takes to break through the box is to imagine in your mind's eye, the fear itself. Imagine constructing the box that holds your fear. What do the walls look like? The ceiling? When you've finished constructing the box, construct the door. Now imagine a beautiful landscape outside the box where you're completely secure and loved. Then open the door, walk out and be free.
As you practice accepting the fear, then walking through the door you've created to where you feel loved and secure, you will move from one mind state to another more easily.
Fear contracts, love expands.
Discovery reports that immaturity levels are rising
Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth.
As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry.
Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny.
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The theory’s creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue.
A “child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge” is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, “unfinished.”
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"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.”
Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, “immature” people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift.
The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues, he believes. These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness.
David Brooks, a social commentator and an op-ed columnist at The New York Times, has documented a somewhat related phenomenon concerning the current blurring of “the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture,” which Charlton believes is a version of psychological neoteny.
Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.
By contrast, Jeremy highlights the characteristics of minds that are not only adult but are fully actualized.
Maslow has also identified a number of characteristics shared by self-actualizing people. According to Maslo
