The Big Fail

 "On July 6th, he posted another of his incendiary all-cap tweets. 'SCHOOLS MUST REOPEN IN THE FALL,"'it read. The next day, at a White House event, the president said, 'We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools. It's very important for our country. It's very important for the well-being of the students and the parents.' Trump was right. It was important. But by this late stage in his presidency, just about every democrat assumed that anything he said was a lie. That was especially true with his pandemic statements. This, after all, was  a man who suggested that ingesting disinfectant might deter the virus. If Trump thought schools should be open, all the more reason to fight to keep them closed. The strong reaction against anything that came out of Trump's mouth was understandable on one level, but on another level, it was inexcusable. Long before vaccine hesitancy became an issue, the fight over schools was an early sign of how stupidly polarized the country had become. And in this case, it wasn't the red states refusing to follow the science. It was blue state democrats, who valued their political affiliation over common sense, and even over their pre-pandemic pretensions about protecting the underprivileged."

The Berry Pickers

"Hope is such a wonderful thing until it isn't. That sadness that Mom had managed to harness since Ruthie went missing and since Charlie's death, threatened to unravel right there and then."

"Things always seem worse just after they happen."

"Alice always said that holding in tears is like holding in pee. It's gonna hurt eventually. So you might as well let them go as soon as you feel them."

What You Are Looking For Is In The Library

"Being born is probably the most difficult thing that we ever have to do. I am convinced that everything else that comes after it is nowhere near as hard. If you can survive the ordeal of being born, you can get through anything."

"'...I want to try and change. Thanks to this book.'

A broad smile lit Ms Komachi's face. 'You may say that it was the book, but it's how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself.'"

"'Does this kind of thing really happen? It's too good to be true. I can't believe an opportunity like this would just fall into my lap.'

Shuji looked at me. 'You're wrong,' he said earnestly. 'This didn't just come to you. It happened because you did something for yourself. You took action and that caused things to change around you.'

I started at him, and he smiled at me reassuringly. 'You made this opportunity happen.'"

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

"There are many ways to erase the past. In the 1990s, in Bogota, my secondary school thought it important that students learn English.... In their classrooms... they lectured us on things that were hard for us to grasp. For example: that realistic fiction was Jane Austen, and fantasy fiction was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Magical realism was just realism to us, and Jane Austen was not any life that was possible in our land. Still, they renewed their efforts to teach us clear boundaries, strict differentiations. There were names for what some of us lived, saw, and believed--legends, superstitions, fictions."

"A circle is a straight line, haunted by something living at its middle-- a ghost that causes it to bend and bend." 

Time off

Ideas

• Aristotle taught on the mobility of leisure. He said we rest for the sake of work, and we work for the sake of leisure. It is the highest on the pyramid.
• Bertrand Russel thought we should work for 4 hours and not engage in frivolity for the rest, but to do things that contribute to culture. The goal is, for example, anyone to be able to paint (no matter how bad they may actually be at painting) and not have to worry how he will eat.
• The Protestant work ethic was a way for the Puritan upper class to control poor people, and they said work (and work alone) was noble. This fostered the idea that work = good and idleness = bad. And apparently this was all based on (an apparently corrupted from) the idea that God left us work to do.
• We used to work to be productive, then with the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't about productivity but time, so leisure became money lost. Historian EP Thompson said, "Time is now currency."
• Reminds us of Newport saying "Busyness as a proxy for productivity"

"This book exists because we are extremely optimistic that our culture can find its way back to moble leisure, one little step at a time. But we want to reiterate, if it’s not already abundantly clear, that we’re not advocating a culture of laziness, sloth, or stagnation. It is a culture in which productivity and the joy of life go hand-in-hand, a culture of productivity in a much brighter sense rather than just economic output. A culture of creative, scientific, spiritual, and humanitarian progress. A culture of noble leisure" (45). 

"Counterintuitively, putting more energy into leisure can energize us overall" (57). 

The Best of You by Alison Cook

"Simply put trust is the 'belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.'"

Oath and Honor

 "...the Republican National Committee, or RNC, convened for its winter meeting. They adopted a resolution censuring Adam Kinzinger and me. In a statement referring to the January 6 investigation as 'the persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,' the RNC accused Kinzinger and me of engaging 'in behavior which has been destructive to the institution of the US House of Representatives, the Republican Party, and our republic...'"

"...Trump and I weren't having some kind of policy disagreement or political debate. I wasn't going to capitulate: 'Trump tried to overturn an election. He went to war with the rule of law. He violated his oath to the Constitution.'"

"There was no bitterness in Vice President Gore's voice as he left to carry out his constitutional duty...Al Gore had conceded the race, saying, in part: 'Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, "Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless you."'"

