Salad Preparation Made Simple
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Brexit is not just Europe’s problem. It highlights a crisis in democracies worldwide.
By Dan Balz, Washington Post, June 27, 2016
LONDON–Britain’s political system remained in turmoil Monday, virtually leaderless and with the two major parties divided internally. But the meltdown that has taken place in the days after voters decided to break the country’s ties with Europe is more than a British problem, reflecting an erosion in public confidence that afflicts democracies around the world.
Last Thursday’s Brexit vote cast a bright light on the degree to which the effects of globalization and the impact of immigration, along with decades of overpromises and under-delivery by political leaders, have undermined the ability of those officials to lead. This collapse of confidence has created what amounts to a crisis in governing for which there seems no easy or quick answer.
The debris here is clear. The Brexit vote claimed Prime Minister David Cameron as its first victim. Having called the referendum and led the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union, he announced his intention to resign the morning after the vote. The results also now threaten the standing of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who faces a likely leadership election after seeing more than two dozen members of his leadership team resign in the past two days.
Alastair Darling, a former chancellor of the exchequer, outlined the extent of the crisis here during an interview with the BBC’s “Today” program on Monday. “There is no government. There is no opposition. The people who got us into this mess–they’ve gone to ground,” he said “How has the United Kingdom come to this position? We have taken this decision and have no plan for the future.”
The seeds of what has brought Britain to this moment exist elsewhere, which makes this country’s problems the concern of leaders elsewhere. In Belgium and Brazil, democracies have faced crises of legitimacy; in Spain and France, elected leaders have been hobbled by their own unpopularity; even in Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces no threat from the opposition, his government has demonstrated a consistent inability to deliver prosperity.
Anthony King, a professor of politics at the University of Essex, said the underlying factor is that many people no longer believe that, however imperfect things are economically, they will keep getting better.
In the face of that change in public attitudes, he said, much of the political class “is behaving the way it used to behave, the old arguments, the old fights, the adversarialism.” That has created what he called “the palpable disconnection” between political leaders and ordinary people. “That is true across much of the democratic world,” he added. “How do you put that right?”
The problem is especially acute here at the moment and threatens to grow worse in the near term. A longtime analyst of politics here, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his position, said: “If you thought your [American] politics were a mess, we can outdo you any time. I’ve never known it in any way, shape or form as bad as this.”
LONDON–Britain’s political system remained in turmoil Monday, virtually leaderless and with the two major parties divided internally. But the meltdown that has taken place in the days after voters decided to break the country’s ties with Europe is more than a British problem, reflecting an erosion in public confidence that afflicts democracies around the world.
Last Thursday’s Brexit vote cast a bright light on the degree to which the effects of globalization and the impact of immigration, along with decades of overpromises and under-delivery by political leaders, have undermined the ability of those officials to lead. This collapse of confidence has created what amounts to a crisis in governing for which there seems no easy or quick answer.
The debris here is clear. The Brexit vote claimed Prime Minister David Cameron as its first victim. Having called the referendum and led the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union, he announced his intention to resign the morning after the vote. The results also now threaten the standing of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who faces a likely leadership election after seeing more than two dozen members of his leadership team resign in the past two days.
Alastair Darling, a former chancellor of the exchequer, outlined the extent of the crisis here during an interview with the BBC’s “Today” program on Monday. “There is no government. There is no opposition. The people who got us into this mess–they’ve gone to ground,” he said “How has the United Kingdom come to this position? We have taken this decision and have no plan for the future.”
The seeds of what has brought Britain to this moment exist elsewhere, which makes this country’s problems the concern of leaders elsewhere. In Belgium and Brazil, democracies have faced crises of legitimacy; in Spain and France, elected leaders have been hobbled by their own unpopularity; even in Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces no threat from the opposition, his government has demonstrated a consistent inability to deliver prosperity.
Anthony King, a professor of politics at the University of Essex, said the underlying factor is that many people no longer believe that, however imperfect things are economically, they will keep getting better.
In the face of that change in public attitudes, he said, much of the political class “is behaving the way it used to behave, the old arguments, the old fights, the adversarialism.” That has created what he called “the palpable disconnection” between political leaders and ordinary people. “That is true across much of the democratic world,” he added. “How do you put that right?”
The problem is especially acute here at the moment and threatens to grow worse in the near term. A longtime analyst of politics here, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his position, said: “If you thought your [American] politics were a mess, we can outdo you any time. I’ve never known it in any way, shape or form as bad as this.”
Heaven over hospital: A tea party to say goodbye to Julianna Snow
It was a funeral with a dress code: fabulous.
And so friends and family arrived Saturday morning at City Bible Church in Vancouver, Washington, in floral print dresses and shocking pink polo shirts, brightly colored boas and sparkly bolero ties to celebrate the life of Julianna Yuri Snow.
Julianna, who had an incurable neuromuscular disorder, chose heaven over the hospital, and last week, she died, going to heaven on her own terms.
Her choice to forgo medical interventions at the end of her life was made with the blessings of her physicians and nurses at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland.
“We pulled her from death’s door so many times last year, but she’s sicker now than she was then, and I don’t think we could pull her through another big crisis,” one of her intensive care unit nurses, Diana Scolaro, said last fall.
“She doesn’t have a long time to live,” her pulmonologist, Dr. Danny Hsia, added at the time. “For her, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.”
During her life, Julianna’s story became known to millions and sparked a conversation about the role children should play in making their own end-of-life medical decisions.
And in death, she had a funeral that fit her magnificent, sparkly, princess self.
She couldn’t use her arms or legs or breathe or eat on her own, but Julianna didn’t know that her life should be anything but fabulous.
Every morning, she donned a princess dress and tiara. She dreamed up elaborate make-believe games with her dolls and animals. She insisted on polished nails and asked to have glitter spilled on her fingers.
“There’s no such thing as too much [glitter],” she told me during a visit with her last fall.
And she loved tea parties.
So her parents–Dr. Michelle Moon, a neurologist, and Steve Snow, a former Air Force fighter pilot–hosted a tea party instead of a traditional funeral.
Julianna’s funeral was everything she loved: bright colors, painted nails and tea parties.
“It will be big, elegant, colorful, fun, whimsical, loving, bright, joyful, magnificent,” Moon wrote on her blog last week after Julianna’s death.
“I’m hoping it’s an over the top, joyful explosion that brings people together to have fun and enjoy. That’s what she loved to do, and what she was so good at facilitating,” she added in an email to CNN. “We want to make J proud.”
When family and friends arrived at the church, pink balloons greeted them, along with a pink poster made by her grandfather Tom Snow.
“Text from Julianna: Arrived in heaven! I am healed! Thank you for your love! Hope to see you in God’s time,” the poster read.
To the right was a table full of Julianna’s toys, the tiny dolls and Hello Kitty figurines and ponies with long pink tails and bunnies and bears and mice that populated the stories she made up.
Children were welcome to take her toys home.
