The New York Times advises us in How to train an aging brain
Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.
The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.
“The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger but allowing for greater complexity and deeper understanding,” says Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, who has studied ways to teach adults effectively. “As adults we may not always learn quite as fast, but we are set up for this next developmental step.”
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the painter Alexej von Assaulenko
Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”
Dr. Mezirow developed this concept 30 years ago after he studied women who had gone back to school. The women took this bold step only after having many conversations that helped them “challenge their own ingrained perceptions of that time when women could not do what men could do.”
Such new discovery, Dr. Mezirow says, is the “essential thing in adult learning.”
Could it be the good news is that aging boomers will be better off if they critically examine their ingrained perceptions of the world as being all about them?
YES.
IN 1975 Hung Ba Lee was only 5 when he fled Vietnam in a fishing boat piloted by his father, a commander in the South Vietnamese Navy and the rest of his family and 400 other refugess. They were rescued at sea by the US navy, taken to a U.S. base in the Philippines, then a refugee camp in California and finally to Virginia where the family rebuilt their lives.
Last week, Le returned to Vietnam as commander of a Navy warship.
Unique homecoming to Vietnam for US commander.
Le returned on the Lassen, an $800 million, 509-foot destroyer equipped with Tomahawk missiles and a crew of 300. The ship and the USS Blue Ridge, the command vessel for the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet, are making the latest in a series of goodwill visits to Vietnam, which began in 2003 when the USS Vandergriff paid a port call to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.
"I thought that one day I would return but I really didn't expect to be returning as the commander of a Navy warship," Le said after stepping ashore Saturday. "It's an incredible personal honor."
"I'm proud to be an American, but I'm also very proud of my Vietnamese heritage," said Le, who spoke a few halting words in Vietnamese.
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Le has few memories of his three-day journey on the fishing trawler, which ended just as they were running out of food, water and fuel.
But he has vivid memories of the example set by his father, Thong Ba Le, who is now 69 and has never returned to Vietnam. After the family settled in northern Virginia, he took a job in a supermarket, where he worked his way up from bag boy to manager.
"I always wanted to be like my dad," Le said. "He persevered and overcame many challenges."
Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist, has Asperger's Syndrome.
This week she is offering career advice on How to deal with Asperger Syndrome at work.
People often tell me that I should write career advice for people with Asperger Syndrome. This is because I am surrounded by people who have Asperger’s, and I have it myself. Please, do not tell me I don’t have it. First of all, it looks very different in men and women, and most of you have experience with men. Second, I’m way more weird in person than I am on the blog. And surely you thought it was the other way around.
So, anyway, the reason I’m good at giving career advice is because I had to learn things systematically, which helps me break it down for everyone else.
For example, I had to learn that a candy dish on someone’s desk means “I like to talk with people.” Other people read this cue instinctively.
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I don’t really do career coaching. I don’t have patience. But often career coaches send people with Asperger’s to me, because mostly, these people are extremely difficult to coach.
They are difficult to coach because the biggest problem is that non-verbal cues that are obvious to everyone else are totally lost on people with Asperger’s. For example, you can tell when you are boring someone, but someone with Asperger’s cannot—we just keep talking.
Jonah Lehrer tells us The Truth about Grit in today's Boston Globe
In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn’t new - “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked - the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.
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Grit, it turns out, is an essential (and often overlooked) component of success.
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The new focus on grit is part of a larger scientific attempt to study the personality traits that best predict achievement in the real world. While researchers have long focused on measurements of intelligence, such as the IQ test, as the crucial marker of future success, these scientists point out that most of the variation in individual achievement - what makes one person successful, while another might struggle - has nothing to do with being smart. Instead, it largely depends on personality traits such as grit and conscientiousness. It’s not that intelligence isn’t really important - Newton was clearly a genius - but that having a high IQ is not nearly enough.
Grit meaning "pluck" and "spirit" in addition to perseverance is an American word describing a certain American type we don't see much of anymore,
What happened?
Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, ...spent decades following a large sample of “gifted” students, searching for evidence that his measurement of intelligence was linked to real world success. ... Terman also found that other traits, such as “perseverance,” were much more pertinent. Terman concluded that one of the most fundamental tasks of modern psychology was to figure out why intelligence is not a more important part of achievement: “Why this is so, and what circumstances affect the fruition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent importance that they should be investigated by every method that promises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance.”
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Unfortunately, in the decades following Terman’s declaration, little progress was made on the subject. Because intelligence was so easy to measure - the IQ test could be given to schoolchildren, and often took less than an hour - it continued to dominate research on individual achievement.
The end result, says James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, is that “there was a generation of social scientists who focused almost exclusively on trying to raise IQ and academic test scores. The assumption was that intelligence is what mattered and what could be measured, and so everything else, all these non-cognitive traits like grit and self-control, shouldn’t be bothered with.”
Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at UPenn is a pioneer in the study of grit says
“I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit. Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.”
But grit isn’t just about stubborn perseverance - it’s also about finding a goal that can sustain our interest for years at a time. Consider two children learning to play the piano, each with the same level of raw talent and each expending the same effort toward musical training. However, while one child focuses on the piano, the other child experiments with the saxophone and cello. “The kid who sticks with one instrument is demonstrating grit,” Duckworth says. “Maybe it’s more fun to try something new, but high levels of achievement require a certain single-mindedness.”
Xavier Le Pichon has a remarkable article up (Speaking of Faith @American Public Media), Ecce Home (Behold Humanity)
A geophysicist, Le Pichon writes of the fragility and evolution of our humanity beginning with a small child dying in Calcutta through the poignant tale of his father taking care of his mother through her long and painful decline.
Who is this child that the tidal wave of human misery has deposited among the dozens of other “dying destitutes”, as announced on the board at the entrance: “Home for dying destitutes”. Why did I have to travel over ten thousand kilometers to meet him so that he would completely reorient my life?
Suffering has suddenly swept my soul: it has washed away everything in me. How so much suffering that I had not even noticed could be present next to me? As I had been standing on the crest of the advancing wave of our scientific and technologic civilization, I did not even glance at the debris left over by its flow. I was looking ahead. And suddenly, among the debris of my civilization, this child becomes for me a person, the most important person in my life.
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Contrarily to what is often assumed, the weak and imperfect parts are often those that allow the evolution to occur without any revolution. This is true for the evolution of life, which is in great part based on the occurrence of coding errors during the duplication of the genetic information. One can ask whether it is not also true of our societies. We tend to dissociate the individuals who are well adapted to our social life from those that have difficulties to follow the pace that is imposed on them by our life style. Yet a society that separates the producers from the others considered as dead weight, even as marginal or excluded individuals, is a hard society, characterized by conflicts and often by complete rejection of minorities. It is sad and pessimistic. On the contrary a society where all are well integrated has a much more adaptable structure, with a different, easier and more conciliatory mode of life. It is often happier and more optimistic.
He finds that even Neanderthals fed and looked after severely handicapped members of their communities who were too disabled to contribute to the quest for food.
this experience of welcoming the suffering of our neighbor is at the very heart of our identity of humans since the origin.
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Thus human societies have reorganized themselves about a new pole governed by the presence of suffering and death, which is related to the realization of the fragility and vulnerability of its members. Actually, we tend to judge the degree of humanity of a society through the way in which it takes into account in its organization the presence of suffering and death.
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Taking care of fragile and vulnerable individuals has revealed to humans their own fragility and vulnerability. It has forced them to enter this dark world of fear in order to learn to live with it. They have realized that the human individual is a unique reality that keeps its unity under widely changing aspects from the fetus to the aged person at the end of his life.
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Father Thomas Philippe co-founder of L’Arche with Jean Vanier said: “If we take away from someone who is suffering, any meaning to his suffering, if we make him feel even indirectly that his suffering is useless and is a burden to the community, what is left for him? Despair.” We must welcome each person in such a way that she retains her full dignity and still have a sense of having something to offer to the community.
He learned from the deep transformation of his father's heart and the suffering humanity of his mother a deep mystery
What my mother and father experienced together during her long and painful illness helps us to understand a little better the nature of this mysterious transformation of relationships which comes when we welcome handicap, suffering and illness. If this welcome is made with dignity and love, the person we welcome becomes the one who leads us into a new deepening of our true humanity. That person changes us deeply as she also changes the nature of the community around them. My mother who had played such an important role during her active life to form the bonds that unified our family had at the end of her painful life an even greater influence in maintaining our unity and in deepening the heart of my father while she appeared to be utterly powerless. One can say that she radiated much more love than what she had received. She had revealed to those who had welcomed her with love a new depth of their humanity. They now better understood that they had a heart and could only find happiness in love.
There will not be enough doctors, heath care or money when we boomers get old. We will have to take care of each other. Time we started learning how by paying attention to what our elderly people need most and that is to be seen and appreciated.
Mother Theresa, beatified by Pope John Paul II said "There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread."
True Grit : Growing Old in America by Jude Acosta
Ours is one of the few civilizations in recorded history that not only ignores the aged but devalues them. The way we have placed such emphatic priority on youthful sexuality, incessant and needless entertainment, and endless consumerism has in effect put the accrued wisdom of the elderly at philosophical and spiritual odds with everything the modern American marketplace stands for. We are a nation of Peter Pans and we believe that somehow we can avoid growing up if we just pretend that aging, like death, is for someone else, not us. And like very young children we cover our eyes and make believe the aged are not there.
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The irony is that while the increasing number of elderly in America may need more care and companionship than ever before, many, like my friend, Mr. Garry, will in fact be more alone. With less family living nearby, fewer social invitations, and little or no value in a world that places material success on par with spiritual salvation, they are often stuck at home, unable to care for themselves well or at all, and dependent upon government services instead of family. For many Americans, particularly those who live in front of the television, the aged and infirm are all but invisible.
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According to a growing number of mental health experts, loneliness is the greatest contributing factor to all manner of illness in our culture. University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo and writer William Patrick in their book Loneliness (WW Norton, 2008) state that loneliness is so serious a condition that it puts people at risk for heart disease, cancer and respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments. Citing three decades of research, they point out that loneliness can disturb our levels of stress hormones, immune function, and even gene expression, while positive human interaction increases levels of oxytocin, a bonding hormone that reduces blood pressure and cortisol levels. In this sense, loneliness is transformed from a purely "emotional" state to a measurable biochemical one.
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Contrary to current media spin, it does not take a whole village to change the situation of the elderly in this country. It takes one person, one moment, one conversation at a local park, and, like a sacred witness, the willingness to see them.
Everything we think we know about babies is wrong
In The Philosophical Baby developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik compiles the latest in her field’s research to paint a new picture of our inner lives at inception — one in which we are, in some ways, more conscious than adults.
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Alison Gopnik: One of the things we discovered is that imagination, which we often think of as a special adult ability, is actually in place in very young children, as early as 18 months old. That ability is very closely related to children’s ability to figure out how the world works.
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Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both.
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They already seem to appreciate the difference between the kinds of morality that comes from empathy and the kind that comes from our conventional rules. From the time they are two, they recognize both are important but in different ways. That’s pretty amazing
A new mental illness that is so destructive that some psychiatrists are urging that bitterness be considered a mental illness - post traumatic embitterment disorder. I think we all know or have met people of this sort.
"They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, a German psychiatrist who named the behavior.
Embittered people are typically good people who have worked hard at something important, such as a job or a relationship or activity, Linden says. When something unexpectedly awful happens -- they don't get the promotion, the wife files for divorce or they fail to make the Olympic team -- a profound sense of injustice overtakes them. Instead of dealing with the loss with the help of family and friends, they cannot let go of the feeling of being victimized. Almost immediately after the traumatic event, they become angry, pessimistic, aggressive, hopeless haters.
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There are only a handful of studies on the behavior, but psychiatrists meeting Monday were in agreement that much more research is needed on identifying and helping these people. One estimate is that 1% to 2% of the population are embittered, says Linden, who has published several studies on the behavior.
"These people usually don't come to treatment because 'the world has to change, not me,' " Linden says. "They are almost treatment resistant.... Revenge is not a treatment."
From the heart of Silicon Valley, eighth graders say that the negative effects of technology vastly outweighs the benefits.
“It’s bad for us, but it sure is fun.”
Through young eyes by Michael Malone reveals remarkable self knowledge by children who lived all their lives in an ocean of technological games and devices.
When asked what they find wrong with living in our modern Wired Web World, the students had no shortage of answers, most of which fell into a half-dozen categories. I’ll let the students largely speak for themselves - voices describing the dark side of the tech revolution with a sincerity few of us adults have ever heard before:
Time-waster
Loss of motivation:
Addictive: “The Internet is like a gateway drug,” says Christine Doan, 13.
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Second Hand Knowledge: This answer was probably the biggest surprise. The eighth graders seemed to intuitively appreciate that the experiences and information they received from the Web and other digital sources was essentially a simulacrum of reality - a re-creation on a glowing flat screen of the three dimensional natural world . . .and that something was being lost in the translation. “We don’t get as much out of things if we don’t experience them ourselves,” says Lauren Fahey, 13. “We seem to spend a lot of our lives as bystanders,” adds Katherine Wu, 13.
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Exposure
Disturbed Values: All of these forces can’t help but affect a young person’s sense of values. The eighth graders, in some ways sophisticated beyond their years, instinctively understand that. “We can’t respect anything anymore,” says Eric Bautista. Adds Jenna Kunz, “You don’t care about things as much; you aren’t as passionate as you should be.”
