Depois do Armagedom
Thursday, May 2, 2013
George Washington's Productivity Tricks
By Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker, April 29, 2013
In order to become a famous inventor, president, scientist, or just about anything else with a semblance of importance, you have to know how to get things done. With that in mind, we know that we can learn a lot about productivity and leadership from these types, so we figured we’d look into exactly how they do it, starting with President George Washington.
George Washington was the quintessential jack of all trades. He not only led the United States in the Revolutionary War, he was also our first president. It takes some serious management and leadership skills to get that much done, so here are three of our favorite tips we’ve gleaned from him.
Maximize Your Strengths and Listen to Everyone. It’s no secret that America was the weaker side in the Revolutionary War. Washington’s troops were outnumbered by the British in both manpower and firepower, but somehow the then commander-in-chief George Washington found a way to win the war.
Author David Hackett Fisher looked at the turning points of the Revolutionary War in his book Washington’s Crossing. The key takeaway, and the thing we all learned in elementary school, is that George Washington decided to use guerilla tactics instead of facing the British head-on as was the custom at the time. This wasn’t just a decision that came overnight of course. Washington and his generals had to look at the strengths of the American army and figure out how to maximize them, even if that meant breaking long-standing rules of war.
While most of us know that the Revolutionary War was won with tactics, it was also because Washington was willing to listen to anyone regardless of rank. Fisher explains how Washington differed from the British in the way he made decisions before the Battle of Trenton:
That night British and American councils of war made different decisions—and also made them differently. Again [officer] Cornwallis imposed his plan from the top down, against the judgement of able inferiors, and prepared to attack in the morning. Washington in his council of war welcomed the judgements of others and presided over an open process of discovery and decision that yielded yet another opportunity. in the night, Washington disengaged his forces from an enemy only a few yards away, and an exhausted American army found the will and strength to make another night march toward the British base at Princeton.
We’re all aware that ideas can come from anywhere, and sometimes beginners can come up with better ideas than experienced people. Washington knew that too, and when taking on an enemy that was far bigger than him, he looked to anyone—regardless of age or rank—for ideas.
Create a Set of Rules for Yourself. It might seem silly to think you need to write out a list of rules to live by, but that’s exactly what George Washington did when he copied down and adapted The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. While most of these rules are about etiquette and are a bit outdated now, NPR points out that the exercise is still interesting. Much like Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues, Washington’s purpose was to outline how he wanted to live his life. Unlike Franklin, some of Washington’s rules are pretty goofy, like “Put not off your clothes in the presence of others, nor go out of your chamber half dressed,” but that doesn’t me he doesn’t include a few gems:
14. Turn not your back to others, especially in speaking; jog not the table or desk on which another reads or writes; lean not upon anyone.
18. Read no letter, books, or papers in company, but when there is a necessity for the doing of it, you must ask leave; come not near the books or writings of another so as to read them unless desired, or give your opinion of them unasked. Also look not nigh when another is writing a letter.
35. Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.
73. Think before you speak, pronounce not imperfectly, nor bring out your words too hastily, but orderly and distinctly.
Washington’s idea here is essentially a to-do list for life. You certainly don’t need to make a list of 110 things, but if you want to solidify something in your head—whether it’s a healthy habit or a behavior change—listing them out as a sort of “personal guide to living” is certainly one way to go about it.
Be Punctual and Stick to a Schedule. We’ve talked a bit about the importance of being punctual and how sometimes a rigid schedule can help you be more productive and defeat distractions. George Washington took this advice to the extreme. The Art of Manliness shares a few examples of just how important promptness and punctuality were to the president:
When he told Congress that he’d meet with them at noon, he could almost always be found striding into the chamber just as the clock was striking twelve.
Washington’s promptness extended to his mealtimes as well. He ate dinner each day at exactly 4 o’clock, and when he invited members of Congress to dine with him, and they arrived late, they were often surprised to find the president halfway done with his meal or even pushing back from the table. To his startled, tardy guest he would say, “We are punctual here. My cook never asks whether the company has arrived, but whether the hour has come.”
And when Washington’s secretary arrived late to a meeting, and blamed his watch for his tardiness, Washington quietly replied, “Then you must get another watch, or I another secretary.”
Whether it’s a deadline or a meeting, being on time is important for jobs and personal relationships.
Washington wasn’t perfect, and had his fair share of vices and failures. That said, Washington certainly did things differently than most, and he had to work in an environment that didn’t have a lot resources to accomplish a lot.
In order to become a famous inventor, president, scientist, or just about anything else with a semblance of importance, you have to know how to get things done. With that in mind, we know that we can learn a lot about productivity and leadership from these types, so we figured we’d look into exactly how they do it, starting with President George Washington.
George Washington was the quintessential jack of all trades. He not only led the United States in the Revolutionary War, he was also our first president. It takes some serious management and leadership skills to get that much done, so here are three of our favorite tips we’ve gleaned from him.
Maximize Your Strengths and Listen to Everyone. It’s no secret that America was the weaker side in the Revolutionary War. Washington’s troops were outnumbered by the British in both manpower and firepower, but somehow the then commander-in-chief George Washington found a way to win the war.
Author David Hackett Fisher looked at the turning points of the Revolutionary War in his book Washington’s Crossing. The key takeaway, and the thing we all learned in elementary school, is that George Washington decided to use guerilla tactics instead of facing the British head-on as was the custom at the time. This wasn’t just a decision that came overnight of course. Washington and his generals had to look at the strengths of the American army and figure out how to maximize them, even if that meant breaking long-standing rules of war.
While most of us know that the Revolutionary War was won with tactics, it was also because Washington was willing to listen to anyone regardless of rank. Fisher explains how Washington differed from the British in the way he made decisions before the Battle of Trenton:
That night British and American councils of war made different decisions—and also made them differently. Again [officer] Cornwallis imposed his plan from the top down, against the judgement of able inferiors, and prepared to attack in the morning. Washington in his council of war welcomed the judgements of others and presided over an open process of discovery and decision that yielded yet another opportunity. in the night, Washington disengaged his forces from an enemy only a few yards away, and an exhausted American army found the will and strength to make another night march toward the British base at Princeton.
We’re all aware that ideas can come from anywhere, and sometimes beginners can come up with better ideas than experienced people. Washington knew that too, and when taking on an enemy that was far bigger than him, he looked to anyone—regardless of age or rank—for ideas.
Create a Set of Rules for Yourself. It might seem silly to think you need to write out a list of rules to live by, but that’s exactly what George Washington did when he copied down and adapted The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. While most of these rules are about etiquette and are a bit outdated now, NPR points out that the exercise is still interesting. Much like Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues, Washington’s purpose was to outline how he wanted to live his life. Unlike Franklin, some of Washington’s rules are pretty goofy, like “Put not off your clothes in the presence of others, nor go out of your chamber half dressed,” but that doesn’t me he doesn’t include a few gems:
14. Turn not your back to others, especially in speaking; jog not the table or desk on which another reads or writes; lean not upon anyone.
18. Read no letter, books, or papers in company, but when there is a necessity for the doing of it, you must ask leave; come not near the books or writings of another so as to read them unless desired, or give your opinion of them unasked. Also look not nigh when another is writing a letter.
35. Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.