Next to the toys, a long table held tea sandwiches–cucumber and mint, tuna salad, peanut butter and jelly–but not egg salad, because Julianna thought egg salad was “stinky.”
Another long table held tea party sweets like scones and her grandmother’s peppermint cookies.
In the back of the church, friends and family frosted and decorated cupcakes at one station and painted their nails at another.
Julianna loved to paint her nails bright colors, and so family and friends painted their nails to celebrate her life.
Wood carvings of bunnies and teapots, made by her grandfather, decorated the walls. He also made bright pink easels to hold family photos. Signs for the food and nail and cupcake bars were written out in fancy handwriting and glitter by Moon’s cousins.
A family video and Julianna’s favorite song–Carrie Underwood’s version of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”–played in the background.
“Julianna cared about the details, so there [are] a lot of details here,” Moon wrote.
It was a funeral on Julianna’s terms.
Looking back, the Sunday before Julianna’s death was “a gift,” Moon says.
She and Julianna dyed a Barbie’s hair rainbow colors and made flowers out of pencils and fabric.
It was sunny and warm, and they took Julianna outside. Moon said she felt that she could relax and enjoy the moments with Julianna and her brother, Alex, 7.
Later in the afternoon, one of Julianna’s favorite hospice nurses, Juliah Larson, came by for a visit.
Then, late Sunday night, Julianna started to have trouble breathing. Respecting her wishes, her parents made her as comfortable as possible but did not take her to the hospital.
And she slipped in one last fashion observation to her mother, who never dressed quite as fabulously as Julianna would have liked.
“I was wearing a plain gray sweater that she hadn’t seen before,” her mother said. “She said, ‘What’s that?’ which is Julianna code for ‘You can do better than that.’”
In the early morning hours of June 14, Julianna passed away.
“She died at home, in her princess room and in my arms,” Moon said. “She died exactly where she wanted to die.”
“She went after 18 beautiful months [in hospice]. She didn’t go after a year of horrible hospitalizations,” she added.
“I take comfort knowing that it happened in the way she wanted it to happen.”
Now, they’re focused on raising money to fight the disease Julianna had, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, through a book she wrote and a fundraising page.
Julianna’s parents say one of the things they learned from the last year and a half of her life is that priorities matter.
Before, their priority had been treating her illness.
But “it became abundantly clear that there was nothing we could do to save her from her disease,” Snow said in a speech at the funeral.
After that, Julianna still received care, such as treatments to make breathing easier, but the family’s priorities shifted.
“We didn’t stop doing medical stuff–we did a lot of medical stuff–but it wasn’t our focus. But it was in the background,” Moon said. “Instead, we made things she loved the priority. That really helped her thrive and helped us enjoy our time with her.”
Julianna thrived during this time, her parents say, with her nail polish and crafts and stories and jokes.
“We got to enjoy and love on Julianna, and her spirit and imagination thrived because of that love. We got to share her love with the world,” her father said.
Moon and Snow said they hope Julianna’s legacy is that unconditional love and joy.
“The power of love–it really is so powerful,” Snow said. “From love, you can have faith; you can have hope; you can have peace.”
Or, to quote Julianna, “Love is a superpower. It makes the bad guys good.”
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Britain Rattles Postwar Order and Its Place as Pillar of Stability
LONDON–Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is already threatening to unravel a democratic bloc of nations that has coexisted peacefully together for decades. But it is also generating uncertainty about an even bigger issue: Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?
Britain’s choice to retreat into what some critics of the vote suggest is a “Little England” status is just one among many loosely linked developments suggesting the potential for a reordering of power, economic relationships, borders and ideologies around the globe.
Slow economic growth has undercut confidence in traditional liberal economics, especially in the face of the dislocations caused by trade and surging immigration. Populism has sprouted throughout the West. Borders in the Middle East are being erased amid a rise in sectarianism. China is growing more assertive and Russia more adventurous. Refugees from poor and war-torn places are crossing land and sea in record numbers to get to the better lives shown to them by modern communications.
Accompanied by an upending of politics and middle-class assumptions in both the developed and the developing worlds, these forces are combining as never before to challenge the Western institutions and alliances that were established after World War II and that have largely held global sway ever since.
Britain has been a pillar in that order, as well as a beneficiary. It has an important (some would argue outsize) place in the United Nations, and a role in NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank–the postwar institutions invested with promoting global peace, security and economic prosperity.
Now Britain symbolizes the cracks in that postwar foundation. Its leaving the European Union weakens a bloc that is the world’s biggest single market, as well as an anchor of global democracy. It also undermines the postwar consensus that alliances among nations are essential in maintaining stability and in diluting the nationalism that once plunged Europe into bloody conflict–even as nationalism is surging again.
“It’s not that this, in and of itself, will completely destroy the international order,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former American representative to NATO who is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But it sets a precedent. It is potentially corrosive.”
The symbolism was pointed in China on Saturday morning, two days after the British vote. In the packed ballroom of a Beijing hotel, China’s new international development bank held its first meeting of the 57 countries that have signed up as members. The new institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is designed to give China a chance to win influence away from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
“History has never set any precedent,” the new bank’s president, Jin Liqun, once wrote of the United States and its Western allies, “that an empire is capable of governing the world forever.”
Even as European leaders held a flurry of meetings on Saturday to weigh a response to Britain’s departure, President Xi Jinping of China welcomed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to Beijing for a brief state visit. More than China, Russia is an outlier to the American-led international system, and Mr. Putin–at best a wary partner of China, which itself has severe economic challenges–in recent years has worked to divide and destabilize Europe.
Mr. Putin has troubles of his own, including an economy hurt by low oil prices, that could limit his ability to exploit the moment. Still, for him, analysts say, the British vote is an unexpected gift.
Russia has nurtured discord inside the European Union by supporting an array of small, extremist political parties that foment nationalist anger in different countries. Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and meddling in eastern Ukraine directly challenged the rules-based international system of respecting national borders and led to a continuing political confrontation with the United States and Europe.
“Vladimir Putin will be rubbing his hands in glee,” the British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian.
The end of Pax Americana is not a new theme. Predictions of American decline were rampant after the global economic crisis in 2007 and 2008, amid parallel predictions of the dawning of a new Chinese century.
But the American economy steadily recovered, if imperfectly, while China has unnerved many of its Asian neighbors with a newly aggressive foreign policy. Chinese overreach opened a path for renewed American engagement in Asia, the fastest-growing region in the world, as President Obama called for a “pivot” to Asia.
Analysts disagree on whether this pivot signaled a declining American interest in European affairs and contributed to the Continent’s current problems. Part of the Obama administration’s rationale was to extricate the United States from decades of costly involvement in the Middle East at a time when that region was in upheaval.
There, the breakdown of the postwar political order has been more fundamental and violent than in Europe. The uprisings of the Arab Spring erupted from widespread frustrations with stagnant, autocratic politics and economic lethargy. But these rebellions failed to yield stable governments, and the borders drawn by Europeans a century ago in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have been rendered largely irrelevant.