"duty above partisanship"

Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease

 "In the past, Jews may have suffered disproportionately from diabetes, and today statistically significant studies show that the rate of diabetes is higher among American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans than among whites as a whole. The critical question is: how have those rates been explained?" (xvii).

on the difficulties of having a disability in the US: "The fears and concerns... articulated, while clearly a response to losses in their own and their loved ones' physical abilities, were also shaped by the cultural and political meaning of dependence. In a society that went beyond merely idealizing rugged individualism to making 'independence' a key qualification for adulthood and thus, by implication, for citizenship, becoming dependent carried a heavy burden" (48). 

"In the years following insulin's discovery, individuals with diabetes struggled to understand the meaning of this new drug in their lives. There can be no question that it gave me any of them the miracle of a longer, fuller life, allowing them to contemplate a future beyond the average of three years post-diagnosis for those with the acute form, and six years for those with the milder form. It also raised new questions about the nature of diabetes, its effect on one's ability to be a 'productive' member of society, and its relationship to other conditions widely viewed as 'disabilities'" (49). 

"Kellyl Miller, a black mathematician educated at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University, issued an immediate rebuttal [to the idea that the "black race was on the road to extinction" due to "the race traits and tendencies" of black people]... He... argued that high morbidity and mortality rates had nothing to do with innate racial traits and everything to do with social factors. The genius of his approach was to turn to studies of London's poor, which revealed health problems similar to those of black people in the United States. Class, not race, he argued, best explained excessive mortality" (75).

"...medical researchers and physicians read African Americans' low rate of diabetes as biological 'evidence' that they lacked the sensibilities and sensitivities that made a race like the Jews so prone to the disease. Similar to other scientific studies that alleged to offer proof of the inferiority of the "African race" and its descendants, medical writings often presented black people as occupying a step lower on the evolutionary ladder than whites, which meant they were considered less developed neurologically. 'The higher the organization, the higher the physiological development, the higher the nervous system, the greater the sensation,' asserted a physician at the meeting of the Saint Louis Medical Society in 1884, adding that is why black people, who had 'less brain' and a 'less developed' nervous system, did not suffer from 'a great number of diseases' that affected whites.' .... 'Nervous system strain, intense application to business, mental shock and worry have frequently served to plan an important role, at least in precipitating the phenomena of the disease [diabetes] or aggravating it. The negro race is to a very great degree free from these influences. The average individual is happy-go-lucky, living from hand to mouth and from day to day, without great responsibilities and without great ambitions which carry with them great cares...'" (75-76). 

"African Americans and Jews were constructed as polar opposites: one primitive, the other civilized; one carefree, the other high-strung; one simple-minded, the other intellectually astute. In this way, the diabetes literature produced, legitimized, and proliferated two sharply drawn, differentiated stereotypes and put the two groups at cross-purposes" (76). 

Later higher rates of diabetes were recognized, and especially once studies realized that there was a self-reporting bias.

M. C. Guthrie, the chief medical director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs said "'ignorance, prejudice and superstition'...led Indians to seek the help of 'so-called medicine men and other charlatans,' rather than taking advantage of 'trained personnel.' To Guthrie, this was the mark of a primitive people,' a characterization with which few would have disagreed at the time.

"But what did 'primitive' signify in this context? Guthrie's comment alluded to one meaning: the direct antithesis of Enlightenment ideals of rationality, science, and hygiene, each of which symbolized the ability to control nature" (108). 

Geneticist James Neel described Native Americans as "'one of the last great resources for the study of primitive man, one of the last opportunities to attempt to fathom the nature of the forces to which man was responding during the course of human evolution.'

"...he and other scientists were imagining them as frozen in time at an earlier stage of human history.... Of course, in theory, Neel and other human geneticists could have viewed 'primitive' populations as simply having different gene frequencies than less 'primitive' populations--perhaps as the result of becoming reproductively isolated at some point in time--but the claim that one population represented an early stage in another population's evolutionary development reintroduced not only the notion of stasis, but also of racial hierarchy. Native Americans, they were implying, did not have different gene frequencies because their paths diverged from that of whites; they had different gene frequencies because they had not changed, while whites had. Put differently, they were less evolved" (119).

"The narrative that Neel ended up constructing could have been lifted almost entirely from early twentieth-century explanations for why Native Americans had succumbed disproportionately to tuberculosis. Once again, underlying structural inequalities were ignored and the bodies of primitive peoples were imagined as being forced to deal quickly with changes to which more civilized populations had had ample time to adapt" (132). 

Other geneticists developed observations that "are consistent with Neel's hypothesis that diabetes results from the introduction of a steady food supply to people who have evolved a 'thrifty genotype'" (134). 

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

 "It takes me awhile to notice, but the woman is actually creating something on the wall behind her. She has three different colors of Post-it notes, and is positioning them with the most meticulous precision I have ever seen. 