73. Think before you speak, pronounce not imperfectly, nor bring out your words too hastily, but orderly and distinctly.
Washington’s idea here is essentially a to-do list for life. You certainly don’t need to make a list of 110 things, but if you want to solidify something in your head—whether it’s a healthy habit or a behavior change—listing them out as a sort of “personal guide to living” is certainly one way to go about it.
Be Punctual and Stick to a Schedule. We’ve talked a bit about the importance of being punctual and how sometimes a rigid schedule can help you be more productive and defeat distractions. George Washington took this advice to the extreme. The Art of Manliness shares a few examples of just how important promptness and punctuality were to the president:
When he told Congress that he’d meet with them at noon, he could almost always be found striding into the chamber just as the clock was striking twelve.
Washington’s promptness extended to his mealtimes as well. He ate dinner each day at exactly 4 o’clock, and when he invited members of Congress to dine with him, and they arrived late, they were often surprised to find the president halfway done with his meal or even pushing back from the table. To his startled, tardy guest he would say, “We are punctual here. My cook never asks whether the company has arrived, but whether the hour has come.”
And when Washington’s secretary arrived late to a meeting, and blamed his watch for his tardiness, Washington quietly replied, “Then you must get another watch, or I another secretary.”
Whether it’s a deadline or a meeting, being on time is important for jobs and personal relationships.
Washington wasn’t perfect, and had his fair share of vices and failures. That said, Washington certainly did things differently than most, and he had to work in an environment that didn’t have a lot resources to accomplish a lot.
Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine
By Brandon Keim, Wired, April 24, 2013
Sam Parnia practices resuscitation medicine. In other words, he helps bring people back from the dead—and some return with stories. Their tales could help save lives, and even challenge traditional scientific ideas about the nature of consciousness.
“The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated,” said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school’s resuscitation research program. “It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside.”
Resuscitation medicine grew out of the mid-twentieth century discovery of CPR, the medical procedure by which hearts that have stopped beating are revived. Originally effective for a few minutes after cardiac arrest, advances in CPR have pushed that time to a half-hour or more.
New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what’s thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.
It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it’s neurologically inexplicable, at least with what’s now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project’s AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically.
Parnia discusses his work in the new book Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. Wired talked to Parnia about resuscitation and the nature of consciousness.
Wired: In the book you say that death is not a moment in time, but a process. What do you mean by that?
Sam Parnia: There’s a point used to define death: Your heart stops beating, your brain shuts down. The moment of cardiac arrest. Until fifty years ago, when CPR was developed, when you reached this point, you couldn’t come back. That led to the perception that death is completely irreversible.
But if I were to die this instant, the cells inside my body wouldn’t have died yet. It takes time for cells to die after they’re deprived of oxygen. It doesn’t happen instantly. We have a longer period of time than people perceive. We know now that when you become a corpse, when the doctor declares you dead, there’s still a possibility, from a biological and medical perspective, of death being reversed.
Of course, if someone dies and you leave them alone long enough, the cells become damaged. There’s going to be a time when you can’t bring them back. But nobody knows exactly when that moment is. It might not just be in tens of minutes, but in over an hour. Death is really a process.
Wired: How can people be brought back from death?
Parnia: Death is, essentially, the same as a stroke, and that’s especially true for the brain. A stroke is some process that stops blood flow from getting into the brain. Whether it’s because the heart stopped pumping, or there was a clot that stopped blood flow, the cells don’t care.
Brain cells can be viable for up to eight hours after blood flow stops. If doctors can learn to manipulate processes going on in cells, and slow down the rate at which cells die, we could go back and fix the problem that caused a person to die, then re-start the heart and bring them back. In a sense, death could become reversible for conditions for which treatments become available.
Wired: Are you talking about bringing people to life days or weeks or even years after they’ve died?
Parnia: No. This is not cryogenics. When you die, most of your cell death occurs through apoptosis, or programmed cell death. If your body is cold, the chemical reactions underlying apoptosis are slower. Making the body cold slows the rate at which cells decay. But we’re talking about chilling, not freezing. The process of freezing will damage cells.
Wired: You also study near-death experiences, but you have a different term for it: After-death experience.
Parnia: I decided that we should study what people have experienced when they’ve gone beyond cardiac arrest. I found that 10 percent of patients who survived cardiac arrests report these incredible accounts of seeing things.
When I looked at the cardiac arrest literature, it became clear that it’s after the heart stops and blood flow into the brain ceases. There’s no blood flow into the brain, no activity, about 10 seconds after the heart stops. When doctors start to do CPR, they still can’t get enough blood into the brain. It remains flatlined. That’s the physiology of people who’ve died or are receiving CPR.
Not just my study, but four others, all demonstrated the same thing: People have memories and recollections. Combined with anecdotal reports from all over the world, from people who see things accurately and remember them, it suggests this needs to be studied in more detail.
Wired: One of the first after-death accounts in your book involves Joe Tiralosi, who was resuscitated 40 minutes after his heart stopped. Can you tell me more about him?
Parnia: I wasn’t involved in his care when he arrived at the hospital, but I know his doctors well. We’d been working with the emergency room to make sure they knew the importance of starting to cool people down. When Tiralosi arrived, they cooled him, which helped preserve his brain cells. They found vessels blocked in his heart. That’s now treatable. By doing CPR and cooling him down, the doctors managed to fix him and ensure that he didn’t have brain damage.
When Tiralosi woke up, he told nurses that he had a profound experience and wanted to talk about it. That’s how we met. He told me that he felt incredibly peaceful, and saw this perfect being, full of love and compassion. This is not uncommon.
Parnia: At the very least, it tells us that there’s this unique experience that humans have when they go through death. It’s universal. It’s described by children as young as three. And it tells us that we should not be afraid of death.
Wired: How do we know after-death experiences happen when people think they do? Maybe people misremember thoughts from just before death, or just after regaining consciousness.
Parnia: That’s a very important question. Do these memories occur when a person is truly flatlined and had no brain activity, as science suggests? Or when they’re beginning to wake up, but are still unconscious?
The point that goes against the experiences happening afterwards, or before the brain shut down, is that many people describe very specific details of what happened to them during cardiac arrest. They describe conversations people had, clothes people wore, events that went on 10 or 20 minutes into resuscitation. That is not compatible with brain activity.
It may be that some people receive better-quality resuscitation, and that—though there’s no evidence to support it—they did have brain activity. Or it could indicate that human consciousness, the psyche, the soul, the self, continued to function.
Wired: Couldn’t the experiences just reflect some extremely subtle type of brain activity?
Parnia: When you die, there’s no blood flow going into your brain. If it goes below a certain level, you can’t have electrical activity. It takes a lot of imagination to think there’s somehow a hidden area of your brain that comes into action when everything else isn’t working.
These observations raise a question about our current concept of how brain and mind interact. The historical idea is that electrochemical processes in the brain lead to consciousness. That may no longer be correct, because we can demonstrate that those processes don’t go on after death.
Wired: This seems to verge on supernatural explanations of consciousness.
Parnia: Throughout history, we try to explain things the best we can with the tools of science. But most open-minded and objective scientists recognize that we have limitations. Just because something is inexplicable with our current science doesn’t make it superstitious or wrong. When people discovered electromagnetism, forces that couldn’t then be seen or measured, a lot of scientists made fun of it.
Sam Parnia practices resuscitation medicine. In other words, he helps bring people back from the dead—and some return with stories. Their tales could help save lives, and even challenge traditional scientific ideas about the nature of consciousness.