You've heard about circadian cycles but did you know that the thousands of genes in the body switch on and off over the 12-hour cycles governed by light and dark that set our waking an sleeping hours and eating habits.
Now scientists are finding that shorter cycles are also biologically encoded. 8 hour workday biologically wired
New research from the University of Pennsylvania and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies suggests that humans are biologically hard-wired to work only eight hours a day.
The standard work cycle appears to be programmed in the genes.
Close friendships often have a greater effect on health than a spouse or a family member. They will shape your life, sustain it and make it better.
What Are Friends For? A Longer Life
Researchers are only now starting to pay attention to the importance of friendship and social networks in overall health. A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large 2007 study showed an increase of nearly 60 percent in the risk for obesity among people whose friends gained weight. And last year, Harvard researchers reported that strong social ties could promote brain health as we age.
“In general, the role of friendship in our lives isn’t terribly well appreciated,” said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. “There is just scads of stuff on families and marriage, but very little on friendship. It baffles me. Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.
- Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) British lexiographer.
My friends are my estate.
- Emily Dickinson
'Unconditional love, extended to others without exception, is considered to be one of the highest expressions of spirituality, said Professor Mario Beauregard, of Montreal University’s centre for research into neurophysiology and cognition.
Professor Beauregard used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on low paid assistants looking after people with learning difficulties, as examples of people with proven ability to feel strong unconditional love:
When the subjects were asked to evoke feelings of unconditional love, the scans showed seven brain areas that became active, three were similar to those of romantic love. The others were different, suggesting a separate kind of love.
Prof Beauregard’s discoveries showed that some of the areas activated when experiencing unconditional love were also involved in releasing dopamine - the chemical involved in sensing pleasure.
The greatest love of all: Study shows why humans are capable of caring unconditionally
The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ.
To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride, they say, this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times.
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“I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine.”
When All You Have Left Is Your Pride
Pride, in short, begets perseverance. All of which may explain why, when the repo man is at the door, people so often remind themselves that they still have theirs, and that it’s worth something. Because they do, and because it is.
However much pride may go before a fall, it may be far more useful after one.
A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.
In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.
In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
I like this theory, but I haven't a clue how to pronounce the scientist's name "Hrdy".
The next article in the Science section of the New York Times is more baffling. Commercials make TV shows more enjoyable.
“The punch line is that commercials make TV programs more enjoyable to watch. Even bad commercials,” said Leif Nelson, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the new research. “When I tell people this, they just kind of stare at me, in disbelief. The findings are simultaneously implausible and empirically coherent.”
I can't resist quoting Camille Paglia. She says things no one else dares.
Last month she wrote this
Computers alone will never solve the educational crisis in this country: They are tools and facilitators, not primary conveyors of knowledge. Packing his team with shiny Harvard retreads, Obama missed a golden opportunity to link his public works project with a national revalorization of the trades. Practical training in hands-on vocational skills is desperately needed in this country, where liberal arts education has become a soggy boondoggle, obscenely expensive and diluted by propaganda and groupthink.
A reader wrote her back
"Revalorization of the trades": You've perfectly articulated what I've thought for years. Time to remove the stigma and recognize trades for the skilled and professional work they are (and to bring that level of professionalism to them).
As a college writing professor, I see many students who clearly don't want to be on the university path but are there because their parents want them to be and are willing to foot the bill. It's all so misdirected. Wouldn't our society and citizens be better served if we quit thinking of vo-tech types as "flunkies" and second-stringers?
Marna Krajeski
Paglia responds.
I agree with you completely! The American system of higher education has become an insane assembly line -- bankrupting families to process hapless students through an incoherent, haphazard and mediocre liberal arts curriculum. In the '60s, there was a brief moment when middle-class young men were dropping out of college to become silversmiths or leather workers in San Francisco or Greenwich Village. As the product of an Italian-American immigrant family where the crafts were honored, I cheered that development and prayed that it would continue. But it sputtered out -- probably because the recession of the 1970s was a cold dose of reality.
Perhaps there's hope of change because of the tens of thousands of liberal arts graduates with expensive degrees who are finding themselves out of work and depressingly marginalized in a society where the manual trades offer guaranteed employment at relatively high wages. A dose of Buddhism might do people good: Sweeping garden sand into oceanic designs around ornamental rocks is considered a spiritual exercise in Asia. I say that landscaping, construction, carpentry, metalworking and all the other trades should be promoted by primary education as worthy careers for both men and women. The pre-college rat race is a sadomasochistic imposition on the young that robs them of free will and saps their vital energies. When will they rebel?
Ruth Graham on Pennies Earned
Like piety and self-denial, however, thrift now seems more quaint than urgent. We can blame formerly easy credit for that, perhaps, or a creeping conventional wisdom that says that shopping is the only response to national troubles. ....
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But if there was a sliver of good news coming out of autumn’s Wall-Street-to-Main-Street bloodletting, it was that thrift, despite its unfashionable status, is poised for a comeback. In October, the John Templeton Foundation hosted a forum to discuss an important new report, “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture,” which begins with a call to give more Americans “opportunities to save and build wealth.” Sixty-two scholars signed on to the report, which was produced by the Institute for American Values and several other think tanks from across the ideological spectrum. Panelist David Blankenhorn, one of the report’s authors, organized thrift into three qualities: industry, or work ethic; frugality, or spending less than we earn; and trusteeship, or wisely giving back to worthy causes. Together, they make for a life not of grim tightfistedness, but of generosity, fulfillment, and eventual abundance.
Having grown up in a family of teasers, I'm glad some one has come out In Defense of Teasing
In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. We learn the wisdom of laughing at ourselves, and not taking the self too seriously. We learn boundaries between danger and safety, right and wrong, friend and foe, male and female, what is serious and what is not. We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding.
Via Kottke comes the news that Brian Eno believes in singing is the key to a good life.
Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don't for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits." When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
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The critical thing turns out to be the choice of songs. The songs that seem to work best are those based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music. You want songs that are word-rich, but also vowel-rich because it's on the long vowels sounds of a song such as "Bring It On Home To Me" ("You know I'll alwaaaaays be your slaaaaave"), that's where your harmonies really express themselves. And when you get a lot of people singing harmony on a long note like that, it's beautiful.
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So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.
Group singing in chapel and assembly was always part of education until a comparatively short time ago. I remember singing together throughout my school years, at camp and at family get-togethers when my grandparents were alive. When people got together they would sing, be it at church, at work or in a friendly gathering. Sadly, with fewer people going to church and no singing at work, that experience has been lost.
So a few weeks ago when I went to a concert We the People by the Mystic Chorale, I was delighted that the conductor Nick Page expected the audience to join the 200+ members of the chorus to join in singing many of the songs.
So enjoyable was it, I've decided to join the chorale for their winter gospel concert.
The Mystic Chorale is a non-profit, volunteer organization that accepts anyone who loves to sing. The commitment for each concert is short, only 8 weeks, a perfect antidote to the winter blues.
I found Brain Science and the Soul by R.R. Reno most interesting.
These days, cognitive scientists are doing experiments that use MRI technology to visualize the brain while subjects undergo experiences, solve problems, and make decisions. This approach allows scientists to see and theorize about the significance and sources of patterns in our brains, patterns that shape the way we respond to the world. We are learning about the highway system of neurological movement, which turns out to be decisive for the way our minds work.
The new emphasis on patterns of neural activity suggests an important support for the traditional Christian understanding of the soul.
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St. Thomas drew on Aristotle’s philosophy to define the soul as the form of the body. The soul is the pattern or highway system that organizes our bodies, including, of course, our brains.
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Princeton brain scientist Jonathan D. Cohen has looked at patterns of brain activity while subjects respond to moral dilemmas and make moral decisions. It turns out that the brain patterns related to moral decisions need to be trained. The soul must be disciplined.
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Now, contemporary brain science and Cohen’s picture of the vulcanized brain lead pretty much to the same, Aristotelian vision of the soul shaped by virtues—or vices.
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Precisely because a human soul is unstable, and subject to influence, and hardening over time, the Christian tradition has put a great deal of weight on moral and spiritual discipline in order to “vulcanize” the networks that lead to properly ordered emotions, thoughts, and decisions. Now it seems that brain science is showing that the traditional emphasis on moral and spiritual discipline was exactly right.
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The neural patterns between the frontal lobe and the brain stem do not know nice distinctions between the private morality and public morality. It’s a distinction much insisted upon by modern liberal antinomians who want to reassure us that the liberated id will not threaten the public good.
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Maybe the intense moral pressure of traditional morality is necessary in order to achieve the stable neural patterns that prevent our instinctual responses from overwhelming our reasoned responses. Perhaps the common good depends on the presence of virtuous, disciplined citizens who have been habituated to deny themselves immediate, instinctual satisfactions.
Malcolm Gladwell on Late Bloomers. Why do we equate genius with precocity?
The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.
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Late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental.
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Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.
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On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.
A question of character. The idea of 'good character' sounds old-fashioned and patronizing, but it may be the answer to some of our most entrenched social problems writes Richard Reeves.
The first headmaster of Stowe school, JF Roxburgh, declared his goal to be turning out young men who would be "acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck." A mixture of courtesy and courage used to be essential to the idea of a British citizen's character. Brits were the sort of people who knew both how to survive a Blitz and queue politely. Similarly, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement, aimed to induce in his young charges "some of the spirit of self-negation, self-discipline, sense of humour, responsibility, helpfulness to others, loyalty and patriotism which go to make 'character.'" He described his movement as nothing less than a "character factory."
But in the postwar shift towards a less constrained and judgemental society—"character-talk" in Stefan Collini's phrase—dropped out of public discourse, except when considering someone's suitability for high office. The idea of good character came to sound old-fashioned and patronising.
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The three key ingredients of a good character are: a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one's own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification.
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inequality of character may now be as important as inequality of economic resources.
The Research Digest of the British Psychological Society hails The return of 'good character' and its importance for a successful society while our fave Sissy Willis writes It's the character, stupid.
How life for men has changed.
Newsweek looks at Why young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in "Guyland." The never-ending party of delayed adulthood does not bode well.
Tony Dokoupil, 28, engaged to be married, examines the 20 something scene and reads the new book Guyland by the sociologist Michael Kimmel.
the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life." In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.
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he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility.
Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history. They're also among the most distraught—men between the ages of 16 and 26 have the highest suicide rate for any group except men above 70—and socially isolated, despite their image as a band of backslapping buddies.
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The happy family man, on the other hand, is an alien concept in Guyland, and all too scarce in popular culture. Men like me, who actually embrace married life in their 20s, are seen as aberrations—or just a bit odd.
"Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men" (Michael Kimmel)
What came to my mind was Kathleen Parker whose book Save the Males is causing a furor.
From the London Times, Where have all the real men gone?
The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.
While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves.
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NOTHING quite says “Men need not apply” like a phial of mail-order sperm and a turkey-baster. In the high-tech nursery of sperm donation and self-insemination – and in the absence of shame attached to unwed motherhood – babies can now be custom-ordered without the muss and fuss of human intimacy.
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By elevating single motherhood from an unfortunate consequence of poor planning to a sophisticated act of self-fulfilment, we have helped to fashion a world in which fathers are not just scarce but in which men are also superfluous.
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As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapours into the atmosphere.
His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the Earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm landmines, to sink enemy ships – or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so...
But, of course, boys don’t stay Cub Scouts for long. We’ve managed over the past 20 years or so to create a new generation of child-men, perpetual adolescents who see no point in growing up. By indulging every appetite instead of recognising the importance of self-control and commitment, we’ve ratified the id.
Our society’s young men encounter little resistance against continuing to celebrate juvenile pursuits, losing themselves in video games and mindless, “guy-oriented” TV fare – and casual sex.
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In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.
Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less.
"Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care" (Kathleen Parker)
Science Day reports on a growing body of research that suggests 'Hope" Therapy Fights Depression.
We’re finding that hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression. And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it,” said Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
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“If you feel you know how to get what you want out of life, and you have that desire to make that happen, then you have hope,” Cheavens said.
Hope is different from optimism, which is a generalized expectancy that good things will happen, she said. Hope involves having goals, along with the desire and plan to achieve them.
From Scientific American, How Snoozing Makes Your Smarter
Whether deciding to go to a particular college, accept a challenging job offer or propose to a future spouse, “sleeping on it” seems to provide the clarity we need to piece together life’s puzzles. But how does slumber present us with answers?
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As exciting findings such as these come in more and more rapidly, we are becoming sure of one thing: while we sleep, our brain is anything but inactive. It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised—an unsettling thought in our fast-paced, sleep-deprived society.
Oxytocin, the natural hormone that assists childbirth bonding the mother to the infant, and dubbed the 'love drug' because it also bonds lovers together is now being considered for use in the U.K. to treat shyness.
Produced naturally in the brain during social interactions, it promotes romantic feelings, helps mothers bond with babies and makes people more sociable.
Oxytocin is released during orgasm and is also the key birthing hormone that enables the cervix to open and the contractions to work. Where labour has to be induced, it is often given to the mother intravenously to kick-start contractions.
Professor Zak said: 'We've seen that it makes you care about the other person. It also increases your generosity towards that person. That's why (the hormone) facilitates social interaction.'
