A Concentrated Effort Quotes

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

To turn your dreams into reality, all your resources, efforts and concentration should be aligned in the same direction.

We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses--one foot is on the horse called "fate," the other on the horse called "free will." And the question you have to ask every day is--which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?

What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.

The real thinkers of the world aren't the best dressed. Staying on top of the latest fashions, accessorizing, and presenting oneself is time consuming. It takes a lot of effort, energy and concentration to be incessantly happy and perfectly groomed. You meet somebody like that- ask yourself what they're running from.

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again,

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

How about I take you to my studio? Much less dangerous. Plus, I need a model and you could sit for me." "You want me to sit for a portrait?" I asked stunned. "Actually, at the moment I'm concentrating on full-length nudes, in the spirit of Modigliani," Jules said. He was making an effort to keep a straight face. "Just kidding, Kates. You're a lady." Jules was trying the guilt-trip method of attack. And it was working. "Ok I'll pose for you," I conceded. "But under no circumstances will any article of clothing leave my body whilst I am in your studio." "And if you're elsewhere?" he asked, breaking into a sly smile. I rolled my eyes.

It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

INTEREST. Here is the key to the whole thing. If and when you are truly interested in what you are doing, or are about to do, then you will center your attention on it with little or no effort, and almost irrespective of the attendant conditions.

Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still?

Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn't come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required automatically. Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.

Destiny, I feel is also a relationship-a play between grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over, half of it is absolutely in your hands and your actions will show measurable consequences. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his own destiny; he’s a little of both. We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses-one foot is on the horse called “fate” the other on the horse called “free will”. And the question you have to ask everyday is, Which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts… That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work. That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. That it is possible to make rather tasty poached eggs in a microwave oven. That some people’s moms never taught them to cover up or turn away when they sneeze. That the people to be the most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused. That it is permissible to want. That everybody is identical in their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

Let one concentrate all his energies in one single great effort, let him perceive a single truth, even though he be consumed by the sacred fire, then millions of less gifted men can easily follow. Therefore it is not as much quantity as quality of work which determines the magnitude of the progress.

Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed-and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

JUST FOR TODAY, I will live through this day only. I will not brood about yesterday or obsess about tomorrow. I will not set far-reaching goals or try to overcome all of my problems at once. I know that I can do something for 24 hours that would overwhelm me if I had to keep it up for a lifetime. JUST FOR TODAY, I will be happy. I will not dwell on thoughts that depress me. If my mind fills with clouds, I will chase them away and fill it with sunshine. JUST FOR TODAY, I will accept what is. I will face reality. I will correct those things that I can correct and accept those I cannot. JUST FOR TODAY, I will improve my mind. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration. I will not be a mental loafer. JUST FOR TODAY, I will make a conscious effort to be agreeable. I will be kind and courteous to those who cross my path, and I'll not speak ill of others. I will improve my appearance, speak softly, and not interrupt when someone else is talking. Just for today, I will refrain from improving anybody but myself. JUST FOR TODAY, I will do something positive to improve my health. If I'm a smoker, I'll quit. If I'm overweight, I will eat healthfully -- if only for today. And not only that, I will get off the couch and take a brisk walk, even if it's only around the block. JUST FOR TODAY, I will gather the courage to do what is right and take the responsibility for my own actions.

Success cannot be pursued; success ensues. It flows as the unintended byproduct of efforts concentrated in the direction of a worthy cause.

Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way. In an exact sense, the only thing we actually can study in our life is that on which we are working in each moment. We cannot even study Buddha’s words.” - “So we should be concentrated with our full mind and body on what we do; and we should be faithful, subjectively and objectively, to ourselves, and especially to our feelings. Even when you do not feel so well, it is better to express how you feel without any particular attachment or intention. So you may say, “Oh, I am sorry, I do not feel well.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port. With Dickens we expand. It seems to me that Jane Austen's fiction had been a charming re-arrangement of old-fashioned values. In the case of Dickens, the values are new. Modern authors still get drunk on his vintage. Here, there is no problem of approach as with Austen, no courtship, no dallying. We just surrender ourselves to Dickens' voice--that is all. If it were possible I would like to devote fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens. However my job is to direct and rationalize those meditations, that admiration. All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder-blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine, the wick really runs through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.

Never underestimate a well-dressed bimbo. The real thinkers of the world aren’t the best dressed. Staying on top of the latestfashions, accessorizing, and presenting oneself is time consuming. It takes a lot of effort, energy, and concentration to be incessantly happy and perfectly groomed. You meet somebody like that—ask yourself what they’re running from.

But the way of practice is just to be concentrated on your breathing with the right posture and with great, pure effort.

On veut gagner de l'argent pour vivre heureux et tout l'effort et le meilleur d'une vie se concentrent pour le gain de cet argent. le bonheur est oublié, le moyen pris pour la fin.

I've always been rather very one-sided about the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn, and I didn't have much patience for what's called the humanities; even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work on it. It's only afterwards, when I've gotten older and more relaxed that I've spread out a little bit — I've learned to draw, and I read a little bit, but I'm really still a very one-sided person and don't know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I've used it in a particular direction.

Just as a wet match, when struck, does not produce fire, so a mind saturated with restlessness cannot produce the fire of concentration even when one makes great efforts to strike the cosmic spark.