“The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated,” said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school’s resuscitation research program. “It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside.”
Resuscitation medicine grew out of the mid-twentieth century discovery of CPR, the medical procedure by which hearts that have stopped beating are revived. Originally effective for a few minutes after cardiac arrest, advances in CPR have pushed that time to a half-hour or more.
New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what’s thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.
It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it’s neurologically inexplicable, at least with what’s now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project’s AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically.
Parnia discusses his work in the new book Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. Wired talked to Parnia about resuscitation and the nature of consciousness.
Wired: In the book you say that death is not a moment in time, but a process. What do you mean by that?
Sam Parnia: There’s a point used to define death: Your heart stops beating, your brain shuts down. The moment of cardiac arrest. Until fifty years ago, when CPR was developed, when you reached this point, you couldn’t come back. That led to the perception that death is completely irreversible.
But if I were to die this instant, the cells inside my body wouldn’t have died yet. It takes time for cells to die after they’re deprived of oxygen. It doesn’t happen instantly. We have a longer period of time than people perceive. We know now that when you become a corpse, when the doctor declares you dead, there’s still a possibility, from a biological and medical perspective, of death being reversed.
Of course, if someone dies and you leave them alone long enough, the cells become damaged. There’s going to be a time when you can’t bring them back. But nobody knows exactly when that moment is. It might not just be in tens of minutes, but in over an hour. Death is really a process.
Wired: How can people be brought back from death?
Parnia: Death is, essentially, the same as a stroke, and that’s especially true for the brain. A stroke is some process that stops blood flow from getting into the brain. Whether it’s because the heart stopped pumping, or there was a clot that stopped blood flow, the cells don’t care.
Brain cells can be viable for up to eight hours after blood flow stops. If doctors can learn to manipulate processes going on in cells, and slow down the rate at which cells die, we could go back and fix the problem that caused a person to die, then re-start the heart and bring them back. In a sense, death could become reversible for conditions for which treatments become available.
Wired: Are you talking about bringing people to life days or weeks or even years after they’ve died?
Parnia: No. This is not cryogenics. When you die, most of your cell death occurs through apoptosis, or programmed cell death. If your body is cold, the chemical reactions underlying apoptosis are slower. Making the body cold slows the rate at which cells decay. But we’re talking about chilling, not freezing. The process of freezing will damage cells.
Wired: You also study near-death experiences, but you have a different term for it: After-death experience.
Parnia: I decided that we should study what people have experienced when they’ve gone beyond cardiac arrest. I found that 10 percent of patients who survived cardiac arrests report these incredible accounts of seeing things.
When I looked at the cardiac arrest literature, it became clear that it’s after the heart stops and blood flow into the brain ceases. There’s no blood flow into the brain, no activity, about 10 seconds after the heart stops. When doctors start to do CPR, they still can’t get enough blood into the brain. It remains flatlined. That’s the physiology of people who’ve died or are receiving CPR.
Not just my study, but four others, all demonstrated the same thing: People have memories and recollections. Combined with anecdotal reports from all over the world, from people who see things accurately and remember them, it suggests this needs to be studied in more detail.
Wired: One of the first after-death accounts in your book involves Joe Tiralosi, who was resuscitated 40 minutes after his heart stopped. Can you tell me more about him?
Parnia: I wasn’t involved in his care when he arrived at the hospital, but I know his doctors well. We’d been working with the emergency room to make sure they knew the importance of starting to cool people down. When Tiralosi arrived, they cooled him, which helped preserve his brain cells. They found vessels blocked in his heart. That’s now treatable. By doing CPR and cooling him down, the doctors managed to fix him and ensure that he didn’t have brain damage.
When Tiralosi woke up, he told nurses that he had a profound experience and wanted to talk about it. That’s how we met. He told me that he felt incredibly peaceful, and saw this perfect being, full of love and compassion. This is not uncommon.
Parnia: At the very least, it tells us that there’s this unique experience that humans have when they go through death. It’s universal. It’s described by children as young as three. And it tells us that we should not be afraid of death.
Wired: How do we know after-death experiences happen when people think they do? Maybe people misremember thoughts from just before death, or just after regaining consciousness.
Parnia: That’s a very important question. Do these memories occur when a person is truly flatlined and had no brain activity, as science suggests? Or when they’re beginning to wake up, but are still unconscious?
The point that goes against the experiences happening afterwards, or before the brain shut down, is that many people describe very specific details of what happened to them during cardiac arrest. They describe conversations people had, clothes people wore, events that went on 10 or 20 minutes into resuscitation. That is not compatible with brain activity.
It may be that some people receive better-quality resuscitation, and that—though there’s no evidence to support it—they did have brain activity. Or it could indicate that human consciousness, the psyche, the soul, the self, continued to function.
Wired: Couldn’t the experiences just reflect some extremely subtle type of brain activity?
Parnia: When you die, there’s no blood flow going into your brain. If it goes below a certain level, you can’t have electrical activity. It takes a lot of imagination to think there’s somehow a hidden area of your brain that comes into action when everything else isn’t working.
These observations raise a question about our current concept of how brain and mind interact. The historical idea is that electrochemical processes in the brain lead to consciousness. That may no longer be correct, because we can demonstrate that those processes don’t go on after death.
Wired: This seems to verge on supernatural explanations of consciousness.
Parnia: Throughout history, we try to explain things the best we can with the tools of science. But most open-minded and objective scientists recognize that we have limitations. Just because something is inexplicable with our current science doesn’t make it superstitious or wrong. When people discovered electromagnetism, forces that couldn’t then be seen or measured, a lot of scientists made fun of it.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Daily Rituals
By Mason Currey, Slate, April 25, 2013
In 1885, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky rented a cottage in a small village some 50 miles northwest of Moscow. After years of restless wandering through Europe, the 45-year-old composer found his new living arrangement a wonderful relief. “What a joy to be in my own home!” he wrote to his patroness. “What a bliss to know that no one will come to interfere with my work, my reading, my walks.”
Those walks were especially important. Before sitting down to work in the morning, Tchaikovsky took a short stroll, lasting no more than 45 minutes. Then, after lunch, regardless of the weather, he went out again. Tchaikovsky’s brother later wrote, “Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”
Tchaikovsky’s superstition may have been justified—his walks were essential to his creativity, and he often stopped to jot down ideas that he would develop later at the piano. But then this is true of the majority of the composers in my Daily Rituals book—most of them required a long (and sometimes very long) daily walk to keep the ideas flowing.
Beethoven went for a vigorous walk after lunch, and he always carried a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper in his pocket, to record chance musical thoughts. Gustav Mahler followed much the same routine—he would take a three- or four-hour walk after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Benjamin Britten said that his afternoon walks were “where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk.” Working outside of Paris in 1971, Morton Feldman described his routine: “I get up at six in the morning. I compose until eleven, then my day is over. I go out, I walk, tirelessly, for hours.”
But the most extreme example is the French composer Erik Satie, who each morning would walk from his home in a Paris suburb to the city’s Montmartre district, a distance of about 6 miles. There he would visit friends, work on his compositions in cafés, eat dinner, and go out drinking—often missing the last train home, in which case he would walk back again, slipping into bed just before sunrise (and then getting up and walking back a few hours later).