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Scientists find childbirth wonder drug that can 'cure' shyness
Autistic patients given oxytocin as part of a study in New York found their ability to recognise emotions such as happiness or anger in a person's tone of voice - something which usually proved difficult - also improved.
Experiments by Dr Eric Hollander at the city's Mount Sinai School of Medicine found a single intravenous infusion of the chemical triggered improvements that lasted for two weeks.
Previous research has revealed autistic children have lower than usual levels of oxytocin in their blood.
Professor Zak said: 'Oxytocin does not cure autism, but it does reduce the symptoms.'
My earlier post on oxytocin, A Wash of Love
How a teen-ager feels about himself is the best indicator of his future social functioning.
Revenge of the Nerds: Most Geeks Well-Adjusted
Kathleen Boykin McElhaney, lead study investigator and research associate in psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,
"I think our study shows that popularity doesn't really matter a whole heck of a lot," McElhaney said. "Our data suggests that finding a social niche and a place where you can be comfortable being yourself is most important."
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 Maslow, self-actualizers tend to, among other things: possess a more efficient view of reality and a corresponding tolerance of ambiguity; be accepting of themselves and others; demonstrate spontaneous behavior that is in tune with their own values and not necessarily tied to the common beliefs and practices of the culture; focus on problems that lie outside of themselves, thus demonstrating a highly ethical concern; maintain a few extremely close interpersonal relationships rather than seek out a large number of less intense friendships; and possess high levels of creativity."
Since I posted Happy Dust, I've been pondering the meaning of charisma. According to the dictionary, charisma is defined as a personal attractiveness that enables you to influence others.
Now here's some etymology on the meaning of charisma via Jeff Kelley The root of charisma lies in the Greek, charis which means many things, among them, splendor, inner grace, charm, talent, gift, gratitude, innate giftedness, courtesy and beneficence.
In Greek mythology, the "Charites" were worshipped as goddesses protecting and promoting joy and happiness. We know them as the Three Graces
Aglala splendor
Euphrosyne - merriment and pleasant state of mind
Thalia - blooming life
I wish you all three.
It used to be the accepted scientific wisdom that we are born with all the brain cells we will ever have or need. Elizabeth Gould is the scientist who started a new field - neurogenesis - by proving that human brains continually create new brain cells.
Her research is explored in a well-written, accessible article in Seed magazine by Jonah Lehrer called The Reinvention of the Self.
The brain, Elizabeth Gould had now firmly established, is always giving birth. The self is continually reinventing itself.
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Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already has retreat inwards. The mind is disfigured.
The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate’s particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain—and Gould’s team has shown that they do—then the playing field isn’t level. Poverty and stress aren’t just an idea: they are an anatomy. Some brains never even have a chance.
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Chronic stress, predictably enough, decreases neurogenesis. As Christian Mirescu, one of Gould’s post-docs, put it, “When a brain is worried, it’s just thinking about survival. It isn’t interested in investing in new cells for the future.”
On the other hand, enriched animal environments—enclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitat—lead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain.
I would never have stumbled across it had it not been for Ambivablog and her post Stress and Depression Make You Stupid.
But it isn't just drugs that can reverse the long-term brain-stunting effects of deprivation and stress. An enriched and stimulating environment can coax the brain to begin to flourish and recreate itself again. "On a cellular level, the scars of stress can literally be healed by learning new things."
(T.H. White, in The Once and Future King, wrote, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.")
What exciting research.
What it's like to be without soul.
Richard Godwin at One Cosmos, one of my favorite blogs
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to conduct psychological evaluations of a number of people from formerly communist countries, mainly the USSR. Uniformly, what has been so striking about them is a certain palpable absence of soul, which was one of the most damaging consequences of communist totalitarianism. For the ban on religion also amounted to a ban on the deepest and most vital regions of Being itself. After a few generations of malign neglect, the damage becomes incalculable and sometimes irreversible in this life.
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Admittedly, it’s a somewhat small sample--perhaps a dozen or so--but not only were these people not religious, but they were literally incapable of being so. ...
But it also left them very empty and devoid of meaning. There was a depression about them, but it had a rather different feel than a psychological or biochemical depression. It was actually a little spooky, as if they had been the victims of “body snatching.”... they were more like soulless machines. It also made them very comfort-seeking, very hedonistic--not in the grandiose and narcissistic American way, but in a petty way, as if life consisted solely in stealing whatever small pleasures were available.
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Western Europe is getting to the point that it no longer comprehends religion, as is true of secular America (which is why they are so allied in their contempt for Americn values). If we do not reverse this trend, we’re going to lose something so critical to our psychic substance, and yet, not even know what hit us. Secular Americans are genuinely clueless in their ignorance of how much they benefit from the thoroughly Judeo-Christian milieu in which they were raised. Like those atheistic Soviets, they really don’t get it, and are largely incapable of doing so.
Via Ambivablog, comes Donald Beck, who writes at Experimentaltheology
It's not what you believe, but how you act in the world that counts,
For me, beliefs are like the tides, they ebb and flow. But how I treat my neighbor, how I practice my faith, should be constant and unchanging.
Mary Katherine Ham on Shame and when a good old-fashioned stigma can be useful.
"Menace in Europe : Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too" (Claire Berlinski)
As I was reading Berlinski's chilling and urgent book, I was struck by a passage about a British psychotherapist who specialized in psychosomatic illness. Apparently, he's treating many, especially women, who are on restrictive vegetarian diets and who suffer from depression anxiety and too many colds.
He believes that at the heart of the food fixation is religion. His patients, having rejected theism and Christianity, are embarking on a desperate quest to conquer the unacceptable prospect of disease, aging and personal extinction.
For ten years he was a Freudian until his own explorations into psychology, philosophy and literature convinced him that love, integrity, compassion and courage - values common to all religions - were more important than he realized.
The focus of his practice now is to impart these common religious values that, he believes, give life meaning. His clients don't even have a vocabulary for these ideas which he calls the true deliverers of the Good Life.
He has his clients to try them out for a week. Without fail, they come back and say, yes, being more honest with the spouses, children and parents did yield meaningful results. They felt more deeply anchored in themselves.
His patients don't come to him in a search for meaning, they come for anxiety or depression. When that's cleared up, he asks them,
"What do you want your life to stand for, what do you think you're here for?"
Almost without exception, they get fascinated by that and do another year with him.
"I love that stage of work."
Berlinski comments that given a choice between the British vegetarianism and high colonics, is it any wonder that so many disaffected are turning to Islam for meaning/
The words millions of Americans want to be able to say
"I know exactly where everything is."
Organizers and closet designers offer a predictable variety of theories to account for the growing infatuation, including the increase in home-makeover television programs, a hunger for a sense of control in a world that moves at warp speed and a desire to focus on the home in an era of war and natural disasters. They also cite benefits of serious closet organization that go beyond efficiency and order for their own sake, including the reduction of stress, the inspiration to take on more ambitious efforts at home- and self-improvement, and the elimination of a potential source of embarrassment.
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Ms. Glovinsky said that a well-organized closet offers "a pocket of order," a place that, once redone, can have an antidepressant effect. "I've seen people's moods brighten as they get organized," she said.
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"Doing this is a form of self-respect," said one Mr. Lupo who also remarked, "Love more, have less."
When faced with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, ordinary moments become holy.
So Harry Lehotsky writes in the Winnepeg Sun
Being told you only have a short time to live has a way of sharpening your senses and adjusting your priorities and perspectives on life.
Many of the most ordinary events and encounters in life are infused with fresh meaning and significance.
A sunny day. The smell of lilacs. A good day at work. Greetings, hugs, goodbyes. We take too many people and things for granted.
Time simultaneously speeds up and slows down. It's hard to explain. It's like you're aware of how quickly hours and days speed by. But you're more determined than ever to juice the most out of every minute.
"A quick snort of happy dust, a mood boost." That's what those on the receiving end of charisma get.
Intangible, but powerful, charisma is what everyone is looking to get at least a measure of.
Charisma, by its nature, is elusive and difficult to study, but most experts agree that it involves a combination of enthusiasm, extroversion and good listening skills.
More specifically, they suggest that charismatic individuals have more variance in the pitch of their speech — that is, their speech pattern goes up and down — they are more likely to smile and initiate physical contact and, consciously or unconsciously, they tend to mimic the body language of their listener.
But there's something else too. Charismatic people appear to tune in to other people to the exclusion of all else, leaving the recipients of all this glorious attention believing that there has been an emotional connection. As a result of the contact, the recipients feel special and consequently good about themselves.
From Psychology Today
Procrastination is not just an issue of time management or laziness. It's about feeling paralyzed and guilty as you channel surf, knowing you should be cracking the books or reconfiguring your investment strategy. Why the gap between incentive and action? Psychologists now believe it is a combination of anxiety and false beliefs about productivity.
What's your excuse?
Remember that book I mentioned Unwritten Rules by Ray Swanson that included The Waiter Rule? Raytheon has given away some 250,000 copies of the booklet
Swanson, the CEO of Raytheon, admitted yesterday that at least 16 of the 33 aphorisms are remarkably similar to the rules compiled six decades ago by W.J. King, an engineering professor.
I regret that over the course of the years and in the process of compiling the 'Unwritten Rules,' any reference to Professor King's work was not properly credited," he said in a statement.
While embarrassing for Swanson, perhaps diluting his effectiveness as CEO, the experience also proves that human nature doesn't change.
To his credit, Swanson was forthright.
''This experience has taught me a valuable lesson -- new Rule #34," he said in his statement. ''Regarding the truisms of human behavior, there are no original rules."
CEOs say how you treat the waiter says a lot about your character.
12 out of 12 CEOs agree.
They acknowledge that CEOs live in a Lake Wobegon world where every dinner or lunch partner is above average in their deference. How others treat the CEO says nothing, they say. But how others treat the waiter is like a magical window into the soul.
Take a look at Swanson's Unwritten Rules in the sidebar.
32: A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person. (This rule never fails).
Swanson is Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. Raytheon has given away 250,000 copies of the booklet with his unwritten rules of management.
Kathy Sierra explains why in Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain. Read the whole thing
1. Our "mirror neurons" activate in the same way watching someone else do something as they do when we're doing it ourself -
Spend time with a nervous, anxious person and physiological monitoring would most likely show you mimicking the anxiety and nervousness, in ways that affect your brain and body in a concrete, measurable way. Find yourself in a room full of pissed off people and feel the smile slide right off your face. Listen to people complaining endlessly about work, and you'll find yourself starting to do the same.
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Regarding the effect of mirror neurons and emotional contagion on personal performance, neurologist Richard Restak offers this advice:
"If you want to accomplish something that demands determination and endurance, try to surround yourself with people possessing these qualities. And try to limit the time you spend with people given to pessimism and expressions of futility. Unfortunately, negative emotions exert a more powerful effect in social situations than positive ones, thanks to the phenomena of emotional contagion."
2. Emotional Contagion
"When we are talking to someone who is depressed it may make us feel depressed, whereas if we talk to someone who is feeling self-confident and buoyant we are likely to feel good about ourselves. This phenomenon, known as emotional contagion, is identified here, and compelling evidence for its affect is offered from a variety of disciplines - social and developmental psychology, history, cross-cultural psychology, experimental psychology, and psychopathology."
3. Happy People. Happy people are not vacuous.
"Furthermore, studies suggest that certain people's ability to see life through rose-colored glasses links to a heightened left-sided brain function. A scrutiny of brain activity indicates that individuals with natural positive dispositions have trumped up activity in the left prefrontal cortex compared with their more negative counterparts. "
In other words, happy people are better able to think logically.
And apparently happier = healthier:
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Happiness is not our only emotion, it is simply the outlook we have chosen to cultivate because it is usually the most effective, thoughtful, healthy, and productive.
Gerard Van der Leun has crafted another marvelous essay on betrayal and Judas where everything is allowed in the Church of the Self.
This dark thrill of denigration has the immediate benefit of pleasingly confirming them in their own Church of Zero, and the secondary benefit of being much, much safer than, say, sticking it to Islam, a faith that enforces its demands for respect with bombs and beheadings, and whose central message to all cowards is "Don't mess with Muhammad." The sad fact of our modern era is that if you denigrate Islam, you often have to bag up body parts and hose down the sidewalk, but when you denigrate Christianity the most you need to clean up after yourself is a warm washcloth.
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We've long permitted greater and greater levels of betrayal in our society. We've codified them as law, policy and custom as far as the wishes of the individual are concerned. It is no longer sophisticated or fashionable to speak of selfishness as betrayal. That word is so harsh when, after all, we are only speaking of "differing needs," aren't we. When the betrayal of others is glossed over with phrases such as "I needed to be me," or "I needed my space," or "I needed more money,"or "We were just on different paths," then the elevation of this disease of the soul from the betrayal of another into the larger realm of treason against all is only a question of degree.
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Betrayal is a common catechism in the Church of the Self.
Judas: A Saint for Our Seasons
What happens when you reach a tipping point with rudeness and you just don't want to put up with it anymore?
Well, if you want some civility get thee to New York City.
know I was surprised to learn New York Leads Politeness Trend? Get Outta Here.
Somehow a city whose residents have long been scorned for their churlish behavior is now being praised for adopting rules and laws that govern personal conduct, making New York an unlikely model for legislating courtesy and decorum.
"Most people just seem to ignore common sense and common courtesy so it does have to be legislated," she said. "To have this happen in New York is going to inspire a lot of other people. I cannot applaud it enough. My hands are tired from clapping."