The nationalism surging in Europe is not the problem in the Arab world; rather, populations have retreated into greater reliance on sects, ethnic groups and militias. Jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have fought national armies and won, providing a religious alternative to the nation-state that has been embraced by some.
Bassel Salloukh, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, said the problems in the Middle East and Europe shared a common origin in the anxieties caused by tectonic shifts in the global economy. But while fear and frustration in the West have shown themselves through democratic elections, brittle Arab states lacked the flexibility to respond.
“Here, we have hyper-centralized, homogeneous, authoritarian states which, when facing these transformations, just exploded,” Mr. Salloukh said.
And those explosions were not contained within the Middle East. Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote. Stabilizing Syria and permanently curbing the refugee flow could be one of the critical factors in determining whether Europe can steady itself politically.
Before the refugee crisis, the European Union was already an unwieldy and unfinished entity. Its contradictions and imperfections were exacerbated by the economic crisis. Yet it was the onset of more than a million refugees marching through Greece and the Balkans toward Germany that may ultimately prove to be the most destabilizing event in Europe’s recent history.
European countries erected border fences despite the bloc’s system of open internal borders. Populist parties raged against immigrants. Britain was relatively insulated, yet British politicians campaigning to leave the European Union depicted an island under siege, mixing the very different issue of immigration from other European Union states with the perceived threat from an influx of poor Muslims. This anti-immigrant strain twinned with the economic anxieties of many Britons who felt left out of the global economy to drive support for the country going its own way.
In the wake of Britain’s choice, Europe faces the parallel challenges of holding itself together and of retaining its global influence.
The European Union often frustrates American presidents, yet the disintegration of the bloc would be a geopolitical disaster for Washington. Even before Britain’s exit, Germany was Europe’s dominant power, and Chancellor Angela Merkel was Europe’s dominant leader.
“Britain leaving the E.U. now poses a challenge for Germany,” said Nicholas Burns, a former top American diplomat who now teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It will need to provide even greater leadership to keep Europe united and moving forward.”
Germany, though, has been reluctant to play a diplomatic and military role commensurate with its economic heft. Ever mindful of its Nazi past, and its four decades as a divided country, Germany often wraps its policies in the mantle of Europe and has developed a pacifist instinct that is a poor fit with the expectations that it must now lead.
“There is no point beating about the bush,” Ms. Merkel said Friday. Europe has reached “a turning point,” and “more and more often, we encounter basic doubts” about ever-greater union.
The markers of European decline are not hard to find. For the first time in modern history, Asia has more private wealth than Europe, the Boston Consulting Group said last year. And China will account for 70 percent of Asia’s growth between now and 2019, the group said.
China’s development of its own international bank partly derives from its frustrations over its role in the I.M.F. Policy makers in Beijing were infuriated that they were not granted a bigger share of power at the I.M.F. as a show of gratitude for helping stabilize world economies in 2008.
Many Asian leaders have tended to view the European experiment at unity as a proposition that could not last. Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, once called the European Union a motley crowd trying to march to a single drummer. He predicted it would fail.
4 Soft Skills You Need To Work On, And Why
David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom, Forbes, June 23, 2016
Would you rather have a co-worker or manager who’s a leader in your field, a true expert with great amounts of knowledge and experience–but isn’t much of a people person, and doesn’t get along with the team very well? Or would you rather work side by side with an inexperienced colleague or leader who’s collaborative, curious, friendly, and pleasant? For most people, the answer is a no-brainer: “Give me someone I can work with! The knowledge and skills will come.”
The good news is, if you think you fall into the first category (lots of smarts and experience, but a lack of people skills), you can turn that around. We’ve found four soft skills you need to make people feel at ease and help them trust you at work–and, by the way, you’ll be making more friends, boosting your productivity, and innovating in no time.
Listening. “Listen first, talk later.” “One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.” “You learn when you listen.” If you’ve heard these–or any other of the myriad of quotes–about listening, you may grasp the importance of this skill. But, if you’re the type of person who finds themselves anxiously planning what you’ll say while others speak, you definitely should understand how important it is to just stop and listen. When a co-worker is communicating with you, give them your full attention. Put your phone down. Make eye contact. Respond only after you’ve heard everything they want to say. When you start making listening a priority, you may just see a lot of previous problems disappear–because listening carefully develops your empathy and understanding in any situation.
Nonverbal Communication. As a leader, your communication style sets the tone for the team. It’s important to be clear, concise, and respectful when you speak or write emails, but your nonverbal cues are another crucial part of good communication. Facial expressions, posture, gestures, and eye contact all count–and they say a lot. Make sure to be positive, polite, and respectful in your face-to-face interactions at work. Because when your body language conflicts with your words, people will believe your nonverbal cues, says Darlene Price, author of Well Said! Presentations and Conversations That Get Results. So keep the eye rolling and crossed arms to a minimum, lest you come across as disinterested and rude.
Dealing With Change. You know the only constant is change–so why is it so hard to manage when something suddenly shifts at work? Whether it’s a team member leaving or arriving, a change in direction, or even a new office space, change can be tricky to navigate. Our top tips? Keep your head. Ask questions so you understand the situation. Enlist help from friends and colleagues when you feel overwhelmed. And be patient, because adjusting to a new situation will probably take a little time.
Saying Thank You. Saying thank you really matters. When you reach out to a team member, a colleague, or even your boss (they deserve a thank you, too!) to appreciate their effort or big win, you’re projecting more than just professionalism. You’re also communicating kindness and team spirit–and boosting co-workers’ motivation to innovate and make a difference. The team grows stronger, people are happier and more satisfied with their jobs, and the whole company benefits. It’s a win-win-win. So if you don’t say thank you nearly enough–and most people don’t, research shows–use these best practices to work more appreciation into your work life.
Hard skills might be what get you the job–but soft skills are what drive friendship, success and happiness at work. So brush up on these simple but crucial people skills to boost your professional success. And don’t be surprised if they help your life outside work either!
Monday, June 27, 2016
Scientists Are Abuzz About Insect Intelligence
You kind of know, going into it, that scientists who have spent their lives studying animal behavior are not going to love being asked, “What is the smartest bug?”
“It’s a tricky question and I don’t think anyone will give you a straight answer to it, unfortunately,” laughs Marc Srour, a biologist who specializes in invertebrates. He’s being nice: it is, I fully acknowledge, a pretty stupid question. But scientists themselves have, without using that phrasing, been attempting to answer it, and have been making progress. Insect intelligence is an under-studied field, but a particularly weird and dynamic one where huge discoveries are being made almost every year.
The biggest problem with asking about animal intelligence is defining what we even mean by “intelligence.” The animals generally thought of as smartest–among them the great apes, dolphins, and the octopus–are believed to be intelligent because they demonstrate some of the behaviors that we associate with our own superiority as humans. These qualities include problem solving, advanced communication, social skills, adaptability, and memory, and also physical traits like the comparative size of the brain or number of neurons in the brain.