Of course, it is not just composers who take long walks. Søren Kierkegaard had his best ideas during his daily walks, and sometimes he would be in such a hurry to get them down that, returning home, he would write standing up before his desk, still wearing his hat and gripping his walking stick or umbrella. Immanuel Kant took a walk every afternoon at precisely 3:30. Milton walked up and down his garden most afternoons, for three or four hours. And, according to one biographer, “If it rained, he would swing himself to and fro in a seat suspended from the ceiling, pulling on a rope.”
Most artists prefer a solitary walk, but I ran across some figures who enjoyed company. Mahler liked to drag his wife along on his afternoon hikes. Ludwig Wittgenstein would ask a close associate to accompany him on his walks. “A walk with Wittgenstein was very exhausting,” wrote Norman Malcolm, in a memoir of his friendship with the philosopher:
“Whatever we talked about, he turned his mind to it with great seriousness and intensity, and it was a formidable strain on me to keep up with his thoughts. He would walk in spurts, sometimes coming to a stop while he made some emphatic remark and looking into my eyes with his piercing gaze. Then he would walk rapidly for a few yards, then slow down, then speed up or come to a halt, and so on. And this uncertain ambulation was conjoined with the most exacting conversation!”
Whew! I could go on, but you get the idea: If you’re trying to generate creative work, you should really consider taking a daily walk—and maybe look into rigging up an indoor rope swing, too.
In 1885, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky rented a cottage in a small village some 50 miles northwest of Moscow. After years of restless wandering through Europe, the 45-year-old composer found his new living arrangement a wonderful relief. “What a joy to be in my own home!” he wrote to his patroness. “What a bliss to know that no one will come to interfere with my work, my reading, my walks.”
Those walks were especially important. Before sitting down to work in the morning, Tchaikovsky took a short stroll, lasting no more than 45 minutes. Then, after lunch, regardless of the weather, he went out again. Tchaikovsky’s brother later wrote, “Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”
Tchaikovsky’s superstition may have been justified—his walks were essential to his creativity, and he often stopped to jot down ideas that he would develop later at the piano. But then this is true of the majority of the composers in my Daily Rituals book—most of them required a long (and sometimes very long) daily walk to keep the ideas flowing.
Beethoven went for a vigorous walk after lunch, and he always carried a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper in his pocket, to record chance musical thoughts. Gustav Mahler followed much the same routine—he would take a three- or four-hour walk after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Benjamin Britten said that his afternoon walks were “where I plan out what I’m going to write in the next period at my desk.” Working outside of Paris in 1971, Morton Feldman described his routine: “I get up at six in the morning. I compose until eleven, then my day is over. I go out, I walk, tirelessly, for hours.”
But the most extreme example is the French composer Erik Satie, who each morning would walk from his home in a Paris suburb to the city’s Montmartre district, a distance of about 6 miles. There he would visit friends, work on his compositions in cafés, eat dinner, and go out drinking—often missing the last train home, in which case he would walk back again, slipping into bed just before sunrise (and then getting up and walking back a few hours later).
Of course, it is not just composers who take long walks. Søren Kierkegaard had his best ideas during his daily walks, and sometimes he would be in such a hurry to get them down that, returning home, he would write standing up before his desk, still wearing his hat and gripping his walking stick or umbrella. Immanuel Kant took a walk every afternoon at precisely 3:30. Milton walked up and down his garden most afternoons, for three or four hours. And, according to one biographer, “If it rained, he would swing himself to and fro in a seat suspended from the ceiling, pulling on a rope.”
Most artists prefer a solitary walk, but I ran across some figures who enjoyed company. Mahler liked to drag his wife along on his afternoon hikes. Ludwig Wittgenstein would ask a close associate to accompany him on his walks. “A walk with Wittgenstein was very exhausting,” wrote Norman Malcolm, in a memoir of his friendship with the philosopher:
“Whatever we talked about, he turned his mind to it with great seriousness and intensity, and it was a formidable strain on me to keep up with his thoughts. He would walk in spurts, sometimes coming to a stop while he made some emphatic remark and looking into my eyes with his piercing gaze. Then he would walk rapidly for a few yards, then slow down, then speed up or come to a halt, and so on. And this uncertain ambulation was conjoined with the most exacting conversation!”
Whew! I could go on, but you get the idea: If you’re trying to generate creative work, you should really consider taking a daily walk—and maybe look into rigging up an indoor rope swing, too.
Kids From Local Institution Enjoy May Day Fair!
Fair in Barcelos, Portugal from Dennis Molinski
Here is a power point with the activity we did with the children/teens from a local institution! It´s not difficult to arrange.
We first approached the owner's of the rides and asked if they would be willing to offer free rides for the children from the institution. We also approached some of the food stands and found two owners who were willing to donate refreshment for the 19 children. Finally, after organizing when would be the best night to come, which was when the fair would not be too busy, we arranged with the institution to go at the time.
This was the fourth activity of this type we have done for the local institution, who do not have the time to devote personel to arrange such extra activities themselves. It's fun for the kids and rewarding for us and for those who help. We offered a newletter from the association http://www.and-pt.org/ for each owner and an Activated magezine http://www.activatedministries.org/activated, and made sure the children thanked them afterwards!
At the end, some of the other owners were asking us to come on their rides, but we did not have enough time as the children had school the next day. Other owners told us to come back some other day for another go. People enjoy helping when they see it is going for the proposed end! Also, it is a lot easier to offer services than money. We are all in need of money, but most people are willing to donate a service if it does not involve them losing too much time and goods which do translate into money!
Try it. You may be able to brighten up the life of some needy child and in the same time find more purpose in your own!
Here is a power point with the activity we did with the children/teens from a local institution! It´s not difficult to arrange.
We first approached the owner's of the rides and asked if they would be willing to offer free rides for the children from the institution. We also approached some of the food stands and found two owners who were willing to donate refreshment for the 19 children. Finally, after organizing when would be the best night to come, which was when the fair would not be too busy, we arranged with the institution to go at the time.
This was the fourth activity of this type we have done for the local institution, who do not have the time to devote personel to arrange such extra activities themselves. It's fun for the kids and rewarding for us and for those who help. We offered a newletter from the association http://www.and-pt.org/ for each owner and an Activated magezine http://www.activatedministries.org/activated, and made sure the children thanked them afterwards!
At the end, some of the other owners were asking us to come on their rides, but we did not have enough time as the children had school the next day. Other owners told us to come back some other day for another go. People enjoy helping when they see it is going for the proposed end! Also, it is a lot easier to offer services than money. We are all in need of money, but most people are willing to donate a service if it does not involve them losing too much time and goods which do translate into money!
Try it. You may be able to brighten up the life of some needy child and in the same time find more purpose in your own!
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Before Bombs, a Battered American Dream
By Deborah Sontag, David M. Herszenhorn and Serge F. Kovaleski, NY Times, April 27, 2013
BOSTON—It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: After capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen.
The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant.
From one year to the next, though, the tournament rules had changed, disqualifying legal permanent residents—not only Mr. Tsarnaev, who was Soviet-born, but several other New England contenders, too. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life took a completely different direction.
Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.
His trajectory eventually led the frustrated athlete and his loyal younger brother, Dzhokhar, to bomb one of the most famous athletic events in this country, killing three and wounding over 200 at the Boston Marathon, the authorities say. They say it led Mr. Tsarnaev, his application for citizenship stalled for eight months, and his brother, a new citizen and a seemingly well-adjusted college student, to attack their American hometown on Patriots’ Day, April 15.