"And the longer I stare at the wall of Post-it notes, the more I begin to understand that I'm not just staring at a wall of notes. I'm staring at something greater than that. 

"The post-its blend and bleed into one another, slicing out the silhouette of a castle--Gothic and grand-- perched upon a cliff ,dangling ovwer a breaking sea. Violet sky. Ebbon stone. A salty sea of paper and dye fluttering in the blow of an approaching storm.

"It's a glorious thing. An honest-to-God work of art. And I wonder if anyone else can see it. These kinds of things go unnoticed by too much of the world, in my opinion.

"I sit there with Renny at my side and all of Renny's alcohol in my blood stream and I stare at the Post-its. How many hours it must have taken to create such a thing, I can't honestly say. Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that's what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we have invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we measure love."

"Only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something'll kill you, and being able to choose not to do it." 

"It's amazing how much you can get used to the intolerable, right up until the moment when you realize you have to pass it on to some pair of bright eyes that have no choice but to be dimmed by it."

I envy this minister. I envy the way he’s able to give solace to these people and what they are going through, while I’m only able to come here and watch and worry about the fact that my second book is due soon and I’m still not any closer to getting it written. Yes, there are better things in the world to be worried about. Yes, there are tragedies, and shootings, and rapes, and violence, and starvation, and human trafficking, and all those other things and I have found the way to ignore them is simply by thinking about myself. I like to think that’s what the minister is talking about when he talks about the ability to look past things and still be happy. The only problem is that I can’t honestly say that I’m happy. For sure, I’m something, but I damn sure wouldn’t call it happy.

Despondent, maybe. Confused, certainly. Horny, without a doubt. But happy? No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.






I know why your mom taught you to be invisible. She wanted to protect you. Being who we are . . . it’s hard. We get shot or put in jail. It’s all we see. It’s all we know. Our whole story is about pain and loss, slavery and oppression. It defines us. It seeps into our skin. We bleed it even as we’re covered by it. All we want is to be something other than the pain that we have been born into. All we want is to be known for something else. We want the great history we see in others. And all we’re ever given is the story of being in pain and being forced to overcome.

Your mama, she wanted to protect you. Protect you from bullets. Protect you from cops. Protect you from judges. Protect you from mirrors that you would look into and see something less than beautiful. She wanted to protect you from the black skin that you should adore and be proud of, but that you’re going to spend your whole life trying not to hate. You’ll hate it in yourself and in anyone who looks like you. You’ll secretly see other Black people and hate them for not solving the riddle of the self-loathing you’ve been taught. It’ll follow you through everything in your life. You’ll be angry and not know why. And the anger won’t ever go away, not really. It’ll hang in the back of your mind. It’ll hang in the back of your world, haunting you, guiding all of your decisions. And when you get tired of being angry, it still won’t go away. It’ll just change into something even worse. You’ll take that anger and turn it on yourself and it’ll call itself depression. And, just like anger, it’ll take over your life. It’ll live with you every day. You’ll look in the mirror and hate what you see. You’ll tell that person in the mirror—with that skin that looks so dark—that it’s broken. You’ll tell that person that they deserve less. You’ll tell that person that the good things in this world are not for them.

And then, rarely, you’ll try to break out of that. The pendulum will swing in the other direction. Maybe you’ll take a stab at being an optimist. You’ll say that race doesn’t matter. You’ll say that everyone is treated equally and you’ll try to live that life. You might even say that you don’t see color. You’ll hide in not being as Black as some other Black people. You’ll look at Black people who don’t behave the way you do as doing it wrong. You’ll divide yourself up. You’ll make fun of the way they talk, the way they dress.

But all you’ll really be doing is making fun of yourself.

But, for a little while, it’ll feel good.

And then, when you’ve been optimistic for long enough, you’ll turn on the news and someone who looks just like you will have been shot and killed. And maybe the optimism will hold for a while. Maybe you’ll be able to say to yourself, “Well, that’s just one case. A freak accident. It doesn’t mean that the world is like that.”

And then—and this part won’t take long—you’ll see another case. You’ll see another person who looks like you that’s been shot. And then you’ll see another. And another. And another. And maybe you’ll stop reading the news. You’ll retreat into books or movies. But then you won’t see anyone who looks like you. Or, if they do, they don’t act like you. They act like those stereotypes. They act like those Black people that you always thought you were better than, those people who use the language you don’t. Those people that dress the way you don’t.

And then, eventually, you’ll come to understand that you’re all the same person. You’ll finally come to understand that you’re a part of it all. That they’re you. And that’ll break your heart and make you proud at the same time. And the anger and depression will cycle back through again and again and the only way to escape them is to pretend that you don’t see how broken the world is. It’ll be that way every single day of your life.

