Meanwhile: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Living Fabric of a City and Our Shared Human Longing to Be Understood by Maria Popova A tender reminder that however vast our differences, we are bonded by the yearning to feel seen for who we are. I’ve written before that every city needs a love letter. Though Meanwhile, in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words (public library) by illustrator extraordinaire and frequent Brain Pickings contributor Wendy MacNaughton — who gave us the wonderful Lost Cat, one of the best books of 2013 — may be “about” a city, in the sense that the raw inspiration was drawn from the streets of San Francisco, it is really about the city, any city — about community, about subcultures and belonging, about the complexities of gentrification, about what it means to have individual dignity and shared identity. We meet the Mission Hipsters, who might as well be the Williamsburg Hipsters*, or the Insert-Any-City’s-Neighborhood-That-Has-Become-Synonymous-With-Hipsters Hipsters, an affectionate portrait of the cultural trope, down to “hand-knit dog sweater #62″: Donating = Loving
Att leva med ADHD Hej. Jag heter Annaklara. Det här är historien om mig. Historien om att växa upp och leva med en funktionsskillnad som ingen visste fanns. Våren 1981 föddes jag i utkanten av Stockholm. När jag var liten var jag en snäll och duktig flicka. Stopp ett tag! Vi har alla en hjärna. För att nervcellerna i hjärnan ska kunna prata med varandra använder de små budbärare som kallas signalsubstanser. Vad är ADHD och DCD undrar ni kanske nu? Det finns många epitet på oss bokstavsbarn. För att du som läser det här skall förstå lite bättre hur det kan vara att leva med min funktionsskillnad tänkte jag nu berätta lite om hur det har varit för mig att växa upp och hur det är för mig att leva idag. Vi börjar med DCD. Jag ville inte vara till besvär för mina kamrater så jag vågade aldrig fråga någon om jag fick vara med. De vanligaste aktiviteterna för flickorna på skolgården var att hoppa hopprep, spela twist, nigger eller kråkan, hoppa hage, göra klapplekar eller skvallra med sin ”bästis”.
The Giving Fraternity Reprinted from May 2010 Congratulations to those graduating this year! You deserve to celebrate and reflect upon your achievements. I also invite you to understand that in regards to fraternity, it ain’t over. The oth er night, my son Jack pulled Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree off his shelf. As the boy grew, his use for his beloved tree changed. Each step along the way, when the boy would return and request more and more from the tree, she was excited to give him what he needed. Many more years pass, and the boy returns as a very old man. , but tells him that she has nothing left to provide – no apples, no branches, and no trunk. And the tree was happy. Consider this story as you prepare to leave your undergraduate years. So now you are an alum. As an alum, you can give the fraternity the gift of mentorship. But there is a gift even greater. And the greatest gift you can give her in return is to live her ritual every day. If you do, then your story may read like this:
Einstein on Kindness, Our Shared Existence, and Life’s Highest Ideals by Maria Popova “Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind… life would have seemed to me empty.” In times of turmoil, I often turn to one of my existential pillars of comfort: Albert Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions — the definitive collection of the great thinker’s essays on everything from science and religion to government to human nature, gathered under the supervision of Einstein himself. It’s been a challenging week, one that’s reminded me with merciless acuity the value of kindness and compassion, so I’ve once again turned to Einstein’s timeless “ideas and opinions” on this spectrum of subjects. On the ties of sympathy: How strange is the lot of us mortals! On public opinion, or what Paul Graham might call prestige: One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. On our interconnectedness, interdependency, and shared existence: On good and evil, creative bravery, and human value: On life’s highest ideals:
Me, My Selfie and I See also: 7 Tips For Great Selfies It's official: 2013 is the year that the selfie came into its own. The self-taken mobile photo now boasts its own art exhibition as well as a new linguistic status—Oxford Dictionaries just added the word in August, making it a legitimate part of the English language. (Update: Oxford has made named it the word of the year for 2013.) Selfies are already big enough to spark a backlash, about which more in a moment. Selfies, of course, aren't really anything new. Keep Feeling Fascination ... World's first photo selfie: Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia, 1839 We’ve come a long way since Robert Cornelius took the world's first photographic self-portrait. Yet he might have had he given it some thought. Those early self-portraits were themselves spurred in equal part by new technology—especially inexpensive, high-quality mirrors—and human self-curiosity, though of course you had to be an artist to actually create one. The Selfie-Centered Generation
Why Being In Your 20s Is Awesome I know I talk crap on being a twentysomething but I’m only half-kidding. In actuality, there’s no age I’d rather be. (Besides maybe seven years old because they don’t do anything besides eat ice cream and poop themselves. That sounds like an ideal life to be completely honest.) Being in your twenties is all about discovering which things hurt you and what makes you feel good. This is what your twenties are for — to feel and see as much as you can, to take advantage of not being tied down to anything and anyone and to go balls to the wall with everything that you do. It’s important to talk about why your twenties are great because it seems like we spend so much of our time wanting to be somewhere else other than where we are. We’re not stuck.
