fuming and fretting

One autumn day Mrs. Peale and I took a trip into Massachusetts to see our son John and we pride ourselves on the good old American custom of promptness. Therefore, being a bit behind schedule, we were driving at breakneck speed through the autumnal landscape. My wife said, "Norman, did you see that radiant hillside?"

"What hillside?" I asked.

"It just went by on the other side," she explained.

"Look at that beautiful tree."

"What tree?" I was already a mile past it.

"This is one of the most glorious days I have ever seen," my wife said. "How could you possibly imagine such amazing colors as these New England hillsides in October? In fact," she said, "it makes me happy inside."

That remark of hers so impressed me that I stopped the car and went back a quarter of a mile to a lake backed by towering hills dressed in autumn colors. We sat and looked and meditated. God with His genius and skill had painted that scene in the varied colors which He alone can mix. In the still waters of the lake lay a reflected vision of His glory, for the hillside was unforgettably pictured in that mirrorlike pond.

For quite a while we sat without a word until finally my wife broke the silence by the only appropriate statement that one could make, "He leadeth me beside the still waters." (Ps 23:2) We arrived at Deerfield at eleven, but we were not tired. In fact, we were deeply refreshed.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

The Geography of Cancer

Chance has a genius for disguise. Frequently it appears in numbers that seem to form a pattern. People feel an overwhelming temptation to deduce that there is more to the events they witness than chance alone. Sometimes we are right. Often, though, we are suckered, and the apparent order merely resembles one.

To see why, take a bag of rice and chuck the contents straight into the air.

Observe the way the rice is scattered on the carpet at your feet. What you have done is create a chance distribution of rice grains. There will be thin patches here, thicker ones there, and every so often a much larger and distinct pile of rice. It has clustered.

Now imagine each grain of rice as a cancer case falling across a map of the United States.

Wherever cases of cancer bunch, people demand an explanation. The rice patterns, however, don’t need an explanation. The rice shows that clustering, as the result of chance alone, is to be expected. The truly weird result would be if the rice had spread itself in a smooth, regular layer. Similarly, the genuinely odd pattern of illness would be an even spread of cases across the population.

This analogy draws no moral equivalence between cancer and rice patterns. Sometimes, certainly, a cancer cluster will point to a shared local cause. Often, though, the explanation lies in the complicated and myriad causes of disease, mingled with the complicated and myriad influences on where we choose to live, combined with accidents of timing, all in a collision of endless possibilities that, just like the endless collisions of those flying rice grains, come together to produce a cluster.

Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, The Numbers Game

Solving the problem is more important than blaming the cause

When you’re young, it’s easy to get into the blame game when things go wrong. Your alarm clock didn’t go off. Your computer crashed as you were typing the last sentence of that 10-page history paper. That professor didn’t like you. Then you grow up, and guess what? No one cares about your excuses, unavoidable as they might be. Be proactive. Get the job done. Worry about the rest later. 

Alex McDaniel

If you’re not being challenged on a daily basis, change something

Reaching adulthood is no excuse to stop learning or growing. It just means now we’re responsible for reaching new heights in every aspect of our lives. Go for a morning jog. Ask your boss if you can have a hand in a bigger project with more responsibility. Meet new people. Keep pushing.

Alex McDaniel

Gratitude is powerful

Learning to be grateful for what we already have will not only make us happier, but will also open the door for more to come into our lives. Say thank you. Write personal notes. Take inventory of the thousands of tiny pieces of your life made possible by friends, family, neighbors, co-workers and members of your community. And be grateful for it.

Alex McDaniel

Your identity

Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.  Reid Hoffman

Being single is not an illness to be cured

There’s a big difference in aspiring to be in a relationship with someone who brings out the best in you and simply wanting to be in a relationship so you don’t have to be single anymore. Your relationship status isn’t indicative of your personal success, so why not embrace the dating lulls when they come as time to work on yourself until someone better comes along? And slap anyone who asks when you’re finally going to settle down and find someone. They need it. 

Alex McDaniel

The storyteller

The storyteller's responsibility is not to be wise. A storyteller is the person who creates an atmosphere in which wisdom can reveal itself. -Barry Lopez

Stop doing stuff

Stop doing stuff you already know how to do. Start doing things that only God could pull off.  Bob Goff

Shrink the change

Shrink the change. Break it down so it's not so scary.

When you hit the ground

Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. –JK Rowling

Levitation

Rise above the drama.

Couple spends wedding day feeding refugees

A Turkish couple celebrated their wedding day by hosting 4,000 Syrian refugees at their reception party in the southern city of Kilis near the Syrian border. Fethullah Uzumcuoglu and his bride Esra Polat borrowed a food truck from a local charity and pooled money they received as wedding gifts to pay for the feast. Still in suit and gown, the newlyweds spent much of their party handing out meals to the grateful refugees. “Seeing the happiness in the eyes of the Syrian children is just priceless,” said the groom. “We started our journey to happiness by making others happy. That’s a great feeling.”

The Week Magazine, August 21, 2015 issue

Read more in The Telegraph

burning books

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky

what we call management

Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work. Peter Drucker

Your Trails

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. -Edward Abbey

My, my we're looking smug

Want to be condescending?  Here are four easy steps to arrogance:

1. Evaluate people from above, not from alongside.
2. Give others no room to change or grow.
3. Once you’ve slapped a label on someone, never revise your opinion.
4. Forget how it feels to be on the receiving end of judgment.

Stephen Goforth

Ask yourself this question when you argue with your partner

Arguments between married couples boil down to two things: Someone either feels unfairly controlled or neglected. That’s the finding of Baylor University psychologists. They gave questionnaires to more than 3500 married couples. Researches say the tension that sparked arguments between them nearly always had to do with whether the partners felt valued or understood. The lead professor in the study says figuring out whether the message is “You’re ignoring me!” or “You’re controlling me!” goes a long way toward developing a healthy relationship.

Stephen Goforth

The incessant demands of the inbox

Before email, if you wanted to write to someone, you had to invest some effort in it. You’d sit down with pen and paper, or at a typewriter, and carefully compose a message. There wasn’t anything about the medium that lent itself to dashing off quick notes without giving them much thought, partly because of the ritual involved, and the time it took to write a note, find and address an envelope, add postage, and take the letter to a mailbox. Because the very act of writing a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn’t cost anything.

Sure, there’s the money you paid for your computer and your internet connection, but there is no incremental cost to sending one more email. Compare this with paper letters. Each one incurred the price of the envelope and the postage stamp, and although this doesn’t represent a lot of money, these were in limited supply – if you ran out of them, you’d have to make a special trip to the stationery store and the post office to buy more, so you didn’t use them frivolously. The sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them. Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”

Most emails demand some sort of action: Click on this link to see a video of a baby panda, or answer this query from a co-worker, or make plans for lunch with a friend, or delete this email as spam. All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.

Daniel J Levitin writing in The Guardian