• no cellphones in movies, theaters and concerts
• $50 fine if subway riders put their feet on a seat.
• owners responsible for cleaning up after vandals
• smoking ban in bars, restaurants and nightclubs
• new stiffer noise code
• penalties for sports fans who throw things on the field or spit at the players
• parents can be ejected from Little League games for "unsportsmanlike" conduct
Can't come fast enough for me. Otherwise we will see the rise of the Howling Mob where some children have no conception how to act.
The four teenaged punks who chased an NYU student into the path of an oncoming car looked and laughed as he lay on the street dying, a prosecutor revealed yesterday.
"They didn't call for an ambulance. They didn't call for help. Rather, they stood on the street corner and laughed," prosecutor Joel Seidemann said of the 13- and 15-year-olds who chased Broderick John Hehman into traffic.
Hehman, 20, died four days later from his massive head injuries.
As boomers grow older, many find it imperative to learn more about their biological families in a search to find a greater sense of identity that might prove a clue to the question we all ask ourselves, "Why are we here?"
With the World War II generation passing over, the search has become more pressing.
Germany's War Children Scramble to Find Their GI Fathers.
"My earliest memory is of wondering, 'Who is my father?' " said Herbert Hack, 53, son of a young rural woman who fell hard for a good-looking GI. "I would beg my mother for answers, and she'd just say, 'Ssssh,' Until finally, when I turned 15, she told me: 'There was an American soldier. His name was Charles. One night we went dancing . . .' "
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"I want so much to finally put a face to this mystery figure who has loomed over my family without ever being there," said Simone Mandl, 35, granddaughter of a GI and a married German woman. "He was an American soldier who had an affair with my grandmother while her husband was away at war. Their romance was tragic. Yet I believe she never stopped loving her American."
But some occupation offspring want more from their missing forebear - formal recognition of paternity, information about genetic disease, even a new identity in their father's image.
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Best estimates are that 66,000 illegitimate children of GIs and German women were born in American-occupied zones from 1946 to 1956, according to historian Johannes Kleinschmidt, author of a book about US-German "fraternization" issues.
It may seem strange, but there's a resurgent market in Zombies, the walking dead.
Books, films and video games about zombies are speaking to the deep and pervasive fear many have.
Most zombie zealots seem to agree that the zombie renaissance has something to do with the anxieties of life after Sept. 11.
"People have apocalypse on the brain right now," Mr. Brooks said. "It's from terrorism, the war, natural disasters like Katrina." Several zombie aficionados said there was a zombielike quality to the spread of the bird flu.
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If you need to brush up on zombie lore, a little background. Zombies have their origin in Caribbean voodoo; they are thought to be reanimated corpses, under the control of the witch who reanimated them.
In modern literature and films, zombies are typically mindless, slow-moving creatures (due to the stiffness of necrotic tissue, Mr. Brooks writes) with but one aim: to eat flesh. And they're not particular about whose flesh they eat.
Seems to me, there's enough walking dead out there. What we need are more people waking up and becoming more responsible for the world around us.
I'm a nut on natural sounds.
Years ago, I started collecting sounds of nature on cassette tapes, later on CDs. I've found them wonderful accompaniments to focused work, meditation, even sleep. I find actual recordings are far superior to white noise or sound machines though the latter works too.
I have them on my computer, my iPod, on CDs, even on my Audubon clock. I thought with a different bird call for each hour, I would learn to identify them by their song alone. No such luck. Seems as though I can only tell the nine o'clock bird from the noon bird.
I believe that without sounds of nature around, at least part of the day, we lose contact with the natural world. Too much sound from radio, TV, computers and iPods, disconnects us from the living, breathing world outside of our own bodies.
Natural sounds emerge from the silence that descends when we turn machines off. In a sheltered space, be it house or office or apartment, with windows closed, silence still brings the hum of the refrigerator or computer. That's why I use recordings.
True well-being brings an expanded sense of being alive. You can't be expanded without a greater sense of self that includes connectedness with nature, her ocean waves, morning song birds, waterfalls, and crickets.
Nature deficit sends kids down a desolate path
Author Richard Louv says kids don't get outside enough and so their bond with nature is not developed and they are suffering as a result. Kids need nature to develop their senses of learning and creativity and wonder.
"Nature is directly connected to our health. It helps us feel better physically and psychologically. It helps us pay attention."
He wonders whether the increase in ADD is attributable in part to children's isolation and alienation from the natural world. His campaign, "No Child Left Inside," calls for less time wired up, more time outside. Any patch of grass, vacant lot, woods or fields will work for kids.
His book
"Last Child in the Woods : Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Richard Louv)
Neo-neocon has two remarkable posts exploring people who help others at great risk to themselves because their humanity demands it.
She calls it When Light Pierces the Darkness. They are the people you instinctively trust.
Moslem rescuers during the Holocaust
Another changed mind. Dr. Wafa Sultan
The following is the statement of hers that led me to believe that she shares the motivation of those Holocaust rescuers who declared that they simply could not do other than what they've done, whatever the personal consequences. Her decision was made some time ago, and now it's more important for that she speak out than to protect her life or even the lives of her relatives:
"I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles."
The most popular course at Harvard this semester, attracting 855 students, more than introductory Economics, is Positive Psychology, a course teaching happiness, how to have a fulfilling and flourishing life.
Said one junior
From what I've seen and experienced at Harvard, I think we could all use a little self-help like this."
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The courses can change how you see yourself and your life, Lopez says. ''A lot of people are just not accustomed to asking, 'What do I have going for me?' and 'What did I do right today?' "
Marty Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania professor who is considered the father of positive psychology for his scholarship and efforts to promote it, said he saw a similar groundswell when he offered a course in 2003. He sees the student enthusiasm as reflecting the tremendous appeal of the positive psychology movement in society at large.
I wrote about Seligman earlier in The Science of Happiness and A River of Joy. It occurs to me as I read about this Harvard class that positive psychology is meeting a deep need that in earlier times was met by philosophy classes or mandatory daily chapel.
We used to take for granted that the goal of a liberal arts education was to learn how to live a deeper, fuller, more meaningful life. Today, philosophy and religion has become so encrusted and encumbered with political and cultural battles that few incoming students can penetrate their vital centers where both religion and philosophy contemplate how best to live one's life.
Positive Psychology, around less than 10 years, is still fresh and new though the lessons are age old.
Gratitude
Simplicity
Meaning
Attitude
Acceptance
Sound body, sound mind
The best story I've read about the Winter Olympics is by Tom Wise in the Washington, Honorable Move Made in a Snap. One of the reasons the Olympics remains so compelling is that there are moments when a person's character is revealed before all the world.
Clarity can be found at the Games if you look hard, a clarity that can distill someone's character better than most life experiences. U.S. goalie Chanda Gunn, refusing to shake hands with the Swedish women's hockey team after the Americans' stunning semifinal loss. France's Pierre-Emmanuel Dalcin, raising his middle finger after he failed to complete the Super-G. A pair of Austrian Nordic skiers, bolting the Games after Italian authorities began a drug investigation.
But character also comes out at the Games in ways that touch and inspire. Joey Cheek, the U.S. speedskater who donated the $40,000 he earned for winning gold and silver medals to the children of Darfur. Zhang Dan, the Chinese pairs figure skater who slid violently to the boards after being dropped by her partner, but got up, finished in pain and captured the silver medal.
Yet Hakensmoen proved there is still an abundance of human majesty at the Olympics.
Hakensmoen is the mystery man below
Sara Renner was skiing the cross-country race of her life when she looked down at her pole and saw it had snapped.
She flailed and struggled uphill as the field passed her in seconds. And then something happened, maybe the most serendipitous, skin-tingling moment of the 20th Winter Games.
Another pole.
Out of nowhere.
Given to her by a person she would call "my mystery man.
The poor behavior on the part of some American athletes has the head of the USOC saying "significant" efforts will be made to improve deportment among US athletes.
Lots of us are according to the latest Pew Study Are We Happy Yet
One third of us are very happy. Half of us are pretty happy. 15% are not too happy and 1% don't have a clue.
And it's been the same since they started keeping records, way back in 1972.
Much of the research into the field of happiness -- to say nothing of simple common sense - suggests that at the level of the individual, happiness is heavily influenced by life events (Did you get the big promotion? Have a fight with your boyfriend?) as well as by psychological traits (self-esteem, optimism, a sense of belonging, the capacity to love, etc.). The Pew survey did not look at life events or psychological characteristics. We only looked at happiness by demographic and behavioral traits. But through this admittedly limited prism, we found some fascinating correlations.
Several of them stand out: Married people are happier than unmarrieds. People who worship frequently are happier than those who don't. Republicans are happier than Democrats. Rich people are happier than poor people. Whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks. Sunbelt residents are happier than those who live in the rest of the country.
We also found some interesting non-correlations. People who have children are no happier than those who don't, after controlling for marital status. Retirees are no happier than workers. Pet owners are no happier than those without pets
You know how experts say you should weigh all the pros and cons before any major decision?
I tried once or twice, but it always seemed false and forced. I usually opt for the easier, more natural gut decisions.
Turns out, that's a smarter thing to do.
A study today published in Science says "Follow your gut.
However, as the decisions become complex (more expensive items with many characteristics, such as cars), better decisions and happier ones come from not attending to the choices but allowing one's unconscious to sift through the many permutations for the optimal combination.
The Boston Globe reports
In a series of studies with shoppers and students, researchers found that people who face a decision with many considerations, such as what house to buy, often do not choose wisely if they spend a lot of time consciously weighing the pros and cons. Instead, the scientists conclude, the best strategy is to gather all of the relevant information -- such as the price, the number of bathrooms, the age of the roof -- and then put the decision out of mind for a while.
Then, when the time comes to decide, go with what feels right. ''It is much better to follow your gut," said Ap Dijksterhuis, a professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, who led the research.
For relatively simple decisions, he said, it is better to use the rational approach. But the conscious mind can consider only a few facts at a time. And so with complex decisions, he said, the unconscious appears to do a better job of weighing the factors and arriving at a sound conclusion.
Three "existentially challenged Pepperdine University grads" traveled the country in a 1985 neon-green Fleetwood RV and interviewed 86 successful leaders in a variety of professions.
Every one essentially gave them the same career advice.
Block out the noise and
really pave your own road
guided by what lights you up.
What's so surprising as they talked to twenty something college students, is that no one else, neither parents nor teachers, ever told them the gospel truth to follow your heart and lines of desire.
Countless emails arrive daily. "I sometimes [wonder] what would have become of my life had I never found your book that day in Target," reads one note from a recent grad who ditched her indifferent plans for law school and moved overseas. "Thank you . . . for writing about an experience in our lives most young people are too frightened to acknowledge."
Read Inspiration Junkies at Fast Company.
Seems like there's a big market in simple truths
Why Donna Trussell is a writer and not a cancer survivor.
On the anniversary of my diagnosis, I followed the lead of another group member—I sent my oncologist a gift with a card that read, "Do you remember what you were doing three years ago today? I do. You were saving my life."
Lawyer jailed for killing wife tells of shame and remorse
A lawyer who stabbed his wife to death five days after she told him she was having an affair made an emotional courtroom apology yesterday for what he described as "this appalling tragedy''.
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She told her husband of the relationship on March 11. That evening she sent Mr Flint two text messages. One read in part: "It's done. All calm and reasonable.''
Five days later Mrs Lumsden and Mr Flint had dinner in Plumley, then drove back to Bowdon separately, believing they were starting a new life together.
Minutes later she was lying dead on her bedroom floor.
Hearty congratulations to 37 days which has just won the most inspirational blog award from The Best of Blogs. and deservedly so.
To see why, read her latest post Open your hand.
“To receive everything, one must open one's hands and give.” –Taisen Deshimaru
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There are people in life who hold their hand open, and there are those whose hands are shut. Which am I, I wonder? Which are you? What does it take to have a generous nature, to hold your hand open, to live a life in which you give when you don’t have, when you give rather than hold? What is a sacrifice and a true gift—when you have the money or time to give, or when you don’t?
With each post, she challenges us to Do it Now
Give the Buddha, where the Buddha is not only what you have, but what you are.
Carve the chop. Extend yourself for someone else. Give what you want to keep.
[Don’t rely too much on words.]
Open your hand.
I've talked in the past about the importance of making life lessons open source. Patricia Digh has done that with the stories from her life, sharing with us what she's learned, what she's thought and challenging us to aim higher and live deeper. in prose that makes me flat out jealous, Patti invites us all to live today as if we only had 37 days left of our "wild and precious life".
UPDATE: Seems to me we spend a good deal of the first part of our lives getting. What makes the second half of our lives successful is how much we give. That, of course, is our legacy
"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and for the world remains and is immortal"
Albert Pine, English author who died in 1851
One of my favorite books that I always keep close is
"The Art of Worldly Wisdom" (Baltasar Gracian)
I have a couple of different versions but I prefer the translation by Christopher Maurer. Written by a Spanish Jesuit in the 17th century, it is the only book with blurbs on the back cover by Frederich Nietzsche who said, "Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety" and Arthur Schopenhauer who said, "Absolutely unique...a book made for constant use...a companion for life. [These maxim are] especially fitted to those who wish to prosper in the great world."
A propos to Groundhog Day, Same Stuff, Different Day, Gracian's maxim #140 is Go straight to the good in everything.