Insects are a particularly difficult group of animals to study for these traits, because they’re just so different from us. Srour walked me through the basics of an insect’s brain, and they are so weird. Insects are extremely modular creatures, not like us at all: the easiest way to understand an insect’s nervous system is that an insect has many different sub-brains in different parts of its body, which feed into and can be controlled by a slightly larger central brain but can actually also operate separately. The antennae of an insect has its own brain. So does the mouth, the eyes, and each leg. Even if the central brain of an insect stops working, its legs still have their own sub-brains, and can keep walking.
Insects have, even considering their small size, a comparatively smaller central brain than we do, and with a much, much smaller neural count. Lars Chittka, perhaps the foremost researcher on the behavior of bees, told me that a bee has under a million neurons in its main brain. Humans? About a hundred billion.
Whether the amount of neurons or the physical size of the brain is related to intelligence is not really clear; researchers have no idea what humans are doing with all those neurons. But certainly there is a correlation between comparative brain size and the amount of those “intelligent” behaviors an animal can perform.
There’s another angle as well, one that’s a little more complicated than just “big brain equals big smarts.” “Generalist insects tend to be the most intelligent,” says Srour. What he means is that insects, and animals in general, demonstrate more intelligence when they are equipped to adapt to all kinds of food sources and habitats. An animal that only eats one kind of leaf in one kind of tree doesn’t have to know very much; it can ignore all other information besides that which is directly related to that one leaf. “You can say in general that fleas and ticks, they’re not very intelligent,” says Srour. “They only have one purpose in life, and that’s to find their host and feed on their blood. They don’t have to do anything sophisticated so they don’t need very high brain functions.”
But a generalist animal has to do all kinds of intense thought to survive. Everything it sees can be a potential home, threat, or food source, and the animal has to constantly evaluate new stimuli to see if it can make use of it. A bee can feed on dozens of kinds of flowers, and must figure out the best bang for its buck as well as figuring out how to take advantage of it. The same goes for ants, which can feed on a wide variety of plant and animal matter. Ants leave scent trails for other ants to follow, a clear demonstration of social intelligence. Beetles don’t do that kind of thing; a beetle is a lone creature that doesn’t need to work with others for survival.
This all ties in with the “social brain hypothesis,” a theory put forth by anthropologist Robin Dunbar in 1998. The social brain hypothesis is basically that living in a group forces an individual to become smarter, rather than a smart individual choosing to live in a group.
“Ants, bees, and termites all have very high intelligence,” says Srour. “They have to recognize nest mates, communicate with them often.” The challenges of living within a large community require intelligence.
Unlike most insects, the honey bee is a social animal, which forces it to have many intelligent abilities that non-social insects (like, say, flies, or beetles) don’t need. And its smarts are legion: the insects are able to recognize and distinguish between human faces, a surprising trait given that it isn’t really necessary for their survival. Another one: bees can count. In an experiment, honey bees were rewarded for stopping at the third in a series of landmarks, and proved able to remember this location and to thus count. (The distance was altered, while keeping the same number of landmarks, to discourage the bees from using their sense of distance.) Further study indicated their maximum counting abilities go to about four.
Bees are capable of observation, learning, and memory to solve problems. “Every bee is entirely flower-naive at the beginning of its foraging career,” says Chittka, meaning that the bee has no instinctive knowledge about how to score nectar or pollen from flowers. That’s trouble, because flowers are wildly divergent: different flowers will need entirely different strategies to exploit, and it’s up to each individual bee to figure out how to attack each different flower.
Bees can learn new strategies for getting food from other bees, something few other insects are capable of doing. Chittka told me about a technique called “nectar robbing,” in which bees figure out that it can be easier to bite a hole in a flower’s spur to suck out the nectar rather than figuring out how to get inside the flower. Other bees have proven able to observe this strategy, understand its purpose, master it themselves, and remember it for future flowers. That’s pretty smart!
But perhaps the best-known and most insane bit of intelligence from bees is what’s known as the “waggle dance.” This is a method of communication that the bee uses to tell other bees in the hive the location of a flower or source of food. Here’s how it works: a bee performs the dance on a vertical surface inside the hive. The dance is shaped like a coffee bean: roughly, an oval with a line down the middle. Dancing straight up means to fly in the direction of the sun, straight down means away from the sun, and left and right mean to fly to the left or the right of the sun.
The bee travels in a figure-eight pattern, tracing the line in the middle before performing the loops around the outside of the coffee bean shape. The amount of time it takes the bee to make its circuit around the outside of the coffee bean tells other bees how far away the food source is: a one-second loop means, roughly, that the food source is a kilometer away. The longer the loop, the farther away the food source is.
The bee will repeat this dance many times to indicate the quality of the food source: a really great one will find the bee doing this over and over again, yelling “IT’S A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE, IT’S A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE, IT’S A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE” for minutes on end.
“The honey bee dance is unique insomuch as they’re using symbols,” says Chittka. “No other animal besides humans has that.” Even other primates don’t use symbols: an ape like a chimpanzee may point at a desired object, or lead others to it, but it won’t use an abstract symbol or message to indicate what it wants to convey. The honey bee’s waggle dance is a wildly intelligent attribute; it enables a bee to very efficiently convey detailed information to a large group, and also can be done in the safety of the hive, where other animals can’t overhear.
These behaviors are far above and beyond what most people would assume an insect is capable of. Without exaggerating, the honey bee is capable of advanced symbolic communication, language, facial recognition, number use, observation and mimicry, understanding of rules, and high-level problem-solving. They are, in some senses, significantly smarter than many mammals. Amazing.
Quakers in Costa Rica
FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: For decades Costa Rica has invited tourists to enjoy its natural beauty and used their dollars to conserve it. One of the deepest roots of this ecotourism traces back to a group of American Quakers. They arrived in the 1950s and carved out the community they called Monteverde, or green mountain, a town and cloud forest reserve that form one of the best known tourist spots in this Central American nation. Today, the influence of Quakers can be seen in the produce and food that’s on the grocery store shelves, in the recreation and the Friends school and center, which is a social hub for the larger community of Costa Ricans and settlers. Over time, the number of original Quaker pioneers has dwindled to a relative handful. At Sunday services there is no priest or leader, no sermon, no music, as is typical for many Quaker congregations. It’s called a meeting and mostly conducted in silence.
LUCILLE “LUCKY” GUINDON: The basic tenet, I think, of Quaker faith is the strong belief that there is that of God in every person–that if you sit in silence and listen that you can be led by the spirit…
DE SAM LAZARO: Lucille or “Lucky” Guindon was among the earliest arrivals here, led on an extraordinary journey by another basic tenet of Quaker faith, which goes back to 17th-century England: that’s pacifism.
