Eknath Easwaran

April 17

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master’s presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord’s presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.
   – SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES

The mind does not like to meditate; it wants to wander. When someone is not doing very well in meditation, one explanation is simple: his or her mind is elsewhere. The early stages of meditation are like a primary school for the mind. At first we are simply trying to get the mind to stay on the school grounds until the last bell rings. This is all we can do at first. The mind has been playing truant for years; when we try to concentrate, it simply is not present. All we can do is stand at the doorstep and whistle, trying to call it back in.

Even if all we do in thirty minutes of meditation is to call the mind back thirty times, we have made great progress. We don’t have to wait for the day when the mind is completely still to receive immense benefits from meditation. As the Bhagavad Gita says, even a little of this discipline protects us from great dangers.

-From Words to Live By

Lena Dunham

I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.

Roger Ebert

How can I begin to tell you about Chaz? She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading.

--about his wife, Chaz. From his memoir, Life Itself.

George Bilgere

Just when you'd begun to feel

You could rely on the summer,

That each morning would deliver

The same mourning dove singing

From his station on the phone pole,

The same smell of bacon frying 

Somewhere in the neighborhood,

The same sun burning off

The coastal fog by noon,

When you could reward yourself

For a good morning's work

With lunch at the same little seaside cafe

With its shaded deck and iced tea,

The day's routine finally down

Like an old song with minor variations,

There comes that morning when the light

Tilts ever so slightly on its track,

A cool gust out of nowhere

Whirlwinds a litter of dead grass

Across the sidewalk, the swimsuits

Are piled on the sale table,

And the back of your hand,

Which you thought you knew,

Has begun to look like an old leaf.

Or the back of someone else's hand.


"August" by George Bilgere, from The Good Kiss. © Akron, 2002. 

Tony La Russa

Trust your gut; don't cover your butt.

Interview. NPR, "Morning Edition," July 25, 2014.

Sarah Jio

Sometimes I think of my life as a great big story. Each silly thing I do is a new paragraph. And each morning I turn to the next chapter. It's fun to think of life that way, each day being an adventure of the grandest proportions. . . . . Every time I see my story tinged with unfortunate events, even when such unfortunate events seem to simply happen to me, I remember that I am ultimately the author of my life. My dear friend, in many ways, you've helped me see that I can end a bad chapter early. I can start a new one. I can write myself a fur coat, and a lovely little hotel room in Paris with a view of the Seine.

~ Goodnight June (p 97)

(especially humorous having just read Harold and the Purple Crayon to my nephew.)

Mark Bittman

For every 12 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverage introduced per person per day into a country’s food system, the rate of diabetes goes up 1 percent.

It’s the Sugar, Folks By MARK BITTMAN FEBRUARY 27, 2013 NY Times

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/its-the-sugar-folks/

Maria Mitchell

[N]o woman should say, "I am but a woman!" But a woman! What more can you ask to be? Born a woman — born with the average brain of humanity — born with more than the average heart — if you are mortal, what higher destiny could you have? No matter where you are nor what you are, you are a power.

--From Maria Mitchell's Life, Letters, and Journals (1896)

Note: Maria Mitchell - what a woman! Read this brief bio from The Writer's Almanac, August 1, 2014:

"Mitchell's list of firsts is impressive: She'd made the first American comet sighting; in 1848, she was the first woman appointed to the American Association for the Advancement of Science; in 1853, she became the first woman to earn an advanced degree; and in 1865, she became the first woman appointed to the faculty of the newly founded Vassar Female College as their astronomy professor and the head of their observatory, making her the first female astronomy professor in American history.

Mitchell also became a devoted anti-slavery activist and suffragette, with friends such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and helped found the American Association for the Advancement of Women."

Ira Glass

Don't wait for permission to make something that's interesting or amusing to you. Just do it now. Don't wait. Find a story idea, start making it, give yourself a deadline, show it to people who'll give you notes to make it better. Don't wait till you're older, or in some better job than you have now. Don't wait for anything. Don't wait till some magical story idea drops into your lap. That's not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now. Be a fucking soldier about it and be tough.

--His advice for aspiring writers or journalists, but doesn't it apply to anyone trying to do pretty much anything? --Editor.

From http://lifehacker.com/im-ira-glass-host-of-this-american-life-and-this-is-h-1609562031

Ira Glass

[T]he hardest part of my job is simply to shift from one task to the next. The new task is like icy water you have to dive into. The old task is a warm bath. It's especially hard when I know the new task is going to be really difficult, as half of them are. I always have to brace myself.

Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz

Whenever a person performs a task well, there are typically both internal and instrumental consequences. A conscientious student learns (internal) and gets good grades (instrumental). A skilled doctor cures patients (internal) and makes a good living (instrumental). But just because activities can have both internal and instrumental consequences does not mean that the people who thrive in these activities have both internal and instrumental motives.

Remarkably, [West Point] cadets with [both] strong internal and strong instrumental motives for attending West Point performed worse on every measure than did those with strong internal motives but weak instrumental ones. They were less likely to graduate, less outstanding as military officers and less committed to staying in the military.

Our study suggests that efforts should be made to structure activities so that instrumental consequences do not become motives. Helping people focus on the meaning and impact of their work, rather than on, say, the financial returns it will bring, may be the best way to improve not only the quality of their work but also — counterintuitive though it may seem — their financial success.

~The Secret of Effective Motivation, July 4th, 2014 NYTimes

David Brooks

Netzer’s piece [from an earlier issue] is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

People with a crooked timber mentality tend to see life as full of ironies. Intellectual life is ironic because really smart people often do the dumbest things precisely because they are carried away by their own brilliance...Marriage is ironic because you are trying to build a pure relationship out of people who are ramshackle and messy. There’s an awesome incongruity between the purity you glimpse in the love and the fact that he leaves used tissues around the house and it drives you crazy.

People with a crooked timber mentality try to find comedy in the mixture of high and low. There’s something fervent in Netzer’s belief in marital loyalty: “You and your spouse are a team of two. It is you against the world. No one else is allowed on the team, and no one else will ever understand the team’s rules.”

People with a crooked timber mentality are anti-perfectionist. When two people are working together there are bound to be different views, and sometimes you can’t find a solution so you have to settle for an arrangement. You have to design structures that have a lot of give, for when people screw up. You have to satisfice, which is Herbert Simon’s term for any option that is not optimal but happens to work well enough.

Great and small enterprises often have two births: first in purity, then in maturity. The idealism of the Declaration of Independence gave way to the cold-eyed balances of the Constitution. Love starts in passion and ends in car pools.

The beauty of the first birth comes from the lofty hopes, but the beauty of the second birth comes when people begin to love frailty. (Have you noticed that people from ugly places love their cities more tenaciously than people from beautiful cities?)

The mature people one meets often have this crooked timber view, having learned from experience the intransigence of imperfection and how to make a friend of every stupid stumble. As Thornton Wilder once put it, “In love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve.”

--"Rhapsody in Realism," New York Times, June 24, 2014

Sally Wadyka

The propensity to laugh has been scientifically linked to positive personality traits, such as likability and creativity. 

Kristin van Ogtrop

Why do humans laugh?

• Because it activates the same pleasure sensors in the brain that are triggered when we eat chocolate. 
• Because it seems to stimulate the release of endorphins, which reduces the perception of pain. 
• Because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol and so enhances our ability to remember.

--from Real Simple, July 2014

Sir John Lubbock

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means a waste of time. 

--from The Use of Life