And then, you’ll have kids one day, and you’ll want desperately to protect them from all of that.

I walk over to The Kid and open my arms and he looks frightened for a second, like he doesn’t know what I’m doing. But he knows exactly what I’m doing and he’s afraid of it. Hell, so am I. But I’m also tired of being afraid. My whole life I’ve lived afraid. My whole life I’ve been afraid. I’ve been running. I can’t remember anything else. Same goes for him. And I know it because he and I are the same. Me and everyone who looks like me are the same. We all carry that same weight. We all live lives under the hanging sword of fear. We’re buried under the terror that our children will come into all of the same burden and be trapped, just like we were. So we stay put, running in place. Most of all, people like me fear that we can’t do anything to break the cycle.

And I don’t know if we can or not. I just know that we have to try.

That I have to try.

Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

 "Like all mothers, I have long since mastered the art of nursing joy at one breast and grief at the other."

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

"Not a single cell of his body was the same as it had been in 1995, but he was still himself, just  as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there."

"I could still tell you a few of them, the stalwart trees of New Hampshire: painted trillium, bunchberry, hemlock, sheep laurel, white cedar, bloodroot. 

"Below me and above me and in the woods stretching thick and endless, their leaves made sugar out of nothing but light"

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

 "It was a precious gift when another person loved your child. You yourself felt loved."

"Every bookish girl in the world in the world is Jane Eyre. Every girl who wants to be good, anyway."

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

 “Looking back, having been through trauma again as an adult… I can see another side to my mother’s actions back then. Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking. Life becomes a stuporous fulfillment of routine, where even walking to the supermarket feels like you’re dragging your limbs through air as heavy as the drying room’s. Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them.”

Flat Share by Beth O’Leary

 “We all descend into the kind of silence that comes after you’ve talked about something difficult, half grateful for it being over, half relieved to have managed it at all.”

Between Us

 "Emotions are part and parcel of our social and cultural lives, and they are shaped by our cultures and communities. The differences in emotions go beyond merely superficial differences in manifestation--emotions not only look different; the differences pertain to the very constituent processes and the course of the emotion itself.

"But wait. Is it possible that people across cultures have different emotions? Doesn't the human body prepare us for emotions? It does and it doesn't. Our brains and bodies do not come pre-wired for certain emotions, but they do prepare us each to have emotions that maximally serve us in our respective social and material lives--emotions that are adjusted to our communities and cultures. Int he most up-to-date science, nature is no longer contrasted with nurture; it is equipped for nurture" (18). 

"Any community that provides a set of experiences, understandings of the world, relationship practices, moral sensitivities, and values and goals may shape the emotions we have as individuals. Different cohorts, different socioeconomic groups, different religions, different gender cultures, and even different family cultures may provide emotions with their meaning" (20).

"When people come to the conclusion that others have feelings just like them, that conclusion may stem from their own projections" (21). 

"Emotions--our own included--are as dependent on our cultures as our clothes, our language, and the foods we feed our children" (22). 

MINE model:

OURS model

"..a MINE model of emotions prevails in Western contexts. Having the emotions that are required by others or by the setting is thought to be demanding and unnatural in MINE contexts. It is quite the norm in contexts that favor an OURS model" (42-43). She gives the example of a Buddhist family who just found out their family member's illness was terminal. "Despite the general state of devastation, Sen's relatives 'crafted their emotions so that they could accept what happened... Sen's father and sister went to the temple to make offerings every morning. His sister, brother, relatives, and friends, at least at first, for the most part, displayed what seemed to be blank faces: faces that did not show emotion at all.' Cassanti assures us that the blank faces of Sen's friends and family neither meant that they were indifferent, nor that they just faked it for others' benefit. Instead, she writes, they were working towards a state that they felt to be appropriate--to accept what happened (tham jai) and to be calm (jai yen)" (43). Later she describes this as "they did what needed to be done, and their feelings mostly followed. The emotion was outside in" (45). 

"When an OURS model of emotions prevails, emotional acting is Situated: individuals accommodate to the social norms, expectations, and roles in their social context. What matters is whether your emotions match up to others' needs and expectations, whether you fit with the norms, and whether you fulfill your role" (45). 

Ifaluk- Micronesian island in southwest Pacific-fago- mix of compassion, love, and sadness

"A final reflection on the terms emotional expression and emotional suppression is that they may themselves be suggestive of a MINE model of emotions. They imply that there is a deep inner feeling that wants to come out, or alternatively, has to be actively suppressed. Expression and suppression privilege a view of emotions as inside the person, and naturally wanting to come out. When emotions are conceived of as acts between people, rather than feelings within, then no 'expression' is naturally privileged over another. There is no essence to be expressed. There is no reason to assume that any emotional act is more authentic, or to the contrary, less. There is also no reason to think it is unnatural to meet social expectations. If emotions live between people, then why would yelling in anger be any more natural than Hiroto and Chiemi's accommodation to the expectations of their environments? Why would silently mourning by yourself be any more natural than wailing with the professional mourners?" (49)

"Consistently, where MINE models dominate, emotion suppression is both less frequent and more harmful to psychological and relational well-being than where OURS models dominate. When a culture's focus is inward, emotions are different from when it is outward" (50).