Back in 1948 the US reinstituted the draft, requiring all young men to sign up. Lucky Guindon’s husband, Wolf, resisted. When we visited, Wolf Guindon was in poor health and unable to speak. He died just four weeks later. Another resister from Alabama, Marvin Rockwell, now 93, said they were willing to face the consequences.
MARVIN ROCKWELL: We were arrested and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. We were actually in prison for a third of the sentence, out on parole the balance.
DE SAM LAZAARO: Far more influential than prison was a piece of advice given to them at sentencing by the judge in that Alabama court:
GUINDON: He said, “If you can’t obey the laws of this country, then you should look for another one.” So that planted a seed.
DE SAM LAZARO: Rockwell, Guindon, and two other resisters joined by other families from Fairhope, Alabama–44 people in all–decided to find a new country, unable to reconcile their beliefs with a system that they believed was preparing the nation for the next war. Costa Rica was a natural fit. It was encouraging immigration and, in 1949, abolished its army.
GUINDON: It was also a country with mostly middle class, not the extreme rich and the extreme poor, and they were also welcoming people to come in and help develop it. So my husband, then not my husband, my husband-to-be, wrote to me because we were not together and how would i like to live in Costa Rica? Of course!
DE SAM LAZARO: You grew up in Iowa?
GUINDON: I grew up in Iowa.
DE SAM LAZARO: The Costa Rica they chose to live in could not be more different than Iowa–or Alabama. With proceeds from the sale of land back home, they purchased some 3400 acres in a lush tropical mountainscape. The road here, treacherous even today. Well, they had to build it.
GUINDON: The roads when we first came here was just an ox cart trail. You had to have four-wheel drive, chains, maybe carry an extra axle with you and have a winch. Because you had many places where you’d get stuck, and even then sometimes people had to get pulled out by oxen.
DE SAM LAZARO: There was no clinic. The community counted on faith and, ironically, the military experience of Marvin Rockwell.
ROCKWELL: In the Second World War, I was drafted and wouldn’t carry a rifle, so they put me in the medical corps, which–the training I got was very valuable here because when we first got here, the closest doctor was in Ipuntarena, six hours away by jeep.
DE SAM LAZARO: In time a school and community center were built. Land was cleared and farms established. The Guindons went on to have nine children. Their dairy farm is now operated by son, Benito Guindon.
Together, international conservation groups and the Quaker community, led by Wolf Guindon, agreed to protect the forest from mining, logging, or even further human encroachment.
GUINDON: Wolf spent the first 20 years of his life cutting down trees and the rest of his life saving trees.
DE SAM LAZARO: The Quakers themselves contributed a third of the 3400 acres of land they’d purchased earlier toward the cloud forest reserve. Today some 250,000 ecotourists visit here each year. A smaller number of North Americans have come and stayed. Hawaii native Nicollette Smith settled here with her husband Randall.
NICOLETTE SMITH: It didn’t take long for us to discover it was the perfect place to have kids. I mean, they’re growing up in a lot of ways like I did in Hilo, a small town where everyone knows who you are.
DE SAM LAZARO: For the Smiths, the Friends school and center quickly became a social hub to meet others–a place for cultural events as well as religious observances. Many of those who attend Sunday services are not Quaker.
GUINDON: We’re not out to convert anybody. There are branches of Quakerism where that’s what they do, but not our branch, and so live peaceably to work with and to live cooperatively.
DE SAM LAZARO: While Quakers draw on biblical scriptures, their belief system is inherently ecumenical. Founded amid religious turmoil in 17th century England, Quakerism’s founders believed in direct communion with God, although some branches do have programmed services with Bible readings. After months of attending for mostly social reasons, the Smiths decided to do so for spiritual ones and become Quakers.
RANDALL SMITH: I was looking for a place where I could practice empathy, I’m looking for a place to practice tolerance. I’m looking for a place to practice compassion, love, truth. What I found in the Friends community is a place to do that that is safe, that is a very large tent. Now, the great part of that is I ended up joining the most unorganized organized religion I could find.
DE SAM LAZARO: One whose adherents–numbering just a few dozen–have left a large civic footprint in Costa Rica, long known as one of the most peaceful nations in this hemisphere.
In Armenia Visit, Pope Aims For Reconciliation In A Tense Region
Pope Francis begins a visit to Armenia on Friday, one of the “peripheries” of the world that are dear to him. He arrived in the capital, Yerevan, on Friday afternoon, and will spend three days in the small country whose geography made it a land of conquest by powerful empires and whose people have greatly suffered for their Christian religion.
The visit will highlight the strong ecumenical ties between the majority Orthodox and smaller Catholic Christian communities, as well as promote reconciliation in a tense region that straddles Europe, the Middle East and Russia.
In his native Argentina, Francis developed close ties with the Armenian community, whose members had fled persecution and massacres.
Last year, Francis marked the centenary of the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians in a solemn ceremony, in which the mournful sounds of the Armenian liturgy echoed through St. Peter’s Basilica. Concealing or denying evil, said the pope, is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.
“The first genocide of the 20th century,” he said in his homily, “was against you, the Armenian people.”
Those words infuriated Turkey, which accused the pope of spreading hatred, and Ankara recalled its ambassador to the Holy See for a full 10 months.
Historians widely agree that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed, but Turkey vehemently rejects the accusation of genocide, claiming the number of dead was smaller and that they were victims of civil strife.
The landlocked country in the Caucasus adopted Christianity in the year 301, 12 years before the emperor Constantine legalized it in the Roman Empire.
The Apostolic Armenian Church is part of the oriental Orthodox churches and is seen the custodian of Armenian national identity.
For most of the last century, Armenia was under Soviet rule, suffering religious repression. Today, with the exception of Georgia, Armenia is surrounded by Muslim countries. It shares borders with Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan, with which it has a long-simmering conflict over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh.
Armenia has a population of 3 million, and a diaspora of some 7 million across the world.
During his visit, Francis will also meet Syrian refugees and is expected to speak out again on the modern-day slaughter of Christians and other minorities by Islamist extremists. The pope will also visit a monastery in the foothills of Mount Ararat, which, according to the Bible, is where Noah’s Ark came to rest.
There, near the Turkish border, he will release a flock of doves as a sign of peace and reconciliation in the region.
Massimo Faggioli, a professor of Catholic Church history, says that in visiting Armenia, Pope Francis is also sending a specific message to a geopolitically strategic region–that “religion should not be part of a global, colonial enterprise.”
Faggioli says the pope is very critical of the way both Russia and Turkey mix nationalism with their respective religions, the Orthodox Church and Islam.
“Armenia is in the middle, geographically and historically, between Turkey and Russia,” he says. “So going there, Pope Francis is more or less poking a finger into the eye of the most important nationalist actors in the area.”
The pope is likely to spark further tensions with Turkey when he visits the genocide memorial in Yerevan on Saturday. But in a possible sign of diplomatic compromise in a briefing ahead of the papal trip, the Vatican spokesman declined to use the word “genocide”–preferring the Armenian term Medz Yeghern, which means “the great crime” or “the great evil.”