He slammed her door shut and spun her so she was facing him. “One more for the road.” She stared at him with a perplexed expression but didn’t back away. “I want another taste,” he said, feeling his heart race. He leaned her against the car and crushed his lips against hers. This time she ran her fingers through his hair, making him moan. He wanted to touch the curves of her body through the thick fabric of her dress, but he forced himself to concentrate all his efforts on her sexy, soft, pouty lips. When he released her, they were both breathless. Her lips were chapped, and those golden eyes were on fire with a carnal sexuality. There was so much electricity between them that, if harnessed, they could power the whole damn city.

Perhaps you are not trying to whip a crowd into a frenzy; you just want to bring people over to your side. Choose your strategy and words carefully. You might think it is better to reason with people, explain your ideas. But it is hard for an audience to decide whether an argument is reasonable as they listen to you talk. They have to concentrate and listen closely, which requires great effort. People are easily distracted by other stimuli, and if they miss a part of your argument, they will feel confused, intellectually inferior, and vaguely insecure. It is more persuasive to appeal to people’s hearts than their heads. Everyone shares emotions, and no one feels inferior to a speaker who stirs up their feelings. The crowd bonds together, everyone contagiously experiencing the same emotions.

The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS I. Suffering does exist. II. Suffering arises from "attachment" to desires. III. Suffering ceases when "attachment" to desire ceases. IV. Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the eightfold path: 1. Right understanding (view). 2. Right intention (thought). 3. Right speach. 4. Right action. 5. Right livelihood. 6. Right effort. 7. Right mindfulness. 8. Rght meditation (concentration). Buddha's fourfold consolation: With a mind free from greed and unfriendliness, incorruptible, and purified, the noble disciple is already during this lifetime assure of a fourfold consolation: “If there is another world (heaven), and a cause and effect (Karma) of good and bad actions, then it may be that, at the dissolution of the body, after death, I shall be reborn in a happy realm, a heavenly world.” Of this first consolation (s)he is assured. “And if there is no other world, no reward and no punishment of good and bad actions, then I live at least here, in this world, an untroubled and happy life, free from hate and unfriendliness.” Of this second consolation (s)he is assured. “And if bad things happen to bad people, but I do not do anything bad (or have unfriendliness against anyone), how can I, who am doing no bad things, meet with bad things?” Of this third consolation (s)he is assured. “And if no bad things happen to bad people, then I know myself in both ways pure.” Of this fourth consolation (s)he is assured.

Let us concentrate all our efforts on achieving perfection through the imperfect gestures of everyday life. True wisdom means respecting the simple things we do, for they can take us where we need to go.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

Effort, concentration, and mindfulness are the internal ways in which the mind restores itself from being out of balance and lost in confusion to a condition of ease, clarity, and wisdom NO external action needs to happen. [p. 17]

Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

Exceptional work is always associated with periods of deep concentration. Nothing excellent ever comes from a scattered effort.

Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.

I heard an old man speak once, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion. He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the back seat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.

That's how this world works. To get a lot, you have to at least give a little. You have to make a concentrated effort to let it be known that you'll do whatever it takes to get ahead." Pause. My father takes a drink from his beer while I stare at him. Smirking, continuing, he says, "Once you accept this fact of life, you'll be able to do whatever you want to do and have anything you want to have.

Someone should start answering,” Cain says, leaning up. “She’s got that crazy look in her eyes, and they’ll follow her lead. You’ve spent too long pissing them off.” Cain is officially my new favorite sibling. I recant that when he reaches down and scratches his balls with a firm look of concentration on his face. Man, with the effort he’s putting into that, they must really itch… I just threw up in my mouth.

If you are disabled, it is probably not your fault, but it is no good blaming the world or expecting it to take pity on you. One has to have a positive attitude and must make the best of the situation that one finds oneself in; if one is physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap. I am afraid that Olympic Games for the disabled do not appeal to me, but it is easy for me to say that because I never liked athletics anyway. On the other hand, science is a very good area for disabled people because it goes on mainly in the mind. Of course, most kinds of experimental work are probably ruled out for most such people, but theoretical work is almost ideal. My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.

Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.

Can you hear me, Todd? There’s an ambulance on its way.” For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. “It’s Maxine,” she said. “Remember me?

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep

Succeed at home first. Seek and merit divine help. Never compromise with honesty. Remember the people involved. Hear both sides before judging. Obtain counsel of others. Defend those who are absent. Be sincere yet decisive. Develop one new proficiency a year. Plan tomorrow’s work today. Hustle while you wait. Maintain a positive attitude. Keep a sense of humor. Be orderly in person and in work. Do not fear mistakes—fear only the absence of creative, constructive, and corrective responses to those mistakes. Facilitate the success of subordinates. Listen twice as much as you speak. Concentrate all abilities and efforts on the task at hand, not worrying about the next job or promotion.

WHEN SOME BASIC NEED IS LACKING—time, energy, money—consider yourself blessed. Your very lack is an opportunity to latch onto Me in unashamed dependence. When you begin a day with inadequate resources, you must concentrate your efforts on the present moment. This is where you are meant to live—in the present;

If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: ‘For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river — / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.’ “Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius ‘not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.’ Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows.