It is the happy lot of those with good taste. The bee goes straight for the sweetness, and the viper for the bitterness it needs for its poison. So with tastes: some go for the best, others for the worst. There is nothing that doesn't have some good, especially books, where good is imagined. Some people's temperaments are so unfortunate that among a thousand perfections they will find a single defect and censure it and blow it all out of proportion. They are the garbage collectors of the will and the intellect, burdened down with blemishes and defects: punishment for their poor discernment rather than proof of their subtlety. They are unhappy, for they batten on bitterness and graze on imperfections. Others have a happier sort of taste: among a thousand defects they discover some perfection that good luck happened to drop.
One exercise that Esther and Jerry Hicks suggest in Ask and It Is Given as a way of going straight to the good is a "Rampage of Appreciation."
It's really a game of noticing something that pleases you. The more you focus on it, the more you appreciate it, the more you will find other things that you appreciate, the better you feel. The better you feel, the more you want to do it. The more you do it, the better you feel. The better you feel, the more you do it. That's going straight to the good in everything. That's what the world weary, cynical and arrogant weatherman learned in Groundhog Day.
If you've been there, done that, if every day is the same stuff, different day, you owe it to yourself to watch Groundhog Day again or, if you're completely out of the loop, for the first time.
The tagline "He's having the worst day of his life...over, and over...
Why do so many people think this is one of the best movies in recent years, "timeless, uplifting, enjoyable and morally serious."
Why do religious teachers - Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Wiccans and Evangelicals - hail Groundhog Day as a triumph? Jonah Goldberg explores in A Movie for All Time.
Sounds as if a lot of our college students are not even remotely prepared for the Business of Life.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
The best way to exercise those parts of the brain involved in paying attention and concentration is to practice meditation.
Meditation not only reduces stress, it increases attention span, sharpens focus and improves memory.
From Time's Getting Smarter, One Breath at a time
One recent study found evidence that the daily practice of meditation thickened the parts of the brain's cerebral cortex responsible for decision making, attention and memory.
Even better, it improves emotional intelligence.
So how do you become more creative? It's working hard at what you love.
From Time's Hidden Secrets of the Creative Mind.
Take risks, and expect to make lots of mistakes, because creativity is a numbers game. Work hard, and take frequent breaks, but stay with it over time. Do what you love, because creative breakthroughs take years of hard work. Develop a network of colleagues, and schedule time for freewheeling, unstructured discussions. Most of all, forget those romantic myths that creativity is all about being artsy and gifted and not about hard work. They discourage us because we're waiting for that one full-blown moment of inspiration. And while we're waiting, we may never start working on what we might someday create.
If you could make only one New Year's resolution, improving your attitude towards everything is the best one you can make. The rewards are immediate and the benefits long-lasting. So don't worry, be happy.
Happiness is an upward spiral.
A sunny outlook trumps physical health in keeping folks independent. Attitude is everything in old age.
A review of more than 225 epidemiological, longitudinal and experimental studies of more than 275,000 people suggest that happiness is its own reward. Success and achievement are encouraged by happiness. The Sweet Smell of...Happiness?
Happy people feel more confident, optimistic, energetic and sexier. Happy people are more sociable, have more satisfying marriages, do better in their jobs, are healthier and live longer.
Some people are born genetically equipped to be happier, but everyone can learn how to be happier. Is that good news or what.
That is the great and last legacy of Dr. Martin Seligman who founded positive psychology.
Of course, that's what the great wisdom teachers from Buddha to Jesus tell us too. Don't worry. Be happy.
Live your life from your deepest part and you will be happy. As Rumi said, "When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy."
Improving your attitude towards life is the key to finding that river of joy.
Only 43% of college students are men. This is a very troubling trend for society. Why aren't more of us concerned about how poor our school system is for millions of boys. They are struggling and need help. They are our sons, our brothers and will be husbands and fathers. It's time for a Movement for Boys so they can be their very best.
Michael Gurian writes more in the Washington Post: Disappearing Act
Where Have the Men Gone? No Place Good
We all need to rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting and overly medicating our boys, as if we can change this guy into the learner we want. When we decide -- as we did with our daughters -- that there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in college again.
This wonderful story comes from Pittsburgh, No longer strangers.
A few months ago, Suzanne Weiner and Heather Bonime didn't know each other. Now, says Weiner, "I think we'll be friends forever."
Their paths crossed unexpectedly after Weiner, grateful for community help in rebuilding her family's flood-ravaged grocery store, decided to give back -- and she gave to Bonime the gift of life.
Just published is Peggy Noonan's new book on John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father. Her column today in Opinion Journal veers between the state of chatter today where the sheer volume of insult, name calling and rudeness has become a large negative blur that saps our energy and .looking at good things and good people whose well-lived lives can revive and refresh us.
Because those who have added to life, who have inspired us and pointed to a better way, should be lauded and learned from. I think the inspiration to be gotten from a life well lived--spectacularly lived--is more important than ever these days. It's important that we dwell on the good and, just as important, maybe more so, try to understand it. This makes us stronger rather than sapping us, as so much of the ebb and flow of news and argument tends to do. We need to be looking to good things.
Is there a moral obligation to be happy? I never thought about it in those terms until I came across this today via Tom McMahon.
From Denis Prager
It only takes a moment's thought to realize that while most unhappy people don't engage in evil, most evil is done by unhappy people. This is true on both the macro and the micro levels. We all know how much more likely we are to lash out at others when we are unhappy and how much we desire to make others feel good when we feel happy.
Given this association of evil with unhappy people, it is quite remarkable how little attention is paid to happiness as a moral, rather than only a personal psychological issue. Too often the pursuit of happiness (not the pursuit of fun or excitement) is regarded as a selfish pursuit, when in fact it is one of the best things a person can do for everyone in his life and for the world at large. The Founders of America were brilliant in many ways, not more so than by enshrining that pursuit alongside the pursuit of life and liberty.
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The notion that happiness (or at least acting happy) is a debt we owe to all those in our lives and even to society at large is foreign to the vast majority of people. Yet, the more time I have devoted to writing and lecturing on this issue, the more I have come to realize that this is indeed the case. Ask anyone who was raised by an unhappy parent; ask anyone married to a chronically unhappy person; ask any worker whose co-worker is moody what their life is like and you will readily understand the moral obligation to be as happy as one can be.
He makes quite a good argument. Absolutely, the world would be a better place if people were happier, if they experienced happiness more often and more deeply. To do that, we have to grow up and take responsibility for creating our own lives, our best lives. For most, if not all, of us, that means doing the work - the necessary emotional and spiritual work so we can be happier. Still, no one can be happy all the time. Everyone suffers one way or another, some from disabling mental states of stress, anxiety and depression and it can a long time and a lot of work to burst through the shell into a larger way of being.
We can, however, be kind no matter how bad we feel. I think kindness is a greater moral obligation. Happiness is a state, an emotion, or a feeling of satisfaction. Kindness is more. Kindness is action in the world, ripples in the ocean of life. Didn't the Dalai Lami say,
This is my simple religion.
There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy.
Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness
A round of applause for Los Angeles cab driver, Afghan immigrant Haider Sediqi, who handed over a pouch of diamonds he found in the back seat of his cab to the police. Shortly after dropping off a fare at LAX, he found the small brown pouch, opened it only to find the diamonds worth some $350,000 and immediately called the police.
The haul was returned to its relieved and grateful owner, New York jewellery trader Eric Austein, airport police said.
Other people's jewels are "not what you earned," Sediqi told the Los Angeles Times. "Someone else earned that."
Treatment Online seems to be an interesting site, a community of mental health professionals using the web to create not only a business but the pooling of experience from all those that participate who are battling stress, depression and addiction.
They have an interesting community weblog and right away, i found a post to link to Keys to a Happier Life, from the BBC who's going all out to help the residents of Slough and incidentally the rest of us who always need reminders.
- Plant something and nurture it
- Count your blessings - at least five - at the end of each day
- Take time to talk - have an hour-long conversation with a loved one each week
- Phone a friend whom you have not spoken to for a while and arrange to meet up
- Give yourself a treat every day and take the time to really enjoy it
- Have a good laugh at least once a day
- Get physical - exercise for half an hour three times a week
- Smile at and/or say hello to a stranger at least once each day
- Cut your TV viewing by half
- Spread some kindness - do a good turn for someone every day
Now this is a very nice idea for Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Tree
Designed as an autumn decoration, the Thanksgiving Tree provides families with an opportunity to write "thank-you" notes on leaves that are hung on the tree.
The autumn-colored Leaf Notes are blank on one side with the words "Thank You" on the other. Throughout the days before Thanksgiving, and as people arrive for Thanksgiving dinner, family members and guests are encouraged to write a note of gratitude on a leaf-note and hang it on the tree.
Following dinner and before dessert, or at some other appropriate time, The Thanksgiving Tree is placed at the center of the table. Those gathered are invited to share what they have written on their leaf-note or other thoughts and feelings about the meaning of Thanksgiving Day
"For many," says Bates, "this time of sharing has become the most important and meaningful part of the Thanksgiving celebration." Response to the Thanksgiving Tree has been overwhelmingly positive.
"Families are grateful for a resource that makes it easy to talk and share important thoughts and feelings," says Bates.
Technorati Tags: Thanksgiving
Nancy Glaser, a Stanford MBA, left her career in venture capital
to help Third World women become apparel-industry entrepreneurs. She was in Russia after the Berlin Wall fell, working to build St. Petersburg into a fashion center. For the past three years, she's been visiting bombed-out villages in Afghanistan, helping poor women turn their native handicrafts into Fifth Avenue must-haves.
Glaser talks about giving up the dream job to take real risks in her life in this interview by Patty Fisher, Desire to live right life can change the world.
`The women in Afghanistan make beautiful hand-embroidered tablecloths and napkins, but the fabric is terrible quality, the thread breaks, the colors run,'' she said. ``They don't match anything you have in your home. The workmanship is beautiful, but it's the wrong color, the wrong design.''
She has enlisted designers from New York and Europe to showcase the women's work, and she's trying to raise money for better materials. It's been hard because the country is so devastated, and so much of the aid money goes for security. But she's determined to succeed.
``Once people have a livelihood and can support their family,'' she said, ``they put down their guns.''
via Evelyn Rodriguez who will be writing more about her own vision of artisan journalism and offers us this bonus:
Nancy Glaser says, "Even with all the devastation, there was so much hope. Turning aid containers into shops, people had already set up a bazaar on a dry riverbed.” She described women swathed in burqas and speaking perfect English (learned in refugee camps in Pakistan). Eager to be working, they presented her with resumes. She also saw school classes meeting under trees that included girls for the first time in six years.
An Italian poet said, "We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever." It’s only a flash and we waste it. We waste it with our anxiety, our worries, our concerns, our burdens."
- Anthony de Mello, 20th century Jesuit priest
via Zaadz and Brian Johnson, Philosopher & CEO who offers more from de Mello -
"The way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine you’re lying in your coffin….Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn’t it?"
"You’re not living until it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you’re ready to lose your life, you live it."
"Life is for the gambler, it really is."
"So love the thought of death, love it."
If you haven't read his thinkarete.the manifesto, you will love it - What would you do if you weren't afraid?
Five teenagers stole a credit card, used it to buy DVDs and video games, a turkey and other groceries. One boy, a college freshman, threw the turkey from the backseat of a moving car.
Victoria Ruvolo didn't know what happened when a frozen turkey came crashing through her windshield. Every bone on her face was shattered requiring five weeks in a hospital and many surgeries.
Ryan Cushing, 19, faced 25 years in prison when he walked into the Long Island courtroom for sentencing.
Then, a moment of grace, what the New York Times called "something startling and luminous"
Victoria Ruvolo met Ryan Cushing for the first time. He said he was sorry and begged her to forgive him. Victoria did.
She cradled his head as he sobbed. She stroked his face and patted his back. "It's O.K.; it's O.K.," she said. "I just want you to make your life the best it can be."
The prosecutor denounced the crime as heedless and brutal, but at Ms Ruvolo's insistence, they gave him a plea bargain: six months in jail and five years' probation.
Given the opportunity for retribution, Ms. Ruvolo gave and got something better: the dissipation of anger and the restoration of hope, in a gesture as cleansing as the tears washing down her damaged face, and the face of the foolish, miserable boy whose life she single-handedly restored.
William Keahon, the defendant's lawyer, said,
This woman's spirituality must be incredible to have this forgiveness. I've never seen this in 32 years of practicing law.
Every day we make a difference in the way we live and deal with other people. Victoria Ruvulo restored her life, Ryan's life, and immeasurably affected for the better the lives of everyone in that courtroom and everyone who reads her story and who can understand the power of forgiveness.
From Marshall Loeb at Marketwatch, a new book, called 3 Dimensional Wealth should be very good in getting people to view their wealth in a far broader context. Your Wealth in 3-D.
The authors, Monroe Diefendorf and Robert Sterling Madden don't see wealth as a simple collection of assets. They say wealth is composed of who you are (personal wealth), what you have (financial wealth) and how you can make a difference (social wealth).
I'm glad to see the financial industry beginning to look at wealth at large and in full.
What do you want to do with the rest of your life?
If you go to 43 things, you'll see how people discover what's important, make it happen, share their progress.