"There are several striking examples from research within Western Europe and the United States showing that emotions that are rewarded will become habitual. Temper tantrums occur more among children whose parents give in to their desires...." (53, emphasis mine).

"In a culture where happiness, success, and excitement are central goals, feeling good about yourself is indispensable" (56, emphasis mine). 

"[In Minangkabau and Taiwanese children cultures] Shame highlights your proper place in an unalienable social network, rather than focusing on rejection or isolation. It reminds you how to behave in the network, but it does not push you out....Shame strengthens the bonds between people, rather than reflecting a potential threat to them" (62).

"Implicit is the shame-sharing: the child's shameful behavior reflects badly on their parents and family... the bond between the child and the parent remains intact. It is not the mom rejecting the child, but the child and the mom jointly having to meet external demands. There is a basic alliance between the child and their parents (or relatives). This alliance makes for the wider impact of norm violations, but also means that shame is not nearly as threatening as it is in Western cultures" (63).

"Having shame is seen as a virtue: it reveals that you have a sense of social norms, and it will prevent you from violating these norms...[and] keeps you from misconduct that would have led to social exclusion" (63-64). 

"Becoming part of a culture means having certain kinds of emotions rather than others. Which kinds of emotions are foregrounded depends on the type of adult that is valued. In communities that foreground individual achievement, children need to feel good about themselves (pride). In communities that value obedience, or view the world as a dangerous place, children need to know fear. Communities focusing on propriety encourage shame. Inducing a given emotion is never good or bad in broad terms, but good or bad in a certain cultural context of community, depending on the goals of child-rearing. Beating and inducing fear, are not bad in general, but bad in a culture that values self-confident and self-propelled children. (White American middle-class families constitute one such context)" (81, emphases mine). 

What Are People For? Essays by Wendell Berry

"To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound" (7).

"It is despair that sees the work failing in one's own failure.

This despair is the awkardest pride of all" (13).

Quoting the 1928 Book of Common Prayer:  "Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as they servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men."

"What is astonishing about this prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations now are divided,almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God's servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people. This alone, I think, is sufficient to account for the orientation of most churches to religious feeling, increasingly feckless, as opposed to religious thought or religious behavior" (101).

"The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess or which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators. We are all unwilling victims, perhaps; and some of us are even unwilling perpetrators, but we must count ourselves among the guilty nonetheless. IN my household we produce much of our own food and try to do without as many frivolous 'necessities' as possible--and yet, like everyone else, we must shop, and when we shop we must bring home a load of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers designed to be thrown away, and 'appliances' designed to wear out quickly and be thrown away" (127). 

"I think that we must learn to see the trash on our streets and roadsides, in our rivers, and in our woods and fields, not as the side effects of 'more jobs' as its manufacturers invariably insist that it is, but as evidence of good work not done by people able to do it" (128).

"'This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.' Henry David Thoreau said that to his graduating class at Harvard in 1837... When he uttered it, he may well have been remembering Romans 4:11: 'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' That God created 'all things' is in itself an uncomfortable thought, for in our workaday world we can hardly avoid preferring some things over others, and this makes it hard to imagine not doing so. That God created all things for his pleasure, and that they continue to exist because they please him, is a formidable doctrine indeed, as far as possible from the 'anthropocentric' utilitarianism that some environmentalist critics claim to find the Bible and from the grouchy spirituality of many Christians" (138). 

"It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, that we support in fact a great variety of pleasure industries and that ehse are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places. Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, an dour dwelling places to consumption. And this accounts for the accelerating division of our country into defeated landscapes and victorious (but threatened) landscapes.

"More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that is we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement... We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them" (140).

"The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp" (151).

"To have everything but money is to have much" (159).

"In such ways as this, the nuclei of home and community have been invaded by the organizations, just as have the nuclei of cells and atoms. And we must be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this invasion by their failure as economies. If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another. When people are no longer useful to one another, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of 'raw material,' human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. Professionalism means more interest in salaries and less interest in what used to be known as disciplines. And so we arrive at the idea, endlessly reiterated in the news media, that education can be improved by bigger salaries for teachers--which may be true, but education cannot be improved, as the proponents too often imply, by bigger salaries alone. There must also be love of learning and of the cultural tradition of excellence--and this love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and a community. Without this love, education is only the importation into a local community of centrally prescribed 'career preparation' designed to facilitate the export of young careerists.