I never even thought to look for other—oof!” Lunging forward I found myself tripping right over a nice big chunk of nothing. I stumbled forward; my body surged with the heat of concentrated humiliation. Finally I regained my footing and looked awkwardly up at Joel. “Ha,” I said as a failed effort to laugh at myself. With no hesitation Joel turned around and walked over to the spot that I’d tripped. He bent down and took a firm grip on an armful of thin air. He heaved it up into his arms and walked it over to the edge of the sidewalk and tossed it out of the way. He brushed off his hands with vigor and said, “Don’t want anyone else tripping over that invisible log.

Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.

Self-parenting exercises taught me to slowly rebuild healthy self-talk. But it must be said: Even though I know reparenting had helped dozens of my friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has told me it’s exhausting. Reparenting takes time, and concentration, and calmness. It takes an intellectual and physical effort to shove aside the comfortably worn neural pathways and go in a different direction. And even though that effort comes with joyous rewards, sometimes it also comes with sadness. Because expressing the kindness to yourself that you deserve often reminds you of the kindness you didn’t get.

By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-today existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.

Virtue, in this strict sense, is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices, requiring effort and concentration, to do something which is good and right but which doesn’t “come naturally”—and then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what’s required “automatically,” as we say.

I will say something still easier. Take a single flea or louse-since you tempt and mock our God with this talk about curing a lame horse-and if, after combining all the powers and concentrating all the efforts both of your good and all your supporters, you succeed in killing it in the name of free choice, you shall be victorious, your case shall be established, and we too will come at once and worship that god of yours, that wonderful killer of the louse.

Hamilton found it difficult to concentrate on what Eliza was saying. Her lips were moving rapidly, but he couldn't actually decipher what the words coming out of her mouth were. It was such a lovely mouth, and he found it quite quirky, given the fact that it could assume different positions with alarming frequency. Like now, it was pursed in a most attractive manner, and now... it was moving again as if the lady could not get the words out fast enough. His gaze traveled upward, past the eyes that were flashing and settled on her hair. He couldn't help but appreciate the efforts of Mabel. The curls she'd been able to produce on Eliza's head, well, they were tantalizing. He had the strangest urge to reach out and touch them, to feel with his own hand if they were as soft as they appeared, something he'd been contemplating ever since he got a good look at her in the dining room. He pulled abruptly back to reality when Eliza poked him in the chest.

You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write (I can’t do much, anyway), but in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of selfrevelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind—for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive —even that degree of selfrevelation and surrender is not enough for writing. Writing that springs from the surface of existence— when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up—is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. This is why there is never enough time at one’s disposal, for the roads are long and it is easy to go astray, there are even times when one becomes afraid and has the desire—even without any constraint or enticement—to run back (a desire always severely punished later on), how much more so if one were suddenly to receive a kiss from the most beloved lips! I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my room, outside the cellar’s outermost door. The walk to my food, in my dressing gown, through the vaulted cellars, would be my only exercise. I would then return to my table, eat slowly and with deliberation, then start writing again at once. And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For extreme concentration knows no effort. The trouble is that I might not be able to keep it up for long, and at the first failure—which perhaps even in these circumstances could not be avoided—would be bound to end in a grandiose fit of madness.

Listen with Ease Have you ever sat very silently, not with your attention fixed on anything, not making an effort to concentrate, but with the mind very quiet, really still? Then you hear everything, don’t you? You hear the far off noises as well as those that are nearer and those that are very close by, the immediate sounds—which means really that you are listening to everything. Your mind is not confined to one narrow little channel. If you can listen in this way, listen with ease, without strain, you will find an extraordinary change taking place within you, a change that comes without your volition, without your asking; and in that change there is great beauty and depth of insight.

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that's not accurate. People object. They object a lot.

Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write no more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemmingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed – and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

Just as there’s usually a space or interval between people passing on the street, even if it sometimes seems very small, a space also exists between thoughts. In your meditation, see if you can perceive this gap between thoughts. What is it, and does it belong to the realm of time? If it does not, then it’s unborn and undying, beyond all conditioning, which is a psychological carry-over from the past to the present. Whatever thoughts or internal conflicts come up—do nothing. Do not try to force them to cease or change. And don’t “do nothing” to still the mind, quiet fears, or resolve conflicts—all of this is doing something. It only leads to more struggling and prevents you from seeing the actual nature of thought and internal conflict. Genuine attention has no motive. This observation or listening doesn’t involve effort. Effort merely distracts you from what’s taking place in the instant. A kind of concentration exists that’s not forced. We’ve all experienced listening or paying attention to something we truly enjoyed. At that moment, was effort required for concentration to take place?

The political merchandisers appeal only to the weak­nesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this pur­pose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work. Carefully se­lected samples of the electorate are given "interviews in depth." These interviews in depth reveal the uncon­scious fears and wishes most prevalent in a given so­ciety at the time of an election. Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the light of the information thus obtained. After which the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look "sincere." Under the new dispen­sation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The person­ality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really mat­ter. In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to con­centrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. The great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the most -- and prefera­bly (since the audience will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat. The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex is­sues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most con­scientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchan­dise the political candidate as though he were a deo­dorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender. Those were the very bad days. It

As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.