From Learning Japanese, ice skating in Rockefeller Center, build a log cabin, become a master knitter, stop procrastinating, worry less, bungee jump, write more, take one picture a day as a way to document my life and lots more.
Take a look at 43 Things Zeitgeist of the day's most popular goals and see how many you share with this younger slice of the country.
A very interesting essay on the idea of evil by Sophie Masson over at Norm's blog
What interested me in this discussion was the poverty of the idea of evil displayed by so many of these eminent men and women. The most humble folktale story of the Devil is more complex, subtle and ambiguous in its exploration of evil than are all the depravity tables of people who, for all their undoubted eminence and record in helping the mentally ill, seem powerless in front of the reality that sometimes - rarely, fortunately - there arise human beings who have deliberately chosen the path of evil.
If you're like me, sometimes you just can't stand watching the news for another minute because it's so depressing.
I speak as a sometimes news junkie who used to walk a mile in the morning to get every newspaper.
Now there's an alternative that can bring some balance to your news and maybe to your soul. It's called Happy News - "Real news, compelling stories, always positive"
Citizen Journalists welcomed.
"All the news that's fun to print."
This is one of the best essays on character, I've read in a long time.
Doug Manning On Character.
I love character. Character is who you are when no one is looking. Character is who you are with people who can't give you anything. Character is who you are when things don't go your way. True character is fearlessly being who you are. True character is stepping up when stepping up is required.
Character defines the quality of life you get to experience. It differentiates the great from the good, the interesting from the humdrum, the resilient from the fragile.
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True character does not develop in a cave. It unfolds in the full flow of life, when things are challenging. You cannot become a character by wishing it so. Character comes from choosing the uphill climb. You cannot develop true character until you take complete responsibility for your own life.
Read how he compares the character of his parents' generation, his generation and his children's generation.
HT to Jeremy who asks whether character is a resource in decline in these days of material abundance, rising expectations and too few challenges.
Your personal character is your primary asset, one that you build up over time and a resource that you can draw upon in difficult times and can never use up though you can lose it with a single disgraceful act. It may be the only guarantee of everlasting happiness said Seneca, the stoic.
In the not so distant past, in our private schools and liberal arts colleges, the building of character was considered as important as the acquisition of knowledge. Heraclitus said, "Character is destiny, " and Booker T. Washington said, "Character is power".
Character is formed in the torrent of life.Could it be that we have to be knocked down and beaten up by life before we can start Learning from Life?
“How many gifts do we have, buried under a hardened armor, awaiting the gracious trauma of a shattered shell?" the Doctor asks.
And Kahil Gibran tells us
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
Ben Stein never fails to enlighten, this time on investing in your own net worth
Our lives are measured by what we do for others, not by how much money we make. Spending time with lonely people, military families, widows, widowers, this is a pretty easy way to make a huge difference in a suffering human life. So when you think of your uncle who just lost his aunt, when you think of the woman down the street whose husband was just called up by the Guard and sent to Iraq, don't just think about them: ask them out to dinner. Invite them to a barbecue. Just call them up to gossip. People are always asking me for stock tips because they think I know something about the market. Usually, I don't. But I do know this. Sharing company with a lonely man or woman or child is about as good an investment in your own net worth as a human being as you can make. Do it today.
Lots of interesting posts over at Curt Rosengren's Occupational Adventure.
There's the thirty career lessons from successful people including this one from Dionne Blackwell
Great questions to ask yourself like How is this moving me forward?
Surprising tips - If you want to save big, you have to dream big Who can stick to a long term savings plan unless your dreams fuel your will to save.
But most interesting is Curt's series of posts exploring what success means to him. You want to read them all and as a spur to thinking about your own definition. Curt lists career passion, financial abundance, time abundance, love, health, being present and meaning.
I would add of course Living and Leaving a Legacy.
Remarkably good life advice from Steve Jobs.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life.
.......
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
Every life transition, especially if it's hard, is a chance to recreate your life, to reorient towards your own North Star, your truest self.
Philosopher and theologian, Harold Thurman Whitman wrote, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
Find what you love. That's what makes you come alive. Part of the Business of Life™.
He's just an ordinary guy, but the way De Pree Johnson spreads kindness for people in a hospital waiting room shows us how small, kind actions affect the world.
Someone once said, You don't get in life what you want; you get in life what you are. If so, De Pree is a wealthy man.
1. Everything changes and ends.
2. Things do not always go according to plan.
3. Life is not always fair.
4. Pain is part of life.
5. People are not loving and loyal all the time.
Can't quarrel with any of that. David Richo goes further and writes that we can find happiness by embracing The Five Things We Cannot Change.
Since I'm always interested in happiness, this article, despite its title - I hate smiley faces - caught my eye, Smiley Phrases about our hunger
for happiness books.
The "self-help" book category is now just about $670 million a year. Those little gift books at the checkout register are more like greeting cards with added value; their sales aren't even tracked in the book industry.
People hunger for happiness, even more for meaning. The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren has sold an astonishing 20 million copies.
Religious books have greater sales, about $1.8 billion and sales are expected to increase 37% over the next five years.
Stanford University philosophy professor John Perry says the best advice for bliss comes from Confucius and your grandmother.
"Confucius said happiness is a well-ordered life and family" - in other words, taking time to do the basic things right, Perry says. "Your grandmother said keep busy, have friends, don't be self-absorbed."
If we listened to these wise old heads, Perry concludes, "we wouldn't need all those books."
A China scholar, fluent in Mandarian, Rachel DeWoskin graduated with honors from Columbia, then took off for China getting a job at a U.S. PR firm
She became one of the most widely watched TV stars on the planet, playing a sexy American on a hit Chinese soap opera.
Terrific interview found via the bookofjoe
Now a book, Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. From the Booklist review.
An executive for an American PR firm by day, by night DeWoskin is the unlikely star of one of China's first television soap operas, an equally unlikely melodrama involving a sexy American college student who wins the love of a rebellious young Chinese man. The merging of two disparate worlds onscreen is nothing compared to the cultural assimilation DeWoskin observes transpiring within China itself in the years immediately following Tiananmen Square. Hers is the ultimate insider's view, living witness to the philosophical and practical aspects of a traditional and repressed society's tumultuous confrontation with liberated, energetic, and economically dynamic Western influences. Exhibiting sensitivity and uncommon wisdom, DeWoskin delivers a candid and valuable portrait of a China few Westerners get to see.
Fearless, smart and lucky, Rachel understands the Business of Life.™
One of the most successful of life and success coaches is Brian Tracy. He calls the law of accumulation one of the greatest success principles.
This law says that everything great and worthwhile in human life is an accumulation of hundreds and sometimes thousands of tiny efforts and sacrifices that nobody ever sees or appreciates. It says that everything accumulates over time. That you have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile. It's like a snowball. A snowball starts very small, but it grows as it adds millions and millions of tiny snowflakes and continues to grow as it gathers momentum.
What you want to accumulate, bit by bit, are the three things we all want more of.
1. Knowledge. Learn what you need to learn.
2. Money. Save it. Every day. Fortunes come from the accumulation of hundreds and thousands of small amounts of money.
3. Experience. Successful people have more experience because they take more risks and are willing to make more mistakes.
We all know that stereotypical view of the midlife crisis involving men, new cars and young blondes. Turns out, the facts surrounding midlife crisis today are quite different. When Sue Shellenbarger, the Work and Family columnist for the Wall St Journal had hers, she realized "The midlife crisis is a cliche -- until you have one."
The shock of recognition led to an overwhelming reader response which in turn led her to begin collecting stories for her new book, The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis is Transforming Today's Women.
Some excerpts from her column on the Female Midlife Crisis (WSJ subscribers only, sorry)
Dozens told heartfelt tales of pain, upheaval, rebirth and transformation in middle age, and said they had no idea other women were experiencing the same thing. My comic tale had touched a hidden nerve. Clearly, millions of midlife women had reached a crisis stage -- a time when old values and goals no longer made sense to them.
.........
A startlingly high number of women have experienced what they consider a midlife crisis, broadly defined as a stressful or turbulent psychological transition that occurs most often in the late 40s and early 50s.
By age 50, even more women than men are reporting a turbulent midlife transition -- 36.1% of women, compared with 34% of men -- according to research by Elaine Wethington, a Cornell University associate professor, based on a subset of the giant 6,432-person MacArthur Foundation "Midlife in the United States" study of Americans' well-being at midlife.
Applying the findings to the 42-million-member generation of U.S. women who are nearing or in middle age, defined as about 38 to 55 years old, more than 15 million women will have, or are already having, what they regard as a midlife crisis -- about equal to the entire populations of Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota combined.
This pattern of female midlife crisis is emerging now because, to put it simply, women are different today. For the first time in history, women not only face more of the kind of stresses that tend to bring on midlife crises, but they also have the financial muscle, the skills and the confidence to act out their frustrations and resolve them. In a sense, women are having midlife crises now because they can.
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Here's what women said after their midlife crisis which should give millions heart.
Without exception, the women who made big midlife changes said that if given the chance to do it all again, they would embrace new undertakings even more wholeheartedly. Every one of the women who entered fully into midlife crisis, taking risks and exploring new opportunities, was enthusiastically glad that she had. Their only regrets were in failing to start sooner or to take more chances.
All my life I've been entranced by the idea of the Communion of Saints. If you were raised Catholic, you know what I mean. But, I've never explored it as throughly or with as much success as Dawn Eden, a convert to Catholicism. I saw it as a beautiful idea, she saw them as friends. A quite remarkable story, Saints Alive.
All too often the dailyness of our lives obscures life's very majesty.
Our inter-connection and inter-dependency on others is so deep we don't see it. Whether its our food, sown, grown, and prepared for our consumption, our clothes made and sewn half a world away, our trash, removed and recycled far from our eyes, the people in factories that make our cars, our planes and trains, the researchers who find new ways to cure disease, making our lives healthier and longer, all those entrepreneurs who have brought us the technology we now can not live without, the people who entertain us, write for us, explore for us, pray for us.
The numbers of people that have added to, supported or changed our lives is larger than we can comprehend. In this dizzying interdependence, the golden rule -treating others the way we want to be treated - the greatest and simplest moral precept seems the only way to live.
Each of us must grown and develop our moral sense and character and that, I believe, is the first and most important business of our lives. I've long believed that our personal character is our greatest wealth, one like education that can never be taken away. Personal character is what we depend on to get us through life's most difficult times. Growing through life and not just going through life is the point and there is no point in life where we can not grow more, we just can't grow backwards. What Rumi wrote:
No mirror ever became iron again;
No bread ever became wheat;
No ripened grape ever became sour fruit.
Mature yourself and be secure from a change for the worse.
Become the light."
We hear and read in countless places that the time to learn about financial fitness is when you're young, so you can start saving, investing and giving early and reap the benefit of compound interest and long-term growth. Youth is also the time to begin to develop a moral character , a fact intuitively grasped by millions of families who may not be believers but who insist on some sort of religious education for their children, if only to imbue with a moral sense.
The story that Varifrank relates in Robert the Counter shows what a profound effect some crippled children have on the students who came to work with them. Such a lesson is never forgotten and the students are richer by far.
Have no doubt, meaning and purpose is BIG. The extraordinary success of a Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren which to date has sold over 20 million copies.
Bill Jensen has a new book out called "What is Your Life's Work". I've been reading excerpts he he's made available on line, and already there are whole paragraphs I want to quote. Normally, I would post this on Legacy Matters, but since this is also about work, here it goes.
From the introduction:
Put simply, this book is about what we learn about ourselves when we teach our loved ones, especially our kids, what matters and about the powerful need we have to leave something behind -what we want to be remembered for.
Bill has spent his career listening to people, collecting stories and studying how we work.
To jump start insightful conversations, he used to ask "What really matters here?" That is until the economy took a nosedive, no one wanted to rock the boat, everyone wanted to keep their job. So he changed the question,
"What is the single most important insight about work that you want to pass on to your kids? Or to anyone you truly care about?"
BAM! The floodgates opened. A happy accident: Changing my question to something much closer to home, "Why do we do what we wouldn't want our kids to do? Which of our mistakes should they not repeat?" unleashed completely new conversations.
Jensen than asked them to put their thoughts on paper: "Write a letter to that loved one. Or keep a journal -a work diary." ..." Something magical happened. They got back more than they gave."....A work diary for others ends up being a tool for self-discovery."
Some astonishing facts:
• 75% of us are disengaged from our jobs
• 75% of all employees are now searching for new employment opportunities
• 83% of us wish we had more of what really matters in life."
You can pre-order the book at Amazon
HT to Curt Rosengren at Occupational Adventure who alerted me to the free downloads.
Julie Leung first felt like an outsider in high school and then reflects on why we all do. The Outsider:why high school never ends.
My teacher revealed truth to me. In his simple but unbelievable statement, he told me that everyone feels like an outsider. Everyone has moments of loneliness. Everyone worries whether she fits or whether he is odd. "In" and "out" are illusions. Inside, we are all outsiders.....
The truth is we are all outsiders. Our secret fears are real and revealed. We are each random points, outliers, misfits, rejects and strangers. We are alone. We are all different. Yet we are all the same.
Why is it that young people with their whole lives before them are so often pessimistic while older people are mellower and more optimistic. What can MRIs tell us?
There's a whole lot of jargon, Fouroboros attempts to parse, I couldn't, in Neurologically speaking, is youth wasted on the young
. It has something to do with amygdala activation, which I take to mean, it's hard-wired in our brains.