"Our children are educated, then, to leave home, not to stay home, and the costs of this education have been far too little acknowledged. One of the costs is psychological, and the other is at once cultural and ecological. 

"The natural or normal course of human growing up must begin with some sort of rebellion against one's parents, for it is clearly impossible to grow up if one remains a child. But the child, in the process of rebellion and of achieving the emotional and economic independence that rebellion ought to lead to, finally comes to understand the parents as fellow humans and fellow sufferers, and in some manner returns to them as their friend, forgiven and forgiving the inevitable wrongs of family life. That was the old norm.

"The new norm, according to which the child leaves home as a student and never lives at home again, interrupts the old course of coming of age at the point of rebellion, so that the child is apt to remain stalled in adolescence, never achieving any kind of reconciliation or friendship with the parents. Of course, such a reconciliation cannot be achieved without the recognition of mutual practical need. In the present economy, however, where individual dependences are so much exterior to both household and community, family members often have no practical need or use for one another. Hence the frequent futility of attempts at a purely psychological or emotional reconciliation.

"And its interposition of rebellion and then of geographical and occupational distance between parents and children may account for the peculiar emotional intensity that our society attaches to innovation. We appear to hate whatever went before, very much as an adolescent hates parental rule, and to look on its obsolescence as a kind of vengeance. Thus we may explain industry's obsessive emphasis on 'this year's model,' or the preoccupation of the professional 'educators' with theoretical and methodological innovation. Similarly, in modern literature we have had for many years an emphasis on 'originality' and 'the anxiety of influence' (an adolescent critical theory), as opposed, say to Spenser's filial admiration to Chaucer, or Dante's for Virgil.

"But if the new normal interrupts the development of the relation between children and parents, that same interruption, ramifying through a community, destroys the continuity and so the integrity of local life. As the children depart, generation after generation, the place loses its memory of itself, which is its history and its culture. And the local history, if it survives at all, loses its place. It does not good for historians, folklorists, and anthropologists to collect the songs and the stories and the lore that make up local cultures and store them in books and archives. They cannot collect and store--because they cannot know--the pattern of reminding that can survive only in the living human community in its place. It is this pattern that is the life of local culture and that  brings it usefully or pleasurably to mind. Apart from its local landmarks and occasions, the local culture may be the subject of curiosity or of study, but it is also dead" (166). 

"Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of 'macho' men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs-- they mutter, 'Thank God it's Friday' and 'Pretty good for Monday'--but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness...These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they will do whatever they are told. They know that their ability to be useful is precisely defined by their willingness to be somebody else's tool. Is it any wonder that they talk rough and worship athletes and cowboys? Is it any wonder that some of them are violent?" (185).

"A broader, deeper criticism is necessary. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else" (185). 

"The economies of our communities and households are wrong. The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and in character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers" (198).

"Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or to the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, 'the least of these my brethren.' Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when it is compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded" (200).

"We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.

"The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do" (201).

The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal

 "...like an eager student, the brain is remarkably responsive to experience. Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not only does your brain find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what you ask it to do." (Plasticity)

"Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure, than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience. One reason forgiveness helps people recover from mistakes, is that it takes away the shame and pain of thinking about what happened. The 'What the hell? Effect' is an attempt to escape the bad feelings that follow a set-back. Without the guilt and self-criticism, there's nothing to escape. This means it's easier to reflect on how the failure happened, and less tempting to repeat it. On the other hand, if you view your set-backs as evidence that you are a helpless loser who screw everything up, thinking about your failure is a miserable exercise in self-hate. Your most urgent goal will be to soothe those feelings, not to learn from your experience. This is why self-criticism backfires as a strategy for self-control. Like other forms of stress, it drives you straight to comfort coping, whether that's drowning your sorrows in the nearest dive bar, or lifting your spirits with a Visa-sponsored shopping spree."

Other ideas I jotted down.

*Pay attention to what's going on in your mind bEfOrE giving into temptation. (Is there something you're trying to distract or comfort in yourself?)

*Willpower is about "I will," "I won't," and "I want."

*Meditation is good at training attention and memory

*A way to instantly get more willpower-- slow your breathing to 4-6 breaths per minute. This increases your heart rate variability and increases your willpower reserve.

*Willpower makes your brain bigger and faster. In one study, those who started exercising also, without being instructed to do so, decreased their intake of caffeine, junk food, alcohol, and cigarettes. They also had better control of their emotions and had better focus and attention, and were less prone to distraction.

*Sleep is good for self-control. "Mild prefrontal dysfunction" is what happens when you're even mildly sleep-deprived.