He started to draw. He drew from memory. He had a good memory, something which, all things considered, was far from a blessing. The pencils moved quickly across the paper, scratching back and forth in deepening shades of grey. He leaned low over the paper, concentrating all his energy on his work. The candles flickered and dripped wax, having nothing better to do. Eventually he lifted his head and looked at his creation. The face of a young woman stared back at him from the paper, a slight smile playing on her lips. She looked as if she was about to say something, and that once she had you would laugh. She looked happy. Seven stared at the picture, his strange eyes unreadable – eyes that, now he made no effort to mask them, were from edge to edge only the deep blue of the dead ocean. He swallowed hard, as if he was trying to imbibe something foul tasting but necessary, like a child sipping medicine, and pulled another sheet of paper from his desk.

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his. At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, I had taken care of the meals, I had taken care of the children, I had taken care of all the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become.

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, when it would be much easier to go to the bathroom and untape the plastic zipped bag containing his cotton pads and loose razors and alcohol wipes and bandages from its hiding place beneath the sink and simply surrender. Those were the very bad days.

If he could have his way, Satan would distract us from our heritage. He would have us become involved in a million and one things in this life–probably none of which is very important in the long run–to keep us from concentrating on the things that are really important, particularly the reality that we are God’s children. He would like us to forget about home and family values. He’d like to keep us so busy with comparatively insignificant things that we don’t have time to make the effort to understand where we came from, whose children we are, and how glorious our ultimate homecoming can be!

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes. But these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest. Here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole.

His work is as it were, a sacred object and the true fruit of his life, and his aim in storing it away for a more discerning posterity will be to make it the property of mankind. An aim like this far surpasses all others, and for it he wears the crown of thorns which is one day to bloom into a wreath of laurel. All his powers are concentrated in the effort to complete and secure his work; just as the insect, in the last stage of its development, uses its whole strength on behalf of a brood it will never live to see; it puts its eggs in some place of safety, where, as it well knows, the young will one day find life and nourishment, and then dies in confidence.

Eh, it's going to end like it always ends. The internet will have its lb of flesh, this kid will get fired from his internship and then get a speaking spot at CPAC, and we'll all forget about it until he's on The Real World: Scottsdale and comes out of the closet. Meanwhile we'll all move on to the next rapping granny or institutionally abused transgendered kindergartner and concentrate our efforts there and hopefully within the next ten years Skynet will kill us all and we won't have to do this again.

Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive.

Our group pressed west on what was left of Highway 93, toward the pass leading to Las Vegas. Sand covered the road in loose drifts so deep the horses' hooves sank into them. The metal highway signs were bent low by the strong wind, and above us, billboards that once screamed ads for the casinos were now stripped of their promises of penny slots and large jackpots. The raw boards underneath were exposed, like showgirls without their makeup. Some signs had been blown over completely and lay half-buried under mounds of sand, like sleeping animals. Cars dotted the highway, their paint scoured off and dead tumbleweeds caught underneath them. Their windows were fogged with death, and despite my effort not to look, my eyes were drawn to the blurred images of the still forms inside. I tried to concentrate on the dark road ahead of us instead.

In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. Now matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run.The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can’t control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isn’t enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be frugal and make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily. Talent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that’s it. Of course, certain poets and rock singers whose genius went out in a blaze of glory—people like Schubert and Mozart, whose dramatic early deaths turned them into legends—have a certain appeal, but for the vast majority of us this isn’t the model we follow. If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else. … After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed of the writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, or two years. … Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee results will come. In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him. … Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would definitely have been different.

JUST FOR TODAY Just for today I will be happy. This assumes that what Abraham Lincoln said is true, that ‘most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’ Happiness is from within; it is not a matter of externals. Just for today I will try to adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires. I will take my family, my business, and my luck as they come and fit myself to them. Just for today I will take care of my body. I will exercise it, care for it, nourish it, not abuse it nor neglect it, so that it will be a perfect machine for my bidding. Just for today I will try to strengthen my mind. I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration. Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways; I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do, as William James suggests, just for exercise. Just for today I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress as becomingly as possible, talk low, act courteously, be liberal with praise, criticise not at all, nor find fault with anything and not try to regulate nor improve anyone. Just for today I will try to live through this day only, not to tackle my whole life problem at once. I can do things for twelve hours that would appall me if I had to keep them up for a lifetime. Just for today I will have a program. I will write down what I expect to do every hour. I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it. It will eliminate two pests, hurrying and indecision. Just for today I will have a quiet half-hour all by myself and relax. In this half-hour sometimes I will think of God, so as to get a little more perspective into my life. Just for today I will be unafraid, especially I will not be afraid to be happy, to enjoy what is beautiful, to love, and to believe that those I love, love me. If we want to develop a mental attitude that will bring us peace and happiness, here is Rule 1: Think and act cheerfully, and you will feel cheerful.