Life gets better as you age. Or seems to.
So you get to spend six hours with Warren Buffett whose worth $40 billion and what do you learn? It was not what Darren Johnson, a 23-year-old entrepreneur expected. These are his headlines in his post The Wisdom of Warren Buffett, and to get the true flavor you have to read the whole thing
So he came not thinking what a great investor Warren Buffett is, he came away hoping that he could "mirror the image of humility, charity, intelligence, optimism and justice that Warren Buffett represents."
That's the impact of a man who understands that personal and social capital matter more in the end than financial capital.
Update: Oops. Forgot to give a hat tip to Jason Kottke
Each soul has a unique spiritual DNA, but life has a way of separating us from our true selves writes Parker Palmer.
All of us live more or less divided lives and all of us yearn for wholeness. When the pain of living such a life becomes too great, the inner journey towards wholeness begin. Finding Your Soul is a wonderful exploration of the soul's journey and you can't beat Palmer's "Quaker powerpoint."
All the great spiritual traditions want to awaken us to the fact that we help to create the reality in which we live. And all of them ask two questions that are intended to help keep us awake: What are we sending from within ourselves out into the world, and what impact is it having “out there”? What is the world sending back at us, and what impact is it having “in here”?
Like people who don't believe that adults continue to develop throughout their lives, not so long ago, scientists believed that connections among brain cells were fixed early in life and did not change in adulthood. Buddhists however have contended for centuries that meditation can change the workings of the brain.
That mental training through meditation can change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain has been proven by Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, who published the newest results of his meditation study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November. Davidson spoke to Marc Kaufman at the Washington Post
"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before. Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine."
What makes the study even more interesting is that it's the result of a collaboration with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
From the Mark Kaufman article:
The Dalai Lama first invited Davidson to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning about Davidson's innovative research into the neuroscience of emotions.The Tibetans have a centuries-old tradition of intensive meditation and, from the start, the Dalai Lama was interested in having Davidson scientifically explore the workings of his monks' meditating minds. Three years ago, the Dalai Lama spent two days visiting Davidson's lab.
The Dalai Lama ultimately dispatched eight of his most accomplished practitioners to Davidson's lab to have them hooked up for electroencephalograph (EEG) testing and brain scanning. The Buddhist practitioners in the experiment had undergone training in the Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions of meditation for an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours, over time periods of 15 to 40 years. As a control, 10 student volunteers with no previous meditation experience were also tested after one week of training. The monks and volunteers were fitted with a net of 256 electrical sensors and asked to meditate for short periods.
Thinking and other mental activity are known to produce slight, but detectable, bursts of electrical activity as large groupings of neurons send messages to each other, and that's what the sensors picked up. Davidson was especially interested in measuring gamma waves, some of the highest-frequency and most important electrical brain impulses. Both groups were asked to meditate, specifically on unconditional compassion. Buddhist teaching describes that state, which is at the heart of the Dalai Lama's teaching, as the "unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings." The researchers chose that focus because it does not require concentrating on particular objects, memories or images, and cultivates instead a transformed state of being.
Davidson said that the results unambiguously showed that meditation activated the trained minds of the monks in significantly different ways from those of the volunteers. Most important, the electrodes picked up much greater activation of fast-moving and unusually powerful gamma waves in the monks, and found that the movement of the waves through the brain was far better organized and coordinated than in the students.
When Daniel Goleman speaks of Emotional Intelligence, he's talking about what used to be called "character development," what used to be an essential component of education. Emotionally intelligent people often are far more successful than smarter people with much higher IQs and emotionally intelligent children often have much higher SAT scores than those who can't delay gratification writes Julia Steiny in the Providence Journal.
She writes about a amazing marshmallow test involving four-year-olds and a follow-up 12-14 years later with the same children as she ponders how emotional intelligence can leverage existing school lessons and make schools a happier place to be.
Steiny, now a consultant, summarizes Goleman's five basic skills to achieve emotional intelligence:
1. Knowing one's emotions, or self-awareness. People who recognize their feelings as they happen are better pilots of their own lives, 'having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from whom to marry to what job to take.'
2. Managing emotions. Poor emotional managers constantly battle feelings of distress, while good ones bounce back from life's setbacks and upsets.
3. Motivating oneself. People who can control their impulses can channel their energies to meet their own goals.
4. Recognizing emotions in others, or empathy. People who are attuned to how others feel get along well with people.
5. Handling relationships, or social competence. "People skills" allow us to get and give to each other with maximal gratification.
All children, but especially adolescents, crave information about how to manage and understand their inner worlds. Merely allowing the use of emotional language and examining interpersonal issues can make otherwise dry historical or literary materials much more alive and compelling. Indeed, the above five features of emotional intelligence seem like natural tools to unlock literature, for example, in a way that would help modern students understand the desires, frustrations, rages and thrills of people in other places, times and historical circumstances.
As if we needed to be reminded, Technology Review, MIT's Magazine of Innovation, explores "Technology and Happiness: why more gadgets don't necessarily increase our well-being." James Surowieki writes that Americans are no happier today than they were in 1946 when happiness studies first started. This despite television, xerox, 800 numbers, cell phones, walkmans, ipods and the World Wide Web. In fact, for many life seems worse. A significant minority of citizens are more anxious, trust government less, get divorced more often, and get depressed far more often.
Strikingly, the Amish who forswear modern technology are as happy as members of the Forbes 400. Surowieki reviews the literature and notes Richard Easterlin whose 1947 paper concluded that once a country was solidly middle-class, getting wealthier doesn't make its citizens any happier. He then goes on to explore the impact of technology on our humanity.
"Hedoinic adaption" is what psychologists call the phenomenon of how quickly people adapt to new innovations and soon take them for granted. That's why we complain when we can't get a cell phone signal or why we're annoyed that a website is loading too slowly. Taking things for granted is a sure sign that you haven't developed the attitude of gratitude, an essential component in one's personal development for the Business of Life.
Having a wealth of happiness means never taking life for granted. It means developing a sense of appreciation for the smallest things - the light of a new day, the smell of coffee in the morning, the pure pleasure of a hot shower after a morning spent shoveling. You can say that the more you appreciate, the happier you are. I particularly appreciate Brother David Stendl-Rast, a Benedictine mystic with his own web page, A Network for Grateful Living. In an essay entitled Word, Silence and Understanding, he writes:
The purpose of anything we do is determined by its usefulness; not so the meaning. What a thing or an action means to me is determined not by its usefulness, but by my appreciation. Meaning is the value of even the useless.... In order to accomplish a given purpose I must be able to control the situation. And in order to be in control I must first grasp what it is all about: ‘to grasp’ – that is the right word with regard to purpose. I must grasp all details firmly, take hold of them as of so many tools. But when it comes to meaning, what is there to be grasped? On the contrary, I must allow myself to be grasped by whatever it is, before it can become meaningful to me. As people sometimes say: “How does this grab you?” Only when it “grabs” you will it mean something to you. But there lies a risk. As long as I am in control, not much can happen to me. As soon as I allow reality to “touch me,” I am in for adventure. The quest for meaning is the adventure par excellence, and happiness lies in the thrill of this adventure.
Finding meaning in life is part of the Business of Life. When something grabs you, it becomes part of you. It's the fullest expression of all parts of you - body, mind, heart and spirit - that makes for the richest life.
Bringing you new ideas and new advances in caring for our health and wealth are part of what the Business of Life™ blog is all about. We don't often get to announce the discovery of a new emotion and when we hear about one, we race to tell you as we did about elevation and how other people's good deeds can make you a better person.
So imagine our surprise when we learned that the term "empathy" was first used only a century ago. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines empathy as "The ability to imagine oneself in another's place and understand the other's feelings, desires, ideas, and actions. It is a term coined in the early 20th century, equivalent to the German Einfühlung and modelled on "sympathy."
The feeling of empathy is not new, so what did they call it before? "Pity" implies sorrow that inclines one to help according to dictionary.com. while "compassion" denotes a deep awareness of the suffering and a wish to relieve it and "sympathy" denotes the capacity for sharing in the sorrows or troubles of another.
I think the term empathy came into being after Sigmund Freud developed his theory of the human mind with his conception of the unconscious. He was really the first to focus on how we think, what we feel and what we repress. Attention shifted from the external world to the internal one, from actions to thoughts and feelings.
Empathy was a necessary coinage to describe thoughts and feelings that may never be expressed in the external world but which exist solely in the mind.
Before that there was only the Golden Rule about which Harry Gensler , a Jesuit, writes a short essay with links
The golden rule is endorsed by all the great world religions; Jesus, Hillel, and Confucius used it to summarize their ethical teachings. And for many centuries the idea has been influential among people of very diverse cultures. These facts suggest that the golden rule may be an important moral truth.
The Golden Rule incorporates the imagination and understanding necessary for empathy but goes beyond it to include action. You never hear people talk or write about the Golden Rule anymore. Maybe it sounds too treacly or old-fashioned. Instead, everyone talks about "empathy", even when what they describe is empathy and action which is the Golden Rule.
Five Lessons in Empathy: The from Brian Alger at the Experience Designer Network who writes about the way we treat people.
1. Cleaning Lady
2. Pickup in the Rain
3. Always Remember Those Who Serve
4. The Obstacle in Our Path
5. Giving When It Counts
Here's Pickup in the Rain:One night, at 11.30 p.m., an older African American woman was standing on the side of an Alabama highway trying to endure a lashing rainstorm. Her car had broken down and she desperately needed a ride. Soaking wet, she decided to flag down the next car. A young white man stopped to help her, generally unheard of in those conflict-filled 1960s. The man took her to safety, helped her get assistance and put her into a taxicab.
She seemed to be in a big hurry, but wrote down his address and thanked him. Seven days went by and a knock came on the man's door. To his surprise, a giant console colour TV was delivered to his home. A special note was attached.. It read: "Thank you so much for assisting me on the highway the other night. The rain drenched not only my clothes, but also my spirits. Then you came along. Because of you, I was able to make it to my dying husband's bedside just before he passed away. God bless you for helping me and unselfishly serving others."
Sincerely,
Mrs. Nat King Cole
One of the key elements to a successful blog is the personal voice. When someone speaks from their heart about what they learned in their lives, you pay attention. Doubly so, if they also bring their business experience to the table. I happened upon this post How do we learn the things we value most by Brian Alger on The Experience Designer Network.
He reviews a recent article by Dean Ornish entitled Love and Survival in which Dean Ornish talks about the healing power of love and intimacy.Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing. If a new drug had the same impact, virtually every doctor in the country would be recommending it for their patients. It would be malpractice not to prescribe it-yet, with few exceptions, we doctors do not learn much about the healing power of love, intimacy, and transformation in our medical training.
Brian relates his experience of isolation and lack of purpose while at the supposed height of a professional career. Regaining his sense of authenticity in life, he suggests that any meaningful ideas about lifestyle which he often writes about must be intimately connected to ideas about love.
What I sense I have learned about love, however incomplete that may yet be, I know precisely that the meaning I possess largely flows through to me through my family, and as only a father could feel through my two children. I have read a number of articles about the idea of authentic learning that make little to no reference to love, compassion, empathy, intimacy, connection, relationship, etc. Does this not seem at least unusual? There is, perhaps, a fear of making reference to things religious, a topic that organized education tends to side-step. Yet if we are to apply the word authentic to the word learning then love, like death, are unavoidable experiences that essential to living life as widely and broadly as possible.
I can't believe it, though I'm confident this was in the works well before the election, a new magazine has been launched to explore ethics and values in our contemporary, capitalist and commercial society. As someone who believes that our personal capital is as important as our financial capital, I think this magazine is well-timed, if not overdue.
In Character by the Templeton Foundation promised to delve "into the history, science, cultural perceptions and impact of "contrarian virtues" according to its editor Naomi Schaefer Riley.
Riley said the journal is intended to bring back a concrete sense of what is important to aid personal and social betterment. “While some of the virtues have not been lost entirely, their relevance to everyday life has,” she said. “The connection between virtue and happiness made by ancient philosophers … is rarely mentioned anymore. The second goal of this journal will be to explore the link between virtue and personal fulfillment.”......
Striving for a multidisciplinary approach, Dr. John Templeton Jr., president of the foundation and author of Thrift and Generosity: The Joy of Giving, said the journal “will illuminate the nature and benefits of virtues from different perspectives.” In Character aligns itself with the mission of the foundation, said Arthur Schwartz, co-executive editor ... The goal, he said, is to influence opinion leaders — including media leaders, public intellectuals and distinguished academics — on three levels. “First, we want facts and insights that can be sighted by thought leaders. On a second level, we want the editor of the Los Angeles Times to get this and make it a local story,” said Schwarz. “Third, we want some editor to say, ‘Can we reprint [your story] in some other publication?’”Schwarz said he hopes the journal will continue to be published three times a year. Upcoming issues will highlight purpose, creativity, loyalty, generosity and modesty.
In its first issue In Character explored thrift
Thrift is part of the American dream, allowing each generation to do better than the one before, but it is also an area where Americans today see room for improvement. In a survey that In Character commissioned in June, 79 percent of respondents say that Americans are less thrifty than they were 50 years ago, 77 percent believe that Americans today spend too much, and 80 percent think “there is a real problem with our ‘throw-away’ society.” And they weren’t just blaming this deficiency on others. Looking at their own behavior, 48 percent of those surveyed consider it important that they become more thrifty.