Mr. Tsarnaev now lies in the state medical examiner’s office, his body riddled with bullets after a confrontation with the police four days after the bombings. He left behind an American-born wife who had converted to Islam, a 3-year-old daughter with curly hair, a 19-year-old brother charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, and a puzzle: Why did these two young men seemingly turn on the country that granted them asylum?
Combing their lives for clues, the authorities have focused on Mr. Tsarnaev’s six-month trip to Dagestan, Russia, last year. But in Cambridge, sitting on the front steps of the ramshackle, brown-shingled house where the Tsarnaev family lived for a decade, their 79-year-old landlady urged a longer lens.
“He certainly wasn’t radicalized in Dagestan,” the landlady, Joanna Herlihy, said.
Ms. Herlihy, who speaks Russian and took the family under wing shortly after it resettled in the area, declined to elaborate. But she said that over the last few years, Mr. Tsarnaev had identified more fiercely than previously with his religious and ethnic roots, seeming to abandon his once avid pursuit of the American dream.
He dropped out of community college and lost interest not just in boxing but also in music; he used to play piano and violin, classical music and rap, and his e-mail address was a clue to how he once saw himself: The_Professor@real-hiphop.com. He worked only sporadically, sometimes as a pizza deliverer, and he grew first a close-cropped beard and then a flowing one.
He seemed isolated, too. For the last year, he, his wife and his child were the only Tsarnaevs living full time in the three-bedroom apartment on Ms. Herlihy’s third floor.
Mr. Tsarnaev’s two younger sisters had married and moved out; his parents, now separated, had returned to Dagestan; and his brother had left for the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, returning home only on the occasional weekend, as he did recently after damaging his 1999 green Honda Civic by texting while driving.
“When Dzhokhar used to come home on Friday night from the dormitory, Tamerlan used to hug him and kiss him—hold him, like, because he was a big, big boy, Tamerlan,” their mother, Zubeidat, 45, said last week, adding that her older son had been “handsome like Hercules.”
Not long after he gave up his boxing career, Mr. Tsarnaev married Katherine Russell of Rhode Island in a brief Islamic ceremony at a Dorchester mosque in June 2010. She has declined to speak publicly since the attacks.
His wife primarily supported the family through her job as a home health aide, scraping together about $1,200 a month to pay the rent. While she worked, Mr. Tsarnaev looked after their daughter, Zahira, who was learning to ride the tricycle still parked beside the house, neighbors said. The family’s income was supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, state officials said.
It was probably not the life that Anzor Tsarnaev had imagined for his oldest child, who, even as a boy, before he developed the broad-shouldered physique that his mother described as “a masterpiece,” dreamed of becoming a famous boxer.
But then the father’s life had not gone as planned, either. Once a government official in the prosecutor’s office in Kyrgyzstan, he had been reduced to working as an unlicensed mechanic in the back lot of a rug store in Cambridge.
“He was out there in the snow and cold, freezing his hands to do this work on people’s cars,” said Chris Walter, owner of the store, Yayla Tribal Rug, “I did not charge him for the space because he was a poor, struggling guy with a good heart.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was born on Oct. 21, 1986, five years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in Kalmykia, a barren stretch of Russian territory by the Caspian Sea.
A photograph of Mr. Tsarnaev as a baby shows a cherubic child wearing a knit cap with a pom-pom, perched on the lap of his unsmiling mother, who has spiky black bangs and an artful pile of hair. Strikingly, she did not cover her head then, as she does now; she began wearing a hijab only a few years ago, in the United States, prodded by her son just as she was prodding him, too, to deepen his faith.
When he was still little, his parents moved from Kalmykia to Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, where their other three children were born. They left during the economic crisis of the late 1990s, and spent a few brief months in Chechnya, then fled before the full-scale Russian military invasion in 1999. They sought shelter next in his mother’s native Dagestan.
In an interview there, Patimat Suleimanova, her sister-in-law, said the family had repeatedly been on the run from war and hardship in those days: “In search of peace, they kept moving,” she said.
Finally, Anzor Tsarnaev sought political asylum in the United States. He arrived first, with his younger son, in the spring of 2002. His older son, a young man of 16, followed with the rest of the family in July 2003.
Their neighborhood in Cambridge was run-down then, with car repair lots where condominiums have since arisen. But the city has long been especially welcoming to immigrants and refugees; its high school has students from 75 countries.
The school superintendent, Jeffrey Young, described Cambridge as “beyond tolerant.”
“How is it that someone could grow up in a place like this and end up in a place like that?” he said of the Tsarnaevs.
Unlike his brother, who was well integrated into the community by the time he started high school, Mr. Tsarnaev was a genuine newcomer when he entered the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, from which he graduated in 2006. Enrolled in the large English as a Second Language program, he made friends mostly with other international students, and his demeanor was reserved, one former classmate, Luis Vasquez, said.
“The view on him was that he was a boxer and you would not want to mess with him,” Mr. Vasquez, now 25 and a candidate for the Cambridge City Council, said. “He told me that he wanted to represent the U.S. in boxing. He wanted to do the Olympics and then turn pro.”
Shortly after his arrival in the United States, while at registration for the Golden Gloves in Lowell, he awed about two dozen people around him when he started playing classical music on a piano in a nearby room. The impromptu performance lasted about 20 minutes and ended to a burst of applause from surprised onlookers.
“He just walked over from the line and started playing like he was in the Boston Pops,” his trainer at the time, Gene McCarthy, 77, recalled. He added that even “the person signing people up stopped what he was doing to walk over and listen.”
Having trained in Dagestan, where sport fighting is the national pastime, Mr. Tsarnaev boxed straight-legged like a European and not crouched, American-style. He also incorporated showy gymnastics into his training and fighting, walking on his hands, falling into splits, tumbling into corners. So as he started working out in Boston-area clubs—and winning novice tournament fights just six months after immigrating—he made an impression, although not an entirely positive one.
“For a big man, he was very agile,” said Tom Lee, president of the South Boston Boxing Club. “He moved like a gazelle and was strong like a horse. He was a big puncher. But he was an underachiever because he did not dedicate himself to the proper training regimen.”
In 2009, Mr. Tsarnaev won the New England Golden Gloves championship in the 201-pound division, which qualified him for the national tournament in Salt Lake City in May. Introducing what would become his signature style, he showed up overdressed, wearing a white silk scarf, black leather pants and mirrored sunglasses.
Stepping into the ring, as The Lowell Sun described it, Mr. Tsarnaev floored Lamar Fenner of Chicago with an explosive punch that required an eight-count from the referee, and then he seemed to control the rest of the fight.
Bob Russo, then the coach of the New England team, said: “We thought he won. The crowd thought he won. But he didn’t.”
Mr. Fenner’s mother, Marsha, said her son had called her the night of his “bout with the bomber,” thrilled to have defeated an opponent he described as unnervingly strong. Her son, who died of heart problems last year at 29, ended up coming in second in the tournament and turning professional, she said.
Mr. Tsarnaev remained an amateur. But if he was chastened by the defeat, it did not temper his behavior. During a preliminary round of the New England Golden Gloves in 2010, in a breach of boxing etiquette, he entered the locker room to taunt not only the fighter he was about to face but also the fighter’s trainer. Wearing a cowboy hat and alligator-skin cowboy boots, he gave the two men a disdainful once-over and said: “You’re nothing. I’m taking you down.”