*"Nothing drains willpower faster than stress. The biology of stress and the biology of self-control are simply incompatible."

*That initial feeling of exhaustion does not mean you are actually exhausted. It's often a protective signal from the brain... can you push past that first feeling of fatigue? (Applies physically and mentally.)

*Notice: at what point in the day do you have the most self-control?

*Finding your "I want" power can motivate your "I will" and "I won't." "I want" has more to do with long-term goals.

*Also, sometimes turning an "I will" into an "I won't" helps. Not "I will go to the gym today!" but "I won't go home and sit right on the couch."

*Your are less likely to take actions to meet your goals when you (only) moralize the decisions. You're more likely to do the difficult thing when you think about how doing so will help you get what you want. (So not, "I won't cheat on my spouse because that's wrong," but "I won't cheat on my spouse because I want to be an honest person, have a lasting marriage, etc.")

*Many people take 'steps away' from their goal once they start to see progress. (For example, celebrating losing weight with pizza & ice cream.) Feeling good about progress you've made toward your goal isn't a bad thing, but remember the 'why.' Focus on your commitment to the goal, not your progress. "Remembering why works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence. That so-called treat will start to look more like the threat to your goals that it is."

*Reduce the variability of your choice day to day. Act as if every choice you made is a commitment to your future choices. ("I could miss the gym today, but do I want to miss it every day this month?" Life as if today is going to be repeated.)

*Do you identify more with the impulses and desires, or with your goals and values? Which you see as more truly 'you' matters.

*Stress puts the brain in a reward-seeking states. Under stress, every temptation seems more tempting, even coping strategies that don't actually work.

*A strategy for feeling better is not the same as a strategy for change. 

*Connection to your future self helps your present self make better choice. (How often so I see me 2.0 as a completely different, possessing endless energy and time, never tempted by anything?)

*"Mirror neurons" make us more likely to imitate the behavior of others around us. It is part of being part of a social group- obviously potential for good and not-so-good here.

*"We may try to push thoughts out of our mind, but the body gets the message anyway."

*One method to withstand temptation- "surf the urge." Sit and notice where the temptation shows up in your body, really feel it, and then let it pass as all cravings do. 

Spiritual Disciplines: A Believer's Openings to the Grace of God

 "The question is important: What are the rationale and the role of discipline in a life where the accent is usually placed on divine grace? In just what way do divine accomplishment and human action interact in the shaping and fulfillment of Christian experience?

"... Discipline is education; it results when we properly respond by accepting and obeying that which instructs and cultivates us for the concerns and issues of a godly life" (3).

"God also trains us by means of his action, which is sometimes punitive in order to correct us. In such instances we can see that the notion of discipline, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament references to it, is two-sided. It deals from God's side with his authority, right, and wisdom to command us, while from our side it deals with our need to submit to that authority, honor that right, and obediently learn to live by wisdom. If we understand discipline in this way, we do not see it primarily as a compulsion imposed on us from the outside, but as a self-imposed training designed to keep the self organized for its proper response to God.

"The motivation behind this understanding is our love for God" (4, emphasis mine). 

"Freedom must be dependent and related in order to properly fulfill the self. It is by discipline that freedom best focuses for action. Such discipline is an instrumental necessity in integrating the whole self for godly living" (4).

"No comprehensive New Testament definition of conversion will omit the clear demand that the believer respond in faith and discipline of resolve. Conversion demands both" (5).

"Conversion is a new life rooted and grounded in the structured existence of Jesus Christ" (8).

"The imperative mood in the Sermon on the Mount is no accident; the imperative mood in Paul's writings is no mere literary experiment. The imperatives call for our disciplined response to God's goodness and sovereign will" (11). 

"Grace always demands effort on our part" (12).

"A discipline is at work, I say, when a person keeps himself or herself open to the ongoing demands of the conversion experience" (14).

"The problematic nature of the self is its multiplicity, and that multiplicity is a major part of the riddle of humanity" (15).

"We must learn the art of sanctifying all of life, not in a rigorous asceticism that denies life, but by inciting the self to know God in the midst of what has conditioned and influenced us" (19).

"We hold a fateful freedom unless we wisely invest that freedom in the will of God, yielding it to God for his use in guiding us" (20).

"Discipline is the willed use of the Christian's given freedom" (21).

"The disciplined Christian follows a vision: holiness. This Christian has an example: Jesus. And this person possesses certain insights for following that example: Scripture" (21).

"[The mastery of will of Christian experience] demands that we move constantly from information and instruction found in Scripture (the written statements about Christ) to discover how to apply them in the rough-and-tumble of life situations" (23).

"The Christian gives serious consideration to the future of one's thought and activity" (24).

"In another place I have written, 'Christian faith involves a mysticism. In fact, Christian experience demands one'" (24).