But thrift, when it was practiced by the generation who made it through the Great Depression, was not to keep us thin or improve the environment. Thrift was a virtue of necessity, like a soldier’s courage in battle. But just like bravery in war doesn’t just manifest itself without the proper training, both of body and mind, so the behaviors that our ancestors demonstrated were not born only out of circumstance, but out of a cultural and often religious environment that considered thrift, as Jean Bethke Elshtain notes in her essay, “a constituent and necessary feature of both worldly success and moral achievement.”
This idea of moral achievement, generally, not just thrift in particular, has been lost in recent years. It is not to say that our society is culturally bankrupt or that we are all, to borrow a phrase, “slouching toward Gomorrah.” Rather, it is to suggest that we do not think about building character and moral development in the systematic way that our ancestors did.
After finding that about one child in 30 is brilliant and happy, (Harvard psychologist Burton) White did a great deal of research to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. But the children came from a wide variety of backgrounds -- rich and poor, small families and large, broken and stable homes, poorly and well-educated parents -- and from all parts of the U.S. Finally, through extensive questioning, he determined that the bright and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space." -- Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers (from Creativity in Business)
via Anita Sharpe's Thought for the Day at Worthwhile
An essential part of the Business of Life is the development of your own personal character.
For most of our country's history character-building was seen as an essential part of education, as important as the acquisition of knowledge. Both constituted a type of wealth that could not lost, stolen or destroyed no matter what the vicissitudes of life. George Santayana called character the basis of happiness. Character is not to be confused with reputation as Abraham Lincoln pointed out, "Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." Think of it as your personal capital not to be confused with your financial capital.
Today most schools and universities no longer see the building of character as part of their mission. Churches and programs like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are seen as too religiously-inclined for many. Much of the commentary on the recent presidential election would have you believe that only one party takes values seriously. Into the breech that's grown even wider in our politically correct age, Foundation for a Better Life is building a bridge.
Not affiliated with any political group or religious organization, the Foundation for a Better Life "creates public service campaigns to communicate the values that make a difference in our communities-values such as honesty, caring, optimism, hard work, and helping others. These messages, communicated utilizing television, theatres, billboards, radio, internet, etc., model the benefits of a life lived by positive values. The Foundation encourages others to step up to a higher level and then to pass on those positive values they have learned. These seemingly small examples of individuals living values-based lives may not change the world, but collectively they will make a difference. And in the process help make the world a better place for everyone. After all, developing values and then passing them on to others is The Foundation for a Better Life."
The mission of The Foundation for a Better Life, through various media efforts, is to encourage adherence to a set of quality values through personal accountability and by raising the level of expectations of performance of all individuals regardless of religion or race. Through these efforts, the Foundation wants to remind individuals they are accountable and empowered with the ability to take responsibility for their lives and to promote a set of values that sees them through their failures and capitalizes on their successes. An individual who takes responsibility for his or her actions will take care of his or her family, job, community, and country.
Just look at what they've done with billboards. Click on any of the thumbnails for a larger image.
I just love it when even the Wall St Journal, recognizing there's been an explosion of research in what brings us happiness is now doing a series on it, Pursuing Happiness.
Some gleanings:
"Our emotional buoyancy is genetically set within a range, which acts as an anchor to our enthusiasm in good times and as a balloon in bad... This creates a happiness paradox: We may imagine we couldn't survive the end of a marriage or death of a family member, yet our innate "psychological immune system" is well equipped to greet these disasters when they occur, says Daniel Gilbert, a researcher at the department of psychology at Harvard University. The flip side is that things we imagine will make us happy -- a new car, a new career or a new spouse -- may give some temporary elation, but eventually the exhilaration fades.
Happier people tend to have a few key traits in common: they believe in causes larger than themselves; they are more optimistic; they don't look to material wealth for fulfillment; and they have many meaningful relationships. "They tend to be more resilient ... more flexible and more focused on the present and the future, not the past, says Gordon Parker, psychiatrist and executive director of Black Dog Institute, a Sydney-based facility for treating mood disorders.
The key to finding fulfillment at work -- and to finding overall greater happiness -- is "really figuring out what you love to do, and do that."
"One day, I received a phone call from a man halfway around the world who, at 45, had never worked a day in his life. A beneficiary of a sizeable inheritance, he was free of the need to earn his daily bread. Yet he was not a happy man. Indeed, he was deeply troubled by the fact that his life had gone by without his having expressed his own talents or made a difference in the lives of others. Like good health, spiritual growth, and nourishing relationships, meaningful work is one of the abundances of life that we neglect at our own peril." -- Laurence G. Boldt, The Tao of Abundance
Shamelessly cribbed from Anita Sharpe at Worthwhile because I liked it so much. This relates to an earlier post "The Pursuit of Legacy is a Libidinous Quest and the major theme of the second half of life. 45 is not too old to get started.
What can you say about a man, who having sold his software business for $19 million, was ashamed to tell his peers he hadn't made more?
You'd think he's nuts and so does Laura Nash. in Sunday's NYT. Laura, a senior lecturer in business ethics as the Harvard Business School, has just written a book with Howard Stevenson called "Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Your Life" (John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
In it they write about the 4 "spheres of life" - happiness, achievement, significance and legacy and say that having just enough in each sphere is more fulfilling than having way too much in one of them.
Claudia Deutsch in Sunday's NYT's interviews Laura in Grab the Brass Ring, or Just Enjoy the Ride
Some lessons the authors have gleaned from their hundreds of interviews can be found in the NYT article:
1/ Recognize that superstardom often carries the baggage of lapsed ethics, alienated spouses or children, substance abuse and a lack of plain, ordinary fun.
2/ If you cannot be a high achiever, switch to the significance sphere of your life.
3/ Remember that the significance of your job does not rest on its impact on the world.
4/ Apply "just enough" to what you give as well as to what you attain.
5/ Remember that it is better to be very good at many important things than to be a superstar at just one.
No amount of success in one area will buy you satisfaction in the others
When I was younger, I was a classic type A personality. A young female lawyer at a Wall Street firm, I was in a hurry for everything and impatient if things didn't happen fast enough.
It's not often you can pinpoint the time when you learned the importance of a classic virtue. I can remember when I learned patience. I was living on the upper West side, in a poorly remodeled apartment building and the elevator was so slow I couldn't stand it. I was going to be late! I would fidget, press the button again, I would tap, whistle, sigh, anything to make the elevator come faster. Of course, it never did. Then I had my little epiphany. It never would. I had to be patient.
Sharon Salzberg has a lovely piece in the June issue of Oprah on patience which she calls "The Cure for Craziness." There's only one way to save your sanity in this speeded-up, lunatic world. Patience...Having patience ...means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than yanking up our carrots, ripping open a budding flower, demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with. Patience isn't dour, and it isn't unhappy. It's a steady strength that we apply to each experience we face.
Patience is one of the Seven Contrary Virtues whose practice can protect one against the temptation toward the Seven Deadly Sins. The practice of patience can protect one against the sin of anger.
Come to think of it, since I've learned patience, I rarely get angry. Whadayouknow.
Is this good news or what
From a study by Sociologists Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams of the University of California, Riverside who have examined national survey data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a national sample of 3,563 children and their parents. They found that
When men perform domestic service for others, it teaches children cooperation and democratic family values, said Coltrane, who studies the changing role of fathers in families. It used to be that men assumed that their wives would do all the housework and parenting, but now that women are nearly equal participants in the labor force, men are assuming more of the tasks that it takes to run a home and raise children.
via Boing Boing
"Be prepared for what?" someone once asked Robert Baden-Powell, the Founder of the Boy Scouts.
"Why, for any old thing," he replied.
Baden Powell's idea was to prepare boys to handle emergencies and to prepare them for life. He wanted his Scouts to be prepared body and mind for any struggle, and to meet with a strong heart whatever challenges might lie ahead.
He understood that knowing you had done your best enabled you to live more happily and without regret.
More than 38 million copies of the Boy Scout Handbook have been printed. Who knows how many millions have become Scouts at one time or another.
It's all the fashion to scoff at Scouting now. Some can't get past the prohibition against homosexuality -no openly gay scouts or openly gay scout leaders. Some think that it is too Christian, others that's its too old-fashioned.
But I don't know of any other youth organization that comes close to instilling the sense that developing your character is the key to a happy life. I like their slogan "Do a good turn every day". I like the scout law and think we could all benefit if more people followed it.
UPDATE: For some reason, I thought the Boy Scouts were Christian, maybe I've confused them with the YMCA.
Anyway, The Mudville Gazette has set me straight, not just with the current controversy over the Pentagon's support of the Boy Scouts, but with a picture of the various medals a boy scout has to choose from.
They’re Boy Scout Religious Emblems. From left to right, Baptist, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Roman Catholic, and Zoroastrian – the Scouts require faith from their members, but not in a specific God. That distinction doesn’t appear in the media coverage of the issue though, does it?
The Scout Law declares a Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
They don't claim a monopoly on any of those.
To the best of my knowledge, other than the reverent part the ACLU has no problem with the Scouts. Odd isn't it? Why isn't the ACLU going to bat for those who refuse to bathe? Why not attack the Scouts for excluding the deceitful, backstabbing, troublesome, mean, rude, unruly, morose, extravagant, cowardly, and dirty Baptists or Hindus that are denied membership too?
Further explanation of 'reverent' from the Scouts home page: "A Scout is reverent. He is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties and respects the convictions of others in matters of custom and religion."
Yea, I can see where that's offensive.
But I don't know of any other youth organization that comes close to instilling the sense that developing your character is the key to a happy life. I like their slogan "Do a good turn every day". I like the scout law and think we could all benefit if more people followed it.
LOYAL
A Scout is true to his family, Scout leaders, friends, school, and nation.
HELPFUL
A Scout is concerned about other people. He does things willingly for others without pay or reward.
FRIENDLY
A Scout is a friend to all. He is a brother to other Scouts. He seeks to understand others. He respects those with ideas and customs other than his own.
COURTEOUS
A Scout is polite to everyone regardless of age or position. He knows good manners make it easier for people to get along together.
KIND
A Scout understands there is strength in being gentle. He treats others as he wants to be treated. He does not hurt or kill harmless things without reason.
OBEDIENT
A Scout follows the rules of his family, school, and troop. He obeys the laws of his community and country. If he thinks these rules and laws are unfair, he tries to have them changed in an orderly manner rather than disobey them.
CHEERFUL
A Scout looks for the bright side of things. He cheerfully does tasks that come his way. He tries to make others happy.
THRIFTY
A Scout works to pay his way and to help others. He saves for unforeseen needs. He protects and conserves natural resources. He carefully uses time and property.
BRAVE
A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. He has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right even if others laugh at or threaten him.
CLEAN
A Scout keeps his body and mind fit and clean. He goes around with those who believe in living by these same ideals. He helps keep his home and community clean.
REVERENT
A Scout is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties. He respects the beliefs of others.
I remember years ago watching the comedian George Carlin on television.
He was playing the part of a news announcer. I was absolutely charmed by his announcement of the discovery of a new color - it seemed totally ridiculous and very funny. I had a similar feeling when I heard about the "discovery" of a new emotion. Except, it's really true. Jonathan Haidt , Asst Prof of Psychology, at the University of Virginia, won the Templeton Positive Psychology Prize and a cash award of $100,000, in 2001.
According to Dr. Haidt, witnessing--even reading about--acts of kindness, heroism, or moral beauty produces an emotion called elevation. Elevation has been noted in different cultures around the world and often manifests itself as a feeling in the chest, especially warm, pleasant, or tingling. It also has a motivating effect: People who have experienced elevation report wanting to help others, to become better people themselves, and to affiliate with others who are also doing good.
Part of the Business of Life is becoming a better person, developing character and integrity. So, now we know that by seeking out stories of inspiring or heroic people make it more likely you will act that way yourself. I guess that's why there are inspirational section of bookstores. People know that if you are feeling in the dumps, reading biographies or inspiring stories can really help. Now we have a word for why it works so well.
Let me excerpt one part of
Prof Haidt's study on elevation
Several participants described the kind of openness and urge to be playful that Fredrickson ascribes to joy. The woman who wrote about the snow-shoveling episode above also wrote,
"I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing. Just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people. Writing a beautiful poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed".
A common theme in most of the narratives is a social focus a desire to be with, love, and help other people.
Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute has written about the Spirit at Work, why faith is the key to maturity
Information is words + silence. Silence is what is what is omitted from what we are told
Knowledge is information organized and applied
Wisdom the addition of context and weight
Information to knowledge, knowledge to wisdom. That is our long journey in life, our journey to maturity.
Your wife is murdered in a suicide bombing and with her your unborn child.
What is your response to such terror? Revenge, paralysis, depression come to my mind first.
But if you are Schmuel Greenbaum, whose 31 year old wife Shoshana was killed in the horrific Sbarro pizza bombing in Jerusalem in 2001, your personal response is KINDNESS.
Greenbaum started a non-profit organization, Partners in Kindness whose purpose is to inspire people to committing more acts of kindness in their lives.
I have in awe of people who can transform such an horrific act by an expanded and enlarged consciousness that creates good.
There is an weekly email distribution called "Kind Words" with stories of kindness that people have submitted. It has become for me a necessary antidote to the news, sad and terrible, I read each day.