The trainer, Hector Torres, was furious and subsequently filed a complaint, arguing that Mr. Tsarnaev should not be allowed to participate in the competition because he was not a citizen.
As it happened, Golden Gloves of America was just then changing its policy. It used to permit legal immigrants to compete in its national tournament three out of every four years, barring them only during Olympic qualifying years, James Beasley, the executive director, said. But it decided in 2010 that the policy was confusing and moved to end all participation by noncitizens in the Tournament of Champions.
So Mr. Tsarnaev, New England heavyweight champion for the second year in a row, found himself stymied. The immigrant champions in three other weight classes in New England were blocked from advancing, too, Mr. Russo said.
But Mr. Tsarnaev was devastated. He was not getting any younger. And at that point, he was more than a year away from being even eligible to apply for American citizenship, and there appeared to be a potential obstacle in his path.
The previous summer, Mr. Tsarnaev had been arrested after a report of domestic violence.
His girlfriend at the time had called 911, “hysterically crying,” to say he had beaten her up, according to the Cambridge police report. Mr. Tsarnaev told the officers that he had slapped her face because she had been yelling at him about “another girl.”
Eventually, charges against him would be dismissed, the records show, so the episode would not have endangered his eventual citizenship application.
But his life was changing. He married. He had a child. And he largely withdrew from Cambridge social life, and from many of the friendships he had enjoyed. “He had liked to party,” said Elmirza Khozhugov, 26, his former brother-in-law, who lost touch with him in 2010. “But there was always the sense that he felt a little guilty that he was having too much fun, maybe.”
In 2011, the Russian security service cautioned the F.B.I., and later the C.I.A., that “since 2010” Mr. Tsarnaev had “changed drastically,” becoming “a follower of radical Islam.” The Russians said he was planning a trip to his former homeland to connect with underground militant groups. An F.B.I. investigation turned up no ties to extremists, the bureau has said.
In early 2012, Mr. Tsarnaev left his wife and child for a six-month visit to Russia. His parents, speaking in Dagestan, portrayed it as an innocuous visit to reconnect with family and to replace his nearly expired passport from the Republic of Kyrgyzstan with a Russian one. His father said he had kept his son close by his side as they visited relatives, including in Chechnya, and renovated a storefront to turn it into a perfume shop.
But American officials say Mr. Tsarnaev arrived in Russia months before his father returned to Dagestan and so did not have the tight supervision, as portrayed by his father, for a good chunk of time.
Also, Mr. Tsarnaev, with no apparent sense of urgency about his travel documents, waited months to apply for a Russian passport, and it was not ready for him when he returned to the United States.
After his return, Mr. Tsarnaev applied for American citizenship. But the F.B.I. investigation, though closed, had caused his application to be stalled. Underscoring how detached he had become, he no longer had any valid passport and was, in a way, stateless.
He grew a five-inch beard, which he shaved off before the bombings, and he engaged neighbors in affable conversations about skiing one week and heated ones about American imperialism the next. At a neighborhood pizzeria, he explained to Albrecht Ammon, 18, that “the Koran is great and flawless, and the Bible is ripped off from the Koran.”
“I asked him about radical Muslims that blow themselves up and say, ‘It’s for Allah,’” Mr. Ammon said. “And he said he wasn’t one of those Muslims.”
From Jesus With Love Books
I wanted to take time to introduce the From Jesus with Love books. I can’t recommend these books highly enough. From Jesus with Love books are like that morning cup of coffee or that loving sex first thing in the morning with your mate. It lifts you up for the whole day or at least gets your day started on a high and in the right direction.
We all seek for spiritually uplifting material or we should do. Having a good reading or viewing diet will help in those moments of crisis or stress that we all experience. Not developing good reading or viewing or listening habits can lead to disaster and leave us without solutions or strength or the will to go on when we hit the hard walls of life. From Jesus with Love books are just the thing you need if you want to develop a more positive reading agenda.
Recently, I went to visit a dear man and his wife who are going through some very difficult times. His company went bankrupt and he lost all his properties and savings. He was suicidal and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. When we sat down after the usual formalities, I suggested we read from the From Jesus with Love for Troubled Times. The Lord let me to start off with the following selection which left this man in tears. He commented, “It sounds like it was written for me.” I responded, “It was, it’s From Jesus with Love!” Here’s the selection that we read.
Seasons of Life
“When you hit bottom, when dreams give way to disappointment, when all you've worked so hard for goes to pieces, when life no longer holds any purpose or promise, you are tempted to despair and wonder if there is any reason to go one living. In extreme situations you may even be tempted to end it all yourself, right now.”
“That’s when you must remember that you were created for a purpose, and
that purpose isn't a single, one-time thing; it’s multifaceted and complex. As
long as you live, there will be something more you can accomplish—something you
are meant to accomplish—and there is always more to get out of life. The end of
one dream doesn't mean the end of all dreams. Just as the seasons come and go
in their cycle, periods of success and setback, fulfillment or disappointment,
and emotional highs and lows come and go. You may be in the depths of despair
now, but that won’t last forever.”
“Soon
you will find hope and a reason to go on—and the sooner you ask Me to show you
what I have for you next, the sooner you will find new inspiration and purpose.
The best may be just around the corner, but you’ll never know if you stop here.
Take My hand and let Me lead you into a new season of fruitfulness and
fulfillment.”
That is one of the 68 pages of encouraging words from the book From
Jesus with Love for Troubled Times. It will lift your spirit and give
you new meaning and purpose in living. From Jesus with Love is a great
gift book, great devotional, great for people needing encouragement. Please
order one today for yourself or a loved one. You won’t be disappointed. Click on Link to see books available.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Duck Dynasty Star: Fame Is Fleeting; What Matters Most Is Jesus Christ
By Melissa Barnhart, Christian Post, April 26, 2013
Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the Robertson family whose Duck Commander business is the backdrop for A&E’s hit program “Duck Dynasty” will release a new book on May 7 titled, Happy, Happy, Happy, in which he shares his faith in Jesus Christ, his knowledge about the founding fathers, and how he’s grown Duck Commander into a multimillion dollar business.
The hour-long season finale of Duck Dynasty was the most-watched program on television Wednesday night, beating out American Idol with 9.6 million viewers, which is a record for A&E.
Robertson credits all of his family’s success to their faith in Jesus Christ and their devotion to living a Christian lifestyle. He told CP on Thursday that his family has managed to stay humble, amid all of the fame, because they know that all blessings come from God; and in the end, everyone’s going to the same place: a six-foot hole.
“Fame is rather fleeting, as you know, or should know,” Robertson said. “Money can come and go, and fame comes and goes. Peace of mind and a relationship with God is far more important, so this is the precedent that we’ve set in our lives. The bottom line is, we all die, so Jesus is the answer. Many have told me through the years: ‘I think I’ll take my chances without Jesus.’ And I always come back and say, ‘so what chance is that?’”
Robertson wasn’t always a follower of Jesus Christ. In fact, for the first 28 years of his life, he said he lived a “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle,” and rejected his sister’s efforts to bring him to the Lord, until he read a sign in the Atlanta airport that stopped him in his tracks.
“I’m walking through the airport in Atlanta, and there was a large sign on one of the terminal walls and the question on it said: ‘Were you born between the years of 1945 and 1965?’ And as I was walking through, I stopped and said, ‘oh, well that would be me.’ I read on and the sign said: ‘Report to the Centers for Disease Control immediately, because you’re in the highest risk group on planet earth for hepatitis C.’ The point is that for the first 28 years, I was in that group of individuals,” Robertson said.