God's Word part 2
Okay. Good morning. We are going to continue the reflection we started yesterday, the Meditation Moment. We were talking about the Word, the importance of the Word in our lives, how Jesus was the Word made flesh and that to know the mind of God, like Paul admonished us to, we need to know God's Word. And I'm going to go over a few more verses here. this next one is from 2 Peter 1:4. It says,
Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.
So God's Word is not just pretty pictures. It's not just pretty sayings. There are actually promises there that can help us to take on the Divine Nature, to become more than the fleshly human being that we are, and become more like Christ, more like God. And so, there are lots of promises there and we can appropriate those promises. And we can become something that we are not. We can become more like Christ. And He can be manifested in us as we appropriate those promises, and as we accept His Word and live it and let it change us and make our minds and hearts like His.
The next verse is from Joshua 1:8. It's one of my favorites. It says,
This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shall meditate therein day and night, that thou may observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shall make thy way prosperous, and then thou shall have good success.
This is just like in Psalm 1,
His delight is in the law of the Lord and in His law does he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water.
It's the same principle here, that this meditating on God's Word is going to make our lives prosperous, fruitful. (Bom dia) And so, God's Word has a beautiful effect on us, if we'll spend time meditating upon it.
We are told that the first commandment is to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. So the mind comes into that, into loving God with our mind. Paul also tells us to,
Casting down imaginations, and high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. [1]
How can we bring our thoughts to the obedience of Christ if we don't even know what Christ's mind is like, if we don't even know His words. You see, His words give us discernment and this is what the next verse we're going to go over talks about. It says, Hebrews 4:12,
For the Word of God is quick (alive), and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
God's Word gives us discernment. You see, Jesus said,
If you continue in My Word, then are you My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. [2]
You see, God's Word is truth. In John 17:17 Jesus said,
Thy Word is truth.
God's Word is truth. So, He also said,
I am the way, the truth, and the life. [3]
So, we have the truth as Christians. We have the Word of God and the Word of God is the truth. We have an objective truth. We have a way to measure right and wrong, whether it is according to God's Word, and not the letter of the Word, but the Spirit of the Word, line upon line, here a little, and there a little. [4] We need to know, that's why Paul said to,
Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth. [5]
Not wrongly dividing it. Not self-righteously dividing it. But rightly dividing it. And that's what Christ went around and did. He rightly divided the Word of truth. He showed love was more important than the letter. More important than the law was love. So that's how we divide it, God's Word, the truth, is with the Spirit of love. But the truth is there.
Notes:
[1] 2Corinthians 10:5
[2] John 8:31-32
[3] John 14:6
[4] Isaiah 28:10
[5] 2Timothy 2:15
Why Constant Learners Embrace the 5-Hour Rule
At the age of 10, Benjamin Franklin left formal schooling to become an apprentice to his father. As a teenager, he showed no particular talent or aptitude aside from his love of books.
When he died a little over half a century later, he was America’s most respected statesman, its most famous inventor, a prolific author, and a successful entrepreneur.
What happened between these two points to cause such a meteoric rise?
Underlying the answer to this question is a success strategy for life that we can all use, and increasingly must use.
Throughout Ben Franklin’s adult life, he consistently invested roughly an hour a day in deliberate learning. I call this Franklin’s five-hour rule: one hour a day on every weekday.
Franklin’s learning time consisted of:
Waking up early to read and write
Setting personal-growth goals (i.e., virtues list) and tracking the results
Creating a club for “like-minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community”
Turning his ideas into experiments
Having morning and evening reflection questions
Every time that Franklin took time out of his busy day to follow his five-hour rule and spend at least an hour learning, he accomplished less on that day. However, in the long run, it was arguably the best investment of his time he could have made.
Franklin’s five-hour rule reflects the very simple idea that, over time, the smartest and most successful people are the ones who are constant and deliberate learners.
Warren Buffett spends five to six hours per day reading five newspapers and 500 pages of corporate reports. Bill Gates reads 50 books per year. Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to his brother. Oprah Winfrey credits books with much of her success: “Books were my pass to personal freedom.” Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day. Dan Gilbert, self-made billionaire and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, reads one to two hours a day.
So what would it look like to make the five-hour rule part of our lifestyle?
To find out, we need look no further than chess grandmaster and world-champion martial artist Josh Waitzkin. Instead of squeezing his days for the maximum productivity, he’s actually done the opposite. Waitzkin, who also authored The Art of Learning, purposely creates slack in his day so he has “empty space” for learning, creativity, and doing things at a higher quality. Here’s his explanation of this approach from a recent Tim Ferriss podcast episode:
“I have built a life around having empty space for the development of my ideas for the creative process. And for the cultivation of a physiological state which is receptive enough to tune in very, very deeply to people I work with … In the creative process, it’s so easy to drive for efficiency and take for granted the really subtle internal work that it takes to play on that razor’s edge.”
Adding slack to our day allows us to:
1. Plan out the learning. This allows us to think carefully about what we want to learn. We shouldn’t just have goals for what we want to accomplish. We should also have goals for what we want to learn.
2. Deliberately practice. Rather than doing things automatically and not improving, we can apply the proven principles of deliberate practice so we keep improving. This means doing things like taking time to get honest feedback on our work and practicing specific skills we want to improve.
3. Ruminate. This helps us get more perspective on our lessons learned and assimilate new ideas. It can also help us develop slow hunches in order to have creative breakthroughs. Walking is a great way to process these insights, as shown by many greats who were or are walking fanatics, from Beethoven and Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey. Another powerful way is through conversation partners.
4. Set aside time just for learning. This includes activities like reading, having conversations, participating in a mastermind, taking classes, observing others, etc.
5. Solve problems as they arise. When most people experience problems during the day, they sweep them under the rug so that they can continue their to-do list. Having slack creates the space to address small problems before they turn into big problems.
6. Do small experiments with big potential payoffs. Whether or not an experiment works, it’s an opportunity to learn and test your ideas.
For many people, their professional day is measured by how much they get done. As a result, they speed through the day and slow down their improvement rate.
The five-hour rule flips the equation by focusing on learning first.
By focusing on learning as a lifestyle, we get so much more done over the long term.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Bernie Sanders: Here’s what we want
As we head toward the Democratic National Convention, I often hear the question, “What does Bernie want?” Wrong question. The right question is what the 12 million Americans who voted for a political revolution want.
And the answer is: They want real change in this country, they want it now and they are prepared to take on the political cowardice and powerful special interests which have prevented that change from happening. (Bernie, the trouble is that Barack Obama told us he would bring us change. We agree with much of what you say, but bigger government with more controls is not going to solve the problems. When the Government gets control of things, they often end up worse.)
They understand that the United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and that new technology and innovation make us wealthier every day. What they don’t understand is why the middle class continues to decline, 47 million of us live in poverty and many Americans are forced to work two or three jobs just to cobble together the income they need to survive. (That's to make sure they don't have time to think and or reproduce. They have their head to the grindstone so they are compelled to follow along instead of rising up and throwing off their corrupt leaders in a peaceful revolution.)