Capacity for keen observation • Exceptional ability to predict and foresee problems and trends • Special problem-solving resources; extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity; fascination with dichotomous puzzles • Preference for original thinking and creative solutions • Excitability, enthusiasm, expressiveness, and renewable energy • Heightened sensitivity, intense emotion, and compassion • Playful attitude and childlike sense of wonder throughout life • Extra perceptivity, powerful intuition, persistent curiosity, potential for deep insight, early spiritual experiences • Ability to learn rapidly, concentrate for long periods of time, comprehend readily, and retain what is learned; development of more than one area of expertise • Exceptional verbal ability; love of subtleties of written and spoken words, new information, theory, and discussion • Tendency to set own standards and evaluate own efforts • Unusual sense of humor, not always understood by others • Experience of feeling inherently different or odd • History of being misunderstood and undersupported • Deep concerns about universal issues and nature, and reverence for the interconnectedness of all things • Powerful sense of justice and intolerance for unfairness • Strong sense of independence and willingness to challenge authority • Awareness of an inner force that “pulls” for meaning, fulfillment, and excellence • Feelings of urgency about personal destiny and a yearning at a spiritual level for answers to existential puzzles

Jesus Christ is not a cosmic errand boy. I mean no disrespect or irreverence in so saying, but I do intend to convey the idea that while he loves us deeply and dearly, Christ the Lord is not perched on the edge of heaven, anxiously anticipating our next wish. When we speak of God being good to us, we generally mean that he is kind to us. In the words of the inimitable C. S. Lewis, "What would really satisfy us would be a god who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven--a senile benevolence who as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.'" You know and I know that our Lord is much, much more than that. One writer observed: "When we so emphasize Christ's benefits that he becomes nothing more than what his significance is 'for me' we are in danger. . . . Evangelism that says 'come on, it's good for you'; discipleship that concentrates on the benefits package; sermons that 'use' Jesus as the means to a better life or marriage or job or attitude--these all turn Jesus into an expression of that nice god who always meets my spiritual needs. And this is why I am increasingly hesitant to speak of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. As Ken Woodward put it in a 1994 essay, 'Now I think we all need to be converted--over and over again, but having a personal Savior has always struck me as, well, elitist, like having a personal tailor. I'm satisfied to have the same Lord and Savior as everyone else.' Jesus is not a personal Savior who only seeks to meet my needs. He is the risen, crucified Lord of all creation who seeks to guide me back into the truth." . . . His infinity does not preclude either his immediacy or his intimacy. One man stated that "I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone." . . . Christ is not "my buddy." There is a natural tendency, and it is a dangerous one, to seek to bring Jesus down to our level in an effort to draw closer to him. This is a problem among people both in and outside the LDS faith. Of course we should seek with all our hearts to draw near to him. Of course we should strive to set aside all barriers that would prevent us from closer fellowship with him. And of course we should pray and labor and serve in an effort to close the gap between what we are and what we should be. But drawing close to the Lord is serious business; we nudge our way into intimacy at the peril of our souls. . . . Another gospel irony is that the way to get close to the Lord is not by attempting in any way to shrink the distance between us, to emphasize more of his humanity than his divinity, or to speak to him or of him in casual, colloquial language. . . . Those who have come to know the Lord best--the prophets or covenant spokesmen--are also those who speak of him in reverent tones, who, like Isaiah, find themselves crying out, "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts" (Isaiah 6:5). Coming into the presence of the Almighty is no light thing; we feel to respond soberly to God's command to Moses: "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5). Elder Bruce R. McConkie explained, "Those who truly love the Lord and who worship the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit, according to the approved patterns, maintain a reverential barrier between themselves and all the members of the Godhead.

He lived much among people, but very little with them. They interested him, but he did not in the least care to have them be interested in him; for he felt the force that should have driven him to do his part with the others or against them slowly ebbing out of him. He could wait, he told himself, even if he had to wait till it was too late. Whoever has faith is in no hurry--that was his excuse to himself. For he believed that, when he came down to the bedrock of his own nature, he did have faith strong enough to move mountains--the trouble was that he never managed to set his shoulder to them. Once in a while, the impulse to create welled up in him, and he longed to see a part of himself freed in work that should be his very own. For days he would be excited with the happy, titanic effort of carting the clay for his Adam, but he never formed it in his own image. The will power necessary to persistent self-concentration was not in him. Weeks would pass before he could make up his mind to abandon the work, but he did abandon it, asking himself, in a fit of irritation, why he should continue. What more had he to gain? He had tasted the rapture of conception; there remained the toil of rearing, cherishing, nourishing, carrying to perfection--Why? For whom?

The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.

In Moscow last night Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a treaty and a declaration of purpose. The text of the latter tells the whole story: “After the German government and the government of the U.S.S.R., through a treaty signed today, definitely solved questions resulting from the disintegration of the Polish state and thereby established a secure foundation for permanent peace in eastern Europe, they jointly voice their opinion that it would be in the interest of all nations to bring to an end the state of war presently existing between Germany and Britain and France. Both governments therefore will concentrate their efforts, if necessary, in co-operation with other friendly powers, towards reaching this goal. “Should, however, the effort of both governments remain unsuccessful, the fact would thereby be established that Britain and France are responsible for a continuation of the war, in which case the governments of Germany and Russia will consult each other as to necessary measures.” This

The separation of the individual from a corporeal relationship with the Soul is mirrored in the separation of the individual from nature. This is perhaps one of the most important spiritual and psychological poisons of modernity: the alienation of the individual from the wilderness of nature. The modern obsession with progress and technology has worked to effectively separate man from the unpredictable and uncontrollable milieu of the wilderness and the concomitant alienation of the Soul from the flesh. The modern mind worships the Techno-God and uses many methods to enforce the separation of the flesh from the Soul. Reconnecting to nature requires only concentrated periods spent in a natural environment instead of living a life entirely immersed in artificial environments Efforts should be made to spend significant time in nature to allow the Sacramental Vision to thrive and organically develop. Without a constant connection to nature, the primordial voice of the Soul will eventually fade into silence. Nature must become a constant companion.