“Fortunately, no debilitating disease fell upon me,” said Robertson who attributes his walk with Jesus Christ for all of the success he’s achieved in the last 38 years.
Robertson told CP that his book, Happy, Happy, Happy, is an extended version of the speeches he’s been giving across the country for the past 25 years.
“Basically, the book is about my life story,” he said. “I’ve been speaking all over the United States about duck calling, the founders of the country, and the Gospel. Once I started doing that, people started asking me: ‘How can I get a copy of what I just heard, why don’t you write a book?’ The book is just about that: ducks, founding fathers, and my faith in God. And the rest of the story is about how it all turned out—went from rags to riches, as they say.”
Robertson also attributes his wife, Miss Kay, for the success of Duck Commander, and for being a Christian example to their four sons who are married and raising families of their own.
“I told Miss Kay we need to make sure our children don’t turn out like I turned out,” he said. “So they were raised up around biblical instruction. That mixed with discipline—the discipline code, I call it. They just had a lifestyle of seeing their parents do good things. I think maybe me loving their mother and me loving my neighbors around me had a profound impact on them. And what came out of that was four sons who are all married to their original wives. And they’re acting godly and I think Miss Kay and I had a hand in that.”
“So basically, I would recommend that to all parents. You have to discipline your children, or they won’t respect you, law enforcement or God, or anyone else. But I would say, overarching, I made sure they knew that we loved them, their mother and myself. … They were loved, they were given biblical instruction, they were seeing their dad and mom reach out to their neighbors around them, helping them, whether it be financial or marriage problems.”
Robertson quoted 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 and cited it as being one of the scriptures he likes to share with people. “So basically, I don’t ever move too far past the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, because it’s of first importance. And I make sure it’s of first importance with anyone I’m talking to. It all comes down to that, really, when you get right down to it. So it’s not complex. Jesus removed our sins and guarantees we can be raised from the dead. I’m still waiting on someone to enlighten me on what story beats that one.”
Part of the Christian lifestyle is the Christian work ethic, and Robertson achieved his dream of getting his duck call on the market by setting goals, maintaining his focus, and holding fast to his unwavering faith in God.
“I worked hard,” Robertson said about his job as a commercial fisherman, catching catfish and buffalo while he worked to get his small business off the ground. “The first year, my gross sales totaled $8,000 in the duck call business. The second year was like $13,000, and the third year was $22,000. Simply put, I set a goal, stayed the course, and trusted in the Almighty. I did what was right, and the result is for everyone to see now.”
Speaking about his book, Robertson said: “All I would tell people is the first 28 years of my life I wasn’t going anywhere very fast. The last 38 went beyond anything I could’ve asked for or imaged. So it was either luck—I was just lucky, as the atheists probably would say—or I was blessed by the Almighty. I’m leaning toward blessings came once I was converted.”
“I would tell anybody who was listening, ‘Hey this is my story, a lot of good came out of it.’ The second half has been far better than the first half, I can tell you that.”
Pope Francis Has a Few Words in Support of Leisure
By Mark Oppenheimer, NY Times, April 26, 2013
On Tuesday, “Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words,” a book of conversations with the man who was then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, will be published in English (Putnam; $24.95). These interviews from 2010 with two journalists in Argentina yield cute facts about the new boss of the church—a favorite movie? “Babette’s Feast”—but not much interesting theology.
But one passage in the book, at first glance rather slight, ends up insinuating a radical note into the proceedings. On a close read, it seems that Pope Francis believes that we must—indeed, that God is calling us to—relax.
Responding to the question, “Do we need to rediscover the meaning of leisure?” Pope Francis replies: “Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport. But this is being destroyed, in large part, by the elimination of the Sabbath rest day. More and more people work on Sundays as a consequence of the competitiveness imposed by a consumer society.” In such cases, he concludes, “work ends up dehumanizing people.”
Some pages later, he derides people who think of themselves as Catholic but don’t make time for their children. This is an example, according to Pope Francis, of living “with fraud.”
Catholic social teaching is known for promoting the idea that workers deserve dignity, which includes rest. But Pope Francis seems to be saying something more: that an authentically Christian life includes a proper dose of leisure and family time. That may sound unusual coming from a man whose tradition valorizes solitude and monasticism, and whose clergy members are not permitted to take spouses or beget children.
The idea of a Catholic exalting the Sabbath sounds particularly peculiar in the American context. In the United States, Catholics were never the great proponents of Sabbatarianism, observing Sunday as a special day, for worship or rest. That was a Protestant thing.
From the moment the Puritans arrived, they began enforcing laws to reserve Sunday for churchgoing. Over time, what came to be called “blue laws” covered different activities, and varied by state. Some laws forbade hunting on Sunday, others the sale of liquor, others any commercial activity. In religious towns, cultural norms made some recreation, like sports, taboo as well. As a child being raised in a Pentecostal family, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, wasn’t allowed to ride a bicycle on Sundays.
Over time, the official justification for the laws had changed, but it was still Protestants who pushed for them. “In the 1820s, they would say this is a time to pause to reflect on our religious obligations to God,” said David Sehat, a historian at Georgia State University. But by the 1870s, “they started using Pope Francis’ justification: a time to spend time with family, for ‘the preservation of health and the promotion of good morals,’ ” to use one jurist’s language.
And the temperance movement, which of course supported laws against Sunday liquor sales, was Protestant in character. Activists often depicted Catholic immigrants as drunkards.
Today, the laws are disappearing, relics of a time when Protestant culture was more dominant. Connecticut, for example, finally decided to permit Sunday liquor sales last year. And in the United States, Sunday has lost its sacred character. Most Christians see little conflict in going to church in the morning, then watching a football game—maybe with the family, or maybe at a sports bar—in the afternoon.
The Sabbatarian tradition is upheld, in a serious way, by some small groups of religious Protestants and, of course, by observant Jews. And, it so happens, by those who think of themselves as both Christian and Jewish. “Messianic Jews,” who believe in the divinity of Jesus but pay special attention to the Jewish roots of Christianity, are often very attached to Sabbath observance.
Sarah Posner, a staff writer for the ReligionDispatches.org Web site, recalled a conference of messianic Jews she attended last year in Ellicott City, Md. “They weren’t selling their books, CDs and DVDs on Saturday, because they didn’t want to exchange money,” Ms. Posner said. “But they were using electricity”—which traditionally observant Jews would not.
Our religiously diverse country includes those who call their weekly day off from smartphones a “secular Sabbath.” Some groups may not even have a concept of Sabbatarianism. In Islam, for example, “there’s a deep theological objection to the idea that God rested on the seventh day,” according to Marion Holmes Katz, a scholar of Islam at New York University. “The idea of God resting seems to imply God being tired. So the whole idea that you refrain from work as some sort of ritualized recapitulation or symbolic nod to the process of creation—it’s not one that has any traction in Islam.”
But in Catholicism, as Pope Francis suggests, the Sabbath actually is supposed to matter—the whole day, not just Mass. For as the catechism teaches, in Paragraph 2185, “On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are to refrain from engaging in work or activities that hinder the worship owed to God, the joy proper to the Lord’s Day, the performance of the works of mercy, and the appropriate relaxation of mind and body.”