What do we want? We want an economy that is not based on uncontrollable greed, monopolistic practices and illegal behavior. We want an economy that protects the human needs and dignity of all people–children, the elderly, the sick, working people and the poor. We want an economic and political system that works for all of us, not one in which almost all new wealth and power rests with a handful of billionaire families.(But Bernie, we've taken God out of the school system and have taught our children that evolution is true, and we are just evolved monkeys. Then we wonder why people behave so corruptly. The unethical political and economic practices are just an extension of what we believe, that's it's just the survival of the fittest, so anything goes if it makes you richer, or more powerful. We need a back to God education system, based of the truth of Christ's law of love.)
The current campaign finance system is corrupt. Billionaires and powerful corporations are now, through super PACs, able to spend as much money as they want to buy elections and elect candidates who represent their interests, not the American people. Meanwhile, we have one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any major country on earth, and Republican governors are working overtime to suppress the vote and make it harder for poor people, people of color, seniors and young people to vote.(Bernie, who would want to vote when we always get the same old crap. Like they say in Spain, the flies change, the ruling party changes, but it's still the same old sh_t! The system has failed us, Bernie. We don't trust it anymore. Even if voting was universal like it is in many European countries, the turnout is still low, because history and experience has shown us that it doesn't make a difference. The money makers hold too much power in their hands and have control over every institution in our lives. We protested in Europe with millions of people on the streets against the Wars in Iraq and it made no difference. The revolution we need, Bernie is a complete one. It's a wiping away of the old decadent system and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth based on true love and brotherhood that comes from us being God's children. But we've killed God as Nietzsche said and are reaping the result of our stupidity.)
What do we want? We want to overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections. We want universal voter registration, so that anyone 18 years of age or older who is eligible to vote is automatically registered. We want a vibrant democracy and a well-informed electorate that knows that its views can shape the future of the country. (Yes, Bernie, we want to throw our Rode vs Wade, the pro-choice law, and establish orphanages and homes for single moms to have their children. We want to let State schools teach the truth about molecule to man evolution, that it's a religious world-view and not supported by experimental science. We want decentralization and giving more power to the State governments to run their States. we want to re-establish that marriage is a male and female institution and all the ramifications of our traditional Judaeo-Christian heritage.)
Our criminal justice system is broken. We have 2.2 million people rotting behind bars at an annual expense of $80 billion. Youth unemployment in a number of inner-cities and rural communities is 30 to 50 percent, and millions of young people have limited opportunities to participate in the productive economy. Failing schools all around the country produce more people who end up in jail than graduate college. Millions of Americans have police records as a result of marijuana possession, which should be decriminalized. And too many people are serving unnecessarily long mandatory minimum sentences. (Bernie, we've got to get back to the basics. We've got to put Christ back into our schools and education system. We've got to get back to our belief in the Bible as the Word of God and our importance of obeying it. We need to teach our children to love God above all else, and to love their neighbor as themselves, and their neighbor is anyone who needs their help, whether near or far. We need to raise up loving Missionaries to go out into all the world with the message of the love of God as the only real solution to the world's problems that we face today.)
What do we want? We want a criminal justice system that addresses the causes of incarceration, not one that simply imprisons more people. We want to demilitarize local police departments, see local police departments reflect the diversity of the communities they serve and end private ownership of prisons and detention centers. We want to create the conditions that allow people who are released from prison to stay out. We want the best educated population on earth, not the most incarcerated population.
The debate is over. Climate change is real. It is caused by human activity, and it already is causing devastating damage in our country and to the entire planet. If present trends continue, scientists tell us the planet will be 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by the end of the century–which means more droughts, floods, extreme weather disturbances, rising sea levels and acidification of the oceans. This is a planetary crisis of extraordinary magnitude.(Sorry, Bernie, the debate is not over. Who is pushing this climate change agenda anyway? It's big government again Bernie. More controls from Big Brother. Some scientist challenge the politically correct global warming stance. Sunspot explosions may have a greater influence on our climatic cycles than any made man carbon pollution. That's not to say we shouldn't take care of our environment. We should, but let's not use scare tactics to push more international government on our backs. If we'd follow Christ's command to love one another, we could find solutions to all these problems. But you see, Bernie, their are evil men out there who won't give up their power very easily. John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others have found out the hard way. Those people are still in control of the world, Bernie. How much do they control you. What part of their agenda are you willing to help fulfill?)
What do we want? We want the United States to lead the world in pushing our energy system away from fossil fuel and toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We want a tax on carbon, the end of fracking and massive investment in wind, solar, geothermal and other sustainable technologies. We want to leave this planet in a way that is healthy and habitable for future generations.(That's right, Bernie, we want to give free solar or wind-powered energy to the whole world. To set the captives free from government oppression, so that mankind can serve God and love one another. Government should be their to help the people, not just take from one set of crooks that are in power, to put another set of crooks in their place. Like I said before, some wipe with the left hand, and some with the right hand, but it's still the same crap, Bernie. We are tired of it. We need the help of God, because man has proven he is incapable of governing himself and others without the miraculous help of God. The Bible tells us mankind is so desperate that they will soon accept the Devil-man, or Antichrist in their frustration with today's political and financial system. This will result in the worst period of mankind's short history which Jesus named the Great Tribulation. A grave period of persecution of those who refuse to come under the New World Order, wars and eventually the final big one in the Middle East, Armageddon. Will the government you head lead into the New World Order under Satan and his Antichrist? We know Hillary will for sure, but what about you?)
What do we want? We want to end the rapid movement that we are currently experiencing toward oligarchic control of our economic and political life. As Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, we want a government of the people, by the people and for the people. That is what we want, and that is what we will continue fighting for. (But a government that excludes Christ and His commandments is headed for destruction. Will you bring us back to God, Bernie? Will you bring back Christ into Christmas, education, politics and economics. if not we're leaning on a broken stick and you'll fail us, just as all the others have. Will you stand-up for Jesus, Bernie? He needs you to make a stand for truth, for love and for Godly justice. Will you take that stand, Bernie? The time is short, Bernie. Stand-up for Jesus today!)
Six Habits Of People Who Make Friends Easily
Friendships are more beneficial than just sharing laughs over a cup of coffee. A lack of strong relationships increases your risk of premature death from all causes by 50%, according to research from Harvard University. That’s the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If your social life is looking light, it might be time to make some new friends, but it doesn’t have to be an intimidating and awkward process.
“Get it out of your head that it’s harder to make friends when you’re older,” says sociologist Jan Yager, author of Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives. “It can actually be easier because you know who you are, and what kind of friend you would like.”