In 1944-1945, Dr Ancel Keys, a specialist in nutrition and the inventor of the K-ration, led a carefully controlled yearlong study of starvation at the University of Minnesota Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. It was hoped that the results would help relief workers in rehabilitating war refugees and concentration camp victims. The study participants were thirty-two conscientious objectors eager to contribute humanely to the war effort. By the experiment's end, much of their enthusiasm had vanished. Over a six-month semi-starvation period, they were required to lose an average of twenty-five percent of their body weight." [...] p193 p193-194 "...the men exhibited physical symptoms...their movements slowed, they felt weak and cold, their skin was dry, their hair fell out, they had edema. And the psychological changes were dramatic. "[...] p194 "The men became apathetic and depressed, and frustrated with their inability to concentrate or perform tasks in their usual manner. Six of the thirty-two were eventually diagnosed with severe "character neurosis," two of them bordering on psychosis. Socially, they ceased to care much about others; they grew intensely selfish and self-absorbed. Personal grooming and hygiene deteriorated, and the men were moody and irritable with one another. The lively and cooperative group spirit that had developed in the three-month control phase of the experiment evaporated. Most participants lost interest in group activities or decisions, saying it was too much trouble to deal with the others; some men became scapegoats or targets of aggression for the rest of the group. Food - one's own food - became the only thing that mattered. When the men did talk to one another, it was almost always about eating, hunger, weight loss, foods they dreamt of eating. They grew more obsessed with the subject of food, collecting recipes, studying cookbooks, drawing up menus. As time went on, they stretched their meals out longer and longer, sometimes taking two hours to eat small dinners. Keys's research has often been cited often in recent years for this reason: The behavioral changes in the men mirror the actions of present-day dieters, especially of anorexics.

My Standard of Performance—the values and beliefs within it—guided everything I did in my work at San Francisco and are defined as follows: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter; show self-control, especially where it counts most—under pressure; demonstrate and prize loyalty; use positive language and have a positive attitude; take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort; be willing to go the extra distance for the organization; deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation (don’t get crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); seek poise in myself and those I lead; put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own; maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together—and each activity will “make sense” in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life. But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? After all, at least since Nietzsche concluded that God was dead, philosophers and social scientists have been busy demonstrating that existence has no purpose, that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary. It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying. From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to have the best beer-bottle collection in the neighborhood, the resolution to find a cure for cancer, or simply the biological imperative to have children who will survive and prosper. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life. In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals—electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. “There is nothing to it,” those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: “We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.” Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.' Subsequent military theory has put the accent on the first clause instead of on the last: in particular, on the words 'one point' instead of on the word 'equilibrium'. The former is but a physical metaphor, whereas the latter expresses the actual psychological result which ensures 'that the rest is nothing'. His own emphasis can be traced in the strategic course of his campaigns. The word 'point' even, has been the source of much confusion, and more controversy. One school has argued that Napoleon meant that the concentrated blow must be aimed at the enemy's strongest point, on the ground that this, and this only, ensures decisive results. For if the enemy's main resistance be broken, its rupture will involve that of any lesser opposition. This argument ignores the factor of cost, and the fact that the victor may be too exhausted to exploit his success-so that even a weaker opponent may acquire a relatively higher resisting power than the original. The other school-better imbued with the idea of economy of force, but only in the limited sense of first costs-has contended that the offensive should be aimed at the enemy's weakest point. But where a point is obviously weak this is usually because it is remote from any vital artery or nerve centre, or because it is deliberately weak to draw the assailant into a trap. Here, again illumination comes from the actual campaign in which Bonaparte put this maxim into execution. It clearly suggests that what he really meant was not 'point', but 'joint'-and that at this stage of his career he was too firmly imbued with the idea of economy of force to waste his limited strength in battering at the enemy's strong point. A joint, however, is both vital and vulnerable. It was at this time too, that Bonaparte used another phrase that has subsequently been quoted to justify the most foolhardy concentrations of effort against the main armed forces of the enemy. 'Austria is our most determined enemy....Austria overthrown, Spain and Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse our attacks but concentrate them.' But the full text of the memorandum containing this phrase shows that he was arguing, not in support of the direct attack upon Austria, but for using the army on the frontier of Piedmont for an indirect approach to Austria.