Of course, those who preach a relaxing Sabbath, with friends and family, are often working hardest on the day they exalt. For clergy members, the Sabbath is the busiest workday of the week.
On Tuesday, “Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words,” a book of conversations with the man who was then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, will be published in English (Putnam; $24.95). These interviews from 2010 with two journalists in Argentina yield cute facts about the new boss of the church—a favorite movie? “Babette’s Feast”—but not much interesting theology.
But one passage in the book, at first glance rather slight, ends up insinuating a radical note into the proceedings. On a close read, it seems that Pope Francis believes that we must—indeed, that God is calling us to—relax.
Responding to the question, “Do we need to rediscover the meaning of leisure?” Pope Francis replies: “Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport. But this is being destroyed, in large part, by the elimination of the Sabbath rest day. More and more people work on Sundays as a consequence of the competitiveness imposed by a consumer society.” In such cases, he concludes, “work ends up dehumanizing people.”
Some pages later, he derides people who think of themselves as Catholic but don’t make time for their children. This is an example, according to Pope Francis, of living “with fraud.”
Catholic social teaching is known for promoting the idea that workers deserve dignity, which includes rest. But Pope Francis seems to be saying something more: that an authentically Christian life includes a proper dose of leisure and family time. That may sound unusual coming from a man whose tradition valorizes solitude and monasticism, and whose clergy members are not permitted to take spouses or beget children.
The idea of a Catholic exalting the Sabbath sounds particularly peculiar in the American context. In the United States, Catholics were never the great proponents of Sabbatarianism, observing Sunday as a special day, for worship or rest. That was a Protestant thing.
From the moment the Puritans arrived, they began enforcing laws to reserve Sunday for churchgoing. Over time, what came to be called “blue laws” covered different activities, and varied by state. Some laws forbade hunting on Sunday, others the sale of liquor, others any commercial activity. In religious towns, cultural norms made some recreation, like sports, taboo as well. As a child being raised in a Pentecostal family, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, wasn’t allowed to ride a bicycle on Sundays.
Over time, the official justification for the laws had changed, but it was still Protestants who pushed for them. “In the 1820s, they would say this is a time to pause to reflect on our religious obligations to God,” said David Sehat, a historian at Georgia State University. But by the 1870s, “they started using Pope Francis’ justification: a time to spend time with family, for ‘the preservation of health and the promotion of good morals,’ ” to use one jurist’s language.
And the temperance movement, which of course supported laws against Sunday liquor sales, was Protestant in character. Activists often depicted Catholic immigrants as drunkards.
Today, the laws are disappearing, relics of a time when Protestant culture was more dominant. Connecticut, for example, finally decided to permit Sunday liquor sales last year. And in the United States, Sunday has lost its sacred character. Most Christians see little conflict in going to church in the morning, then watching a football game—maybe with the family, or maybe at a sports bar—in the afternoon.
The Sabbatarian tradition is upheld, in a serious way, by some small groups of religious Protestants and, of course, by observant Jews. And, it so happens, by those who think of themselves as both Christian and Jewish. “Messianic Jews,” who believe in the divinity of Jesus but pay special attention to the Jewish roots of Christianity, are often very attached to Sabbath observance.
Sarah Posner, a staff writer for the ReligionDispatches.org Web site, recalled a conference of messianic Jews she attended last year in Ellicott City, Md. “They weren’t selling their books, CDs and DVDs on Saturday, because they didn’t want to exchange money,” Ms. Posner said. “But they were using electricity”—which traditionally observant Jews would not.
Our religiously diverse country includes those who call their weekly day off from smartphones a “secular Sabbath.” Some groups may not even have a concept of Sabbatarianism. In Islam, for example, “there’s a deep theological objection to the idea that God rested on the seventh day,” according to Marion Holmes Katz, a scholar of Islam at New York University. “The idea of God resting seems to imply God being tired. So the whole idea that you refrain from work as some sort of ritualized recapitulation or symbolic nod to the process of creation—it’s not one that has any traction in Islam.”
But in Catholicism, as Pope Francis suggests, the Sabbath actually is supposed to matter—the whole day, not just Mass. For as the catechism teaches, in Paragraph 2185, “On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are to refrain from engaging in work or activities that hinder the worship owed to God, the joy proper to the Lord’s Day, the performance of the works of mercy, and the appropriate relaxation of mind and body.”
Of course, those who preach a relaxing Sabbath, with friends and family, are often working hardest on the day they exalt. For clergy members, the Sabbath is the busiest workday of the week.
Study: Monsanto's Roundup Herbicide Linked to Cancer, Autism, Parkinson's
Common Dreams, April 26, 2013
The active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide may be “the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment,” being responsible for a litany of health disorders and diseases including Parkinson’s, cancer and autism, according to a new study.
It’s “the most popular herbicide on the planet,” widely used on crops like corn and soy genetically engineered to be “Roundup Ready,” and sprayed on weeds in lawns across the US. But in the peer-reviewed study published last Thursday in the journal Entropy, authors Anthony Samsel, an independent scientist and consultant, and Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT, crush the industry’s claims that the herbicide glyphosate is non-toxic and as safe as aspirin.
Looking at the impacts of glyphosate on gut bacteria, Samsel and Seneff found that the herbicide “enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins,” and is a “textbook example” of “the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins.”
The researchers point to a potential long list of disorders that glyphosate, in combination with other environmental toxins, could contribute to, including inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, depression, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancer, cachexia, infertility, and developmental malformations.
The herbicide’s “Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body,” they write.
The authors conclude:
Given the known toxic effects of glyphosate reviewed here and the plausibility that they are negatively impacting health worldwide, it is imperative for more independent research to take place to validate the ideas presented here, and to take immediate action, if they are verified, to drastically curtail the use of glyphosate in agriculture. Glyphosate is likely to be pervasive in our food supply, and, contrary to being essentially nontoxic, it may in fact be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.
The new findings may add further momentum to concerns from food safety and food sovereignty advocates who have challenged Monsanto’s grip on corporate agriculture and its genetically engineered crops.
The active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide may be “the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment,” being responsible for a litany of health disorders and diseases including Parkinson’s, cancer and autism, according to a new study.
It’s “the most popular herbicide on the planet,” widely used on crops like corn and soy genetically engineered to be “Roundup Ready,” and sprayed on weeds in lawns across the US. But in the peer-reviewed study published last Thursday in the journal Entropy, authors Anthony Samsel, an independent scientist and consultant, and Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT, crush the industry’s claims that the herbicide glyphosate is non-toxic and as safe as aspirin.
Looking at the impacts of glyphosate on gut bacteria, Samsel and Seneff found that the herbicide “enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins,” and is a “textbook example” of “the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins.”
The researchers point to a potential long list of disorders that glyphosate, in combination with other environmental toxins, could contribute to, including inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, depression, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancer, cachexia, infertility, and developmental malformations.
The herbicide’s “Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body,” they write.
The authors conclude:
Given the known toxic effects of glyphosate reviewed here and the plausibility that they are negatively impacting health worldwide, it is imperative for more independent research to take place to validate the ideas presented here, and to take immediate action, if they are verified, to drastically curtail the use of glyphosate in agriculture. Glyphosate is likely to be pervasive in our food supply, and, contrary to being essentially nontoxic, it may in fact be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.
The new findings may add further momentum to concerns from food safety and food sovereignty advocates who have challenged Monsanto’s grip on corporate agriculture and its genetically engineered crops.