3 Bad Habits That Can Derail Any Relationship As a marriage therapist, one of the questions I get asked most by family and friends is What should I do so we don’t end up in couples therapy? As a wife, I get it: you want to know what goes wrong in other relationships so you can avoid it in yours. Unfortunately, there’s no magic checklist that will guarantee marital bliss. 1. Culturally we've embraced this idea that happy couples don’t fight. No two human beings alive will agree on everything and always meet each other’s needs and expectations; and that’s part of the excitement of being together. Too often couples think that conflict is a sign that the relationship is falling apart. 2. If you disagree on a major issue, it's so much easier to turn to a friend or family member who shares your position rather than facing the conflict with your partner. In order to establish a deep and meaningful connection, you must learn how to weather storms as a team, relying on one another first. 3. So, there you have it! Photo Credit: Stocksy.com
How Long to Nap for the Best Brain Benefits Home » Health » How Long to Nap for the Best Brain Benefits Taking a nap, we’ve seen time and again, is like rebooting your brain. But napping may be as much of an art as it is a science. Scientists offer recommendations for planning your perfect nap, including how long to nap and when. The sleep experts in the article say a 10-to-20-minute power nap gives you the best “bang for your buck,” but depending on what you want the nap to do for you, other durations might be ideal: For a quick boost of alertness, experts say a 10-to-20-minute power nap is adequate for getting back to work in a pinch. For cognitive memory processing, however, a 60-minute nap may do more good, Dr. Finally, the 90-minute nap will likely involve a full cycle of sleep, which aids creativity and emotional and procedural memory, such as learning how to ride a bike. In addition to those recommendations, one surprising suggestion is to sit slightly upright during your nap, because it will help you avoid a deep sleep.
Flow chart Buddhadharma In Everyday Life. ~ via Linda Lewis Lojong 12, “Drive All Blames into One” Perhaps the most challenging and provocative of Atisha’s slogans is Drive All Blames into One. Why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing? Sometimes it is difficult enough to take the blame for something we actually did, like reaching for honey in the grocery store and accidentally knocking a glass jar of peanut butter off the shelf and onto the floor. When we see our own or others’ defense mechanism shun blame, we also see self-cherishing and ego-fixation. Obviously, it’s good to be responsible for our own mishaps. As a Bodhisattva in progress, why in the world would we want to lay emotional or aggressive blame on anyone else? Interestingly, this simplifies the situation. I remember many years ago, one of my best bosses called me into his office. “Linda, you’ve been doing a good job, working independently, and I am to blame for not giving you enough guidance.” “Absorb the poison—then the rest of the situation becomes medicine.”
Pentagon researching ‘narrative networks’ as way to hijack the brain with false stories J. D. HeyesNaturalNews If someone – or some government entity – were able to figure out the science behind what makes people violent, what do you suppose they would do with that knowledge? According to a recent report by the BBC, the Defense Department appears to be looking for a way to hijack the mind so it can implant false, but believable, stories – a sort of “like me” weapon, if you will. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA – the division responsible for all of the Defense Department’s cutting-edge technology development – is said to be working on brand-new research that focuses on the neurobiology behind the political violence and, specifically, whether such violence can be mitigated before it even begins. DARPA officials say the research is aimed at looking for ways to generate versions of events that would convince people not to support the enemy. Not science fiction – just science Brainwash us? “Why are we grabbed by some stories and not others?
The “I” of the Beholder: What Is the Self? by Maria Popova “The fate of the world depends on the Selves of human beings.” “I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations,” Anaïs Nin wrote to Harper’s Bazaar editor Leo Lerman in history’s most gracious turn-down of a major magazine profile, “I am a series of moods and sensations. In her seminal book The “I” of the Beholder: A Guided Journey to the Essence of a Child (public library), education pioneer and Roeper School co-founder Annemarie Roeper considers the origin and nature of identity and of the self as it relates to developmental psychology and our formative years. Roeper, who fled to America from Nazi Germany, was born in Vienna in 1918 and came of age in the aftermath of “the age of insight,” which had sparked a historic cross-pollination of science, the arts, and the humanities. Roeper writes in the introduction: [We have] a sense of the mystery of life, the mystery of the universe that surrounds us, and the mystery that is within us.