"Meditation is the process of mind by which life and mind meed in intimate fashion" (30).

"Understanding usually comes later than the experience itself. Understanding usually comes when we observe, handle, and sift our experience to see its meaning and interrelationships in light of our life and concerns. Attention is therefore the first requirement in the process of meditation-prayer, but the data for our attention are found in life as we have become aware of it" (30).

"Meditation-prayer is the act of giving attention to the living data of the world" (31).

"Thus, meditation and prayer interpenetrate each other; meditation keeps prayer thoughtful, while prayer sanctifies the meditation, claiming it for God" (33).

"Meditation means giving attention with intention. Meditation-prayer is meeting with God on the field of the inward self, applying oneself to discover, discern, watch for detail, and act with responsible decision in light of the finds" (36).

"Meditation-prayer is more than thinking about God. It is thinking in the presence of God. It is thinking with God" (36).

"Meditation-prayer should be forever aimed toward learning more and more of God as well as of oneself. Such learning will demand consistency as well as openness" (49).

"Fasting became a way of sensitizing the human spirit to discern God's will" (58).

"Fasting is a discipline that leads to vision, understanding, and creative spiritual behavior" (59). 

"Fasting is important in Christian experience because it deepens within the whole self a sense of one's dependence upon the strength of God. Fasting is more than an act of abstinence. It is an affirmative act; it is a way of waiting on God; it is an act of surrender. Fasting tends to induce within us an awareness of the spiritual dimension of life" (66).

Quoting Buber: "All real living is meeting" (71).

"Humans regard too lightly the fact that we have the ability to frame and use words. A word is a vital creation; it is a decisive tool. A word is a reflection of some reality, a means by which that reality can be apprehended and understood" (75).

"The very act of speaking or hearing implies we have relationship and togetherness with others; it demands that we face one another" (75).

"[Jesus] knew how to listen. Jesus knew how to speak--and when to speak...But something was at work within Jesus prior to his speaking, something deeper than a facility with words. That something was a spirit of openness to other human beings. He had a will for mutuality" (79).

"Dialogue is the way of community. It is the personal dimension of sharing. Dialogue concretizes the human will to be in relation with another person. It is the self-conscious response of an individual with another self. It is the way of willed encounter, a means of grace, a celebration of shared meaning. Dialogue is the way of explored intention, the way of God who is always seeking to share himself with others" (90).

"Worship is best understood as an experience of celebration in honor of God" (91).

"True worship is a considered action on our part; it is born out of a basic intent to celebrate God. This considered act of praise is more than a mere expression of thanksgiving; it is also a kind of interpretation of who God is and what God has done" (91).

"...true worship demands a high standard of inwardness on the one hand and a high degree of involvement on the other" (91).

"The worshiper must be challenged by bibilical statements so as to enter more fully into the faith they enshrine" (93).

"The first factor that influences a person's worship pattern is that person's temperament" (101).

"The second factor that influences a person's worship pattern is that person's tradition" (102).

"Tradition does not always change one's temperament; tradition rather trains it" (103).

"... third factor that influences someone's worship pattern: the worshipper's apprehension of truth and the way of relating oneself with it. Any alert Christian not only seeks the truth but, having found it, orients the self to its implications" (104).

"Music for worship must convey significant doctrine, human sentiment, and inward strength. And it must make sense as music" (112).

"Music that aids worship must give meanings and perspective to the worship experience; it will not undercut thought, even as it engages the emotions" (115).

So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba

 "Torn between the past and present, we deplored the 'hard sweat' that would be inevitable. We counted the possible losses. But we knew that nothing would be as before. We were full of nostalgia but were resolutely progressive" (19).

"To overcome distress when it sits upon you demands strong will. When one thinks that with each passing second one's life is shortened, one must profit intensely from this second; it is the sum of all the lost or harvested seconds that makes for a wasted or a successful life. Brace oneself to check despair and get it into proportion! A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness. Little by little, it takes over your whole being" (41).

"My reflections determine my attitude to the problems of my life. I analyse the decisions that decide our future. I widen my scope by taking an interest in current world affairs.

"I remain persuaded of the inevitable and necessary complimentarity of man and woman.

"Love, imperfect as it may be in its content and expression, remains the natural link between these two beings" (88). 

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

 "I let go of a breath I hadn't even known I was holding. This was what it was to have a friend, someone who knew exactly who you were and didn't blame you for it" (75).

"My mama didn't change herself in any way that you could easily put your finger on [when Grandma died]. She still opened the shop at seven thirty, taking care of the old ladies who got up at five, and she closed down at eight thirty, having taken care of the women who worked in offices. Everything was almost the same with her,but she went about her business in a way that put me in the mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have, but you are not going to get any kind of spark" (194).