She was swamped by a feeling of utter hopelessness as she waited for him to destroy her with a few caustic words. But he continued to watch her silently, his face unreadable. It seemed almost as if he were waiting for some cue from her. The dilemma lasted for several seconds, until Sara solved it by bursting into tears. She jerked her hands up to her face, blotting her streaming eyes. "I'm so sorry," she gasped. Suddenly he was next to her, touching her shoulders and arms lightly and then jerking his hands back as if burned. "No, don't. Don't. You're all right now." Gingerly he reached out to pat her back. "Don'y cry. Everything's fine. Bloody hell. Don't do that." As she continued to weep, Derek hovered over her in baffled dismay. He excelled at seducing women, charming and deceiving them, breaking down their defenses... everything but comforting them. No one had ever required it of him. "There, now," he muttered, as he had heard Lily Raiford say a thousand times to her crying children. "There, now." Suddenly she was leaning on him, her small head testing at the center of his chest. The long skeins of her hair draped everywhere, entangling him in a fine russet web. Alarmed, he lifted his hands to ease her away. Instead his arms slid around her until she was pressed against him length to length. "Miss Fielding," he said with great effort. "Sara..." She nestled deeper against him, muffling her gulping sobs in his shirtfront. Derek swore and furtively pressed his lips to the top of her head. He concentrated on the chilly night air, but his loins began to throb with an all-too-familiar pain. It was impossible to stay indifferent to the feel of her body molded to his. He was a bloody charlatan... no gentleman, no chivalrous comforter of women, only a scoundrel filled with raw desire. He smoothed his hand over her hair and urged her head into his shoulder until she was in danger of being smothered. "It's all right," he said gruffly. "Everything's fine now. Don't cry anymore.

With effort, he concentrated on an editorial. It told of widespread industrial unrest in the Midlands and asserted that it was imperative to pay a fair wage for a fair day’s work. Another article lamented that the huge industrial machine of England was operating at only half capacity and cried that greater new markets must be found for the productive wealth it could spew forth; more production meant cheaper goods, increased employment, higher wages. There were news articles that told of tension and war clouds over France and Spain because of the succession to the Spanish throne; Prussia was spreading its tentacles into all the German states to dominate them and a Franco-Prussian confrontation was imminent; there were war clouds over Russia and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire; war clouds over the Italian States that wished to throw out the upstart French King of Naples and join together or not to join together, and the Pope, French-supported, was involved in the political arena; there were war clouds over South Africa because the Boers – who had over the last four years trekked out of the Cape Colony to established the Transvaal and the Orange Free State – were now threatening the English colony of Natal and war was expected by the next mail; there were anti-Semitic riots and pogroms throughout Europe; Catholic were fighting against Protestants, Mohammedans against Hindus, against Catholics, against Protestants, and they fighting among themselves; there were Red Indian wars in America, animosity between the Northern and Southern states, animosity between America and Britain over Canada, trouble in Ireland, Sweden, Finland, India, Egypt, the Balkans  . . . ‘Does na matter what you read!’ Struan exploded to no one in particular. ‘The whole world’s mad, by God!

The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments. Volunteers in one of their studies watched a short silent film of a woman being interviewed and were asked to interpret her body language. While they were performing the task, a series of words crossed the screen in slow succession. The participants were specifically instructed to ignore the words, and if they found their attention drawn away they had to refocus their concentration on the woman’s behavior. This act of self-control was known to cause ego depletion. All the volunteers drank some lemonade before participating in a second task. The lemonade was sweetened with glucose for half of them and with Splenda for the others. Then all participants were given a task in which they needed to overcome an intuitive response to get the correct answer. Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance. It will take some time and much further research to establish whether the tasks that cause glucose-depletion also cause the momentary arousal that is reflected in increases of pupil size and heart rate.

Barbara took her accustomed place by the door but as the singing began Margerit beckoned her over to her side. "I haven't been following much except that it's all ancient Greeks and battles and such. What's happening now?" Barbara knelt beside her and leaned close to whisper so as not to disturb the rest of the party. A brief synopsis of what had gone before took up the time while the chorus escorted the principles to the centre of the stage. "I haven't seen this performance before," Barbara added, "but I imagine this will be the grand love duet." As the soprano began, she concentrated on the stage to follow the opening phrases. The chorus had abandoned the field to the principles who faced each other against a backdrop of fluted columns. "O! What strange fate is mine!" Barbara paused as the signature line was repeated several times. "I loved you in the guise of Mars, but now I am betrayed by Venus. The iron in your glance turns soft beneath my touch. I am undone. O Venus, you are cruel to mock me so." It continued on in the same vein until it was the mezzo's turn. Her lyrics ran much parallel with the soprano's. With less concentration required, Barbara ventured a glance to see Margerit's reaction. Margerit turned at the same moment and their eyes met as Barbara whispered Ifis's lines. "O! What a strange fate is mine! In the guise of Mars I love you but now as Venus I'm betrayed. The Iron in my soul turns soft beneath your touch." Unconsciously, Margerit placed a hand on hers where it lay on the arm of her chair. "Fire runs through my veins - I am undone." Fire indeed ran through her veins. Her hand burned sweetly where Margerit touched it and she dared now take it back. Her voice grew husky. "Why do the gods mock me with desire I cannot sate?" Their eyes were still locked and Margerit's lips had parted in a little "o" of wonder. "O Venus, have mercy on one new come to your shrine." When the soprano joined again for the duet, Margerit breathed along with her, "O! What strange fate is mine!" With effort, Barbara wrenched her gaze away.