The secret to making new friends is as simple as being open to it. Here are six things you can do to fill your calendar and forge new friendships:
Be approachable. The first impression sets the stage on whether a person will be communicating with you or not, says psychotherapist Richard E. Toney. “The key is your facial expression,” he says. “Think about people who you’ve seen in grocery stores, airports, and even in long lines that are near you. If you see them grimacing and frowning, you more than likely will not communicate with that person because they do not appear approachable or even nice.”
An inviting smile or a courteous head nod could go a long way in allowing people to know that you are available and open to communicating, he says. And being a good listener is a big part of being approachable, adds Yager. “Too many focus on sharing with others, forgetting that they need to be there for their new relationships that might become friends,” she says.
Get involved in activities you enjoy. One of the best ways to make new friends is to meet people with whom you share a common interest, says John Boese, founder of GoFindFriends.com, a website that helps New Yorkers find new friends. Turn your hobby into a social activity by joining a meetup.com group or social sport league, he suggests.
Going to places that you enjoy allows you to be around like-minded individuals, adds Toney. “It is easy to start up a conversation about things that you like,” he says. “Once you find someone who has similar interests to yours, you can exchange phone numbers or email addresses and keep in touch.”
Have a positive attitude. “Feeling positive is one of the absolute requirements of friendship, and how we choose who we want to spend time with,” says Shasta Nelson, CEO of GirlFriendCircles.com, an online community that helps connect women, and author of Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness.
Figure out ways to help other people feel better for having spent time with you. Saying “thank you,” being encouraging, asking questions, validating feelings, and smiling are all ways of affirming new friends, she says.
“Researchers have found that if you say good things about other people, people tend to remember you as having those positive qualities.”
People don’t like to be around others who are negative all the time, adds Keith Rollag, author of What to Do When You’re New. “Researchers have found that if you say good things about other people, people tend to remember you as having those positive qualities,” he says. “For example, if you tell a new coworker that your previous boss is a friendly, helpful person, they will likely walk away remembering you as somewhat friendly and helpful, too. But if you complain that your previous boss was an egotistical jerk, they may see a few of those qualities in you, too.”
Don’t wait for others to make the first move. While you can feel vulnerable approaching someone for the first time, the other person may have even more reluctance, says Rollag. “Just go for it,” he says. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Relationships are built on give and take, and Rollag suggests starting by helping other people meet their needs. “Many of the things we want in friendships–trust, reliability, integrity–have their basis in reciprocity,” he says. “Figure out what other people want and help them get it, and you’ve predisposed them to see you as a potential friend.”
Be proactive and ask people to get together, or let people know that you’re looking for activities to join, adds Boese. “You’ll be surprised how many people are open to having you join one of their weekend activities,” he says.
Follow up. Relationships are built largely on logging time together, so be thoughtful about how to stay in touch, says Nelson. “Before leaving one get-together, say, ‘This was such fun and I’d like to get to know you better, could we schedule it now and avoid the email back-and-forth?’” she suggests. You can also send an email the next day, thanking them for their time, or set a reminder in your calendar for a date they mentioned of something coming up, such as a surgery or birthday, and email them to let them know you’re thinking of them.
One of the keys to turning an acquaintance into a friend is consistency, adds Boese. “Don’t let more than two weeks go by without seeing them,” he says. “If you spend time with someone and then don’t talk to them for a month, it’s going to be tough to keep them in the friend zone.”
Say “yes” to invitations (even when you want to say “no”). People who make friends easily view events as opportunities to meet people, says Nelson.
“Remind yourself to choose based on what you value or hope for, not based on how you feel in the moment,” she says. “Like exercise, if left to only when we felt like it, we’d often opt for a quiet night in instead of the chance to connect.”
Meditation on the Importance of God's Word
Good morning. Today's meditation moment is going to be on the Word of God. These are 14 different verses of the importance of God's Word. The first one is John 1:1 & 14.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.
God became flesh in Jesus Christ and He dwelt among us. Jesus is the Word of God. You want to know Jesus? Then you need to study His words. See what He said. Read His words. We know one another through our words. Our words, Jesus said,
the words I speak unto you they are Spirit and they are life.[John 6:63]
You see our words reveal our real inner self and we know each other through our words. There used to be a saying
A man a is as good as his word.
Words are real things. They lift up or they knock down. They bless or they curse. Jesus said we'll give account for every idle word. So words identify us And God's Word identify's Him. And God's Word was manifested in Jesus. He's the Word of God. And Jesus said in Matthew 4:4,
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
You see a man isn't just a flesh being. You know it's not just eat, drink and be merry without spiritual fulfillment. Mankind is searching for spiritual input to satisfy his weary soul and it's found in God's Word. But what's happening is so many times the Pharisaical religious people have made the Word of God of none effect through their traditions.[1]
In Psalm 119:11 it says,
Thy Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee.
The Word is the standard by which we judge what is true and what is false. Psalm 119:130 says,
The entrance of Thy Words gives light: it gives understanding unto the simple.
God's Word gives us light. It helps us to understand things. It helps us to get the big picture. Paul said to Timothy,
Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth.[2]
You've got to study to know God's will. You've got to study to know God's mind. Paul told us to put on the mind of Christ. [3] But how can we put on the mind of Christ unless we study, unless we read His words. Matthew 24:35, Jesus said,
Heaven and Earth shall pass away, but My Words shall not pass away.
God's Word is not going to pass away. Everything else you're living for is going to pass away. But it's the Word of God that is going to endure forever. Please pick up your Bible and read God's Word. It will give you strength, life, encouragement. It will give you comfort in time of need. It will give you spiritual strength. It will give you verses and stories to share with others, so you can comfort and strengthen others.
Peter says, 1Peter 2:2,
As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby.
As a little child is on his mother's breast, so should we be with God's Word. God's Word should be the most important thing in our life, more than our necessary food. As Job said,
Neither have I gone back from the commandment of His lips, I have esteemed the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.[4]
And people go travelling all over the world, to India, all parts of the world, to try to find spiritual enlightenment. And it's right there in that little book they have in their parent's home. It's right there in that thing called the Holy Bible. If they would just pick it up and read it and get desperate and call out to God and say, "God peak to me, speak to me."
Psalm 119:105 says,
Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
God's Word is a lamp that will help us know where to walk. It will speak to us in those moments when we don't know what to do. And we read God's Word and all of a sudden something that's written there, even though it's talking about something entirely different, it just pops out and speaks to us. And it's just the key to showing us exactly what direction we should take. Are we to do this, or should we do that? Should we say "Yes," or should we say, "No." Should we have the operation or not? God's Word is that light, it's a lamp unto our feet.
And John 15:3, Jesus said,
Now are you clean through the Word which I have spoken unto you.
God's Word cleanses us. It's like taking a shower. You spend time in God's Word and you just feel refreshed. You've had a big struggle, or made a 10 km run and you've gone into the shower and you're showering yourself and all the filth is running off. That's what it's like when you spend time in God's Word.
Notes:
[1] Mark 7:13
[2] 2Timothy 2:15
[3] 1Corinthians 2:16
[3] 1Corinthians 2:16
[4] Job 23:12