Damn it, Jacob, I’m freezing my butt off.” “I came as fast as I could, considering I thought it would be wise to walk the last few yards.” Isabella whirled around, her smiling face lighting up the silvery night with more ease than the fullest of moons. She leapt up into his embrace, eagerly drinking in his body heat and affection. “I can see it now. ‘Daddy, tell me about your wedding day.’ ‘Well, son,’” she mocked, deepening her voice to his timbre and reflecting his accent uncannily, “’The first words out of your mother’s mouth were I’m freezing my butt off!’” “Very romantic, don’t you think?” he teased. “So, you think it will be a boy, then? Our first child?” “Well, I’m fifty percent sure.” “Wise odds. Come, little flower, I intend to marry you before the hour is up.” With that, he scooped her off her feet and carried her high against his chest. “Unfortunately, we are going to have to do this hike the hard way.” “As Legna tells it, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” “Yeah, well, I assure you a great many grooms have fudged that a little.” He reached to tuck her chilled face into the warm crook of his neck. “Surely the guests would know. It takes longer to walk than it does to fly . . . or whatever . . . out of the woods.” “This is true, little flower. But passing time in the solitude of the woods is not necessarily a difficult task for a man and woman about to be married.” “Jacob!” she gasped, laughing. “Some traditions are not necessarily publicized,” he teased. “You people are outrageous.” “Mmm, and if I had the ability to turn to dust right now, would you tell me no if I asked to . . . pass time with you?” Isabella shivered, but it was the warmth of his whisper and intent, not the cold, that made her do so. “Have I ever said no to you?” “No, but now would be a good time to start, or we will be late to our own wedding,” he chuckled. “How about no . . . for now?” she asked silkily, pressing her lips to the column on his neck beneath his long, loose hair. His fingers flexed on her flesh, his arms drawing her tighter to himself. He tried to concentrate on where he was putting his feet. “If that is going to be your response, Bella, then I suggest you stop teasing me with that wicked little mouth of yours before I trip and land us both in the dirt.” “Okay,” she agreed, her tongue touching his pulse. “Bella . . .” “Jacob, I want to spend the entire night making love to you,” she murmured. Jacob stopped in his tracks, taking a moment to catch his breath. “Okay, why is it I always thought it was the groom who was supposed to be having lewd thoughts about the wedding night while the bride took the ceremony more seriously?” “You started it,” she reminded him, laughing softly. “I am begging you, Isabella, to allow me to leave these woods with a little of my dignity intact.” He sighed deeply, turning his head to brush his face over her hair. “It does not take much effort from you to turn me inside out and rouse my hunger for you. If there is much more of your wanton taunting, you will be flushed warm and rosy by the time we reach that altar, and our guests will not have to be Mind Demons in order to figure out why.” “I’m sorry, you’re right.” She turned her face away from his neck. Jacob resumed his ritual walk for all of thirty seconds before he stopped again. “Bella . . .” he warned dangerously. “I’m sorry! It just popped into my head!” “What am I getting myself into?” he asked aloud, sighing dramatically as he resumed his pace. “Well, in about an hour, I hope it will be me.

I don't like to make mistakes. Which is why I haven't been with a man before now." He as thrown off balance so quickly and completely, he coud hear his own brain stumble. "Well,that's...that's wise." He took one definite step back, like a chessman going from square to square. "It's interesting that makes you nervous," she said, countering his move. "I'm not nervous,I'm...finished up here, it seems." He tried another tactic, stepped to the side. "Interesting," she continued, mirroring his move, "that it would make you nervous,or uneasy if you prefer, when you've been...I think it's safe to use the term 'hitting on me' since we met." "I don't think that's the proper term at all." Since he seemed to be boxed into a corner,he decided he was really only standing his ground. "I acted in a natural way regarding a physical attraction. But-" "And now that I've reacted in a natural way, you've felt the reins slip out of your hands and you're panicked." "I'm certainly not panicked." He ignored the terror gripping claws into his belly and concentrated on annoyance. "Back off, Keeley." "No." With her eyes locked on his, she stepped in.Checkmate. His back was hard up against a stall door and he'd been maneuvered there by a woman half his weight.It was mortifying. "This isn't doing either of us any credit." It took a lot of effort when the blood was rapidly draining out of his head, but he made his voice cool and firm. "The fact is I've rethought the matter." "Have you?" "I have,yes,and-stop it," he ordered when she ran the palms of her hands up over his chest. "You're hearts pounding," she murmured. "So's mine.Should I tell you what goes on inside my head,inside my body when you kiss me" "No." He barely managed a croak this time. "And it's not going to happen again." "Bet?" She laughed, rising up just enough to nip his chin. How could she have known how much fun it was to twist a man into aroused knots? "Why don't you tell me about this rethinking?" "I'm not going to take advantage of your-of the situation." That,she thought,was wonderfully sweet. "At the moment,I seem to have the advantage.This time you're trembling,Brian." The hell he was.How could he be trembling when he couldn't feel his own legs? "I won't be responsible.I won't use your inexperience.I won't do this." The last was said on a note of desperation and he pushed her aside. "I'm responsible for myself.And I think I've just proven to both of us,that if and when I decide you'll be the one, you won't have a prayer." She drew a deep, satisfied breath. "Knowing that's incredibly flattering." "Arousing a man doesn't take much skill, Keeley. We're cooperative creatures in that area." If he'd expected that to scratch at her pride,and cut into her power,he was mistaken. She only smiled,and the smile was full of secret female knowledge. "If that was true between us, if that were all that's between us, we'd be naked on the tack room floor right now." She saw the change in his eyes and laughed delightedly. "Already thought of that one, have you? We'll just hold that thought for another time.

Tell me what to do," she said, the words blowing against him. Whatever sanity Ross had left promptly burned to cinders. He gasped out instructions, his hands trembling as he clasped her head. "Use your tongue on the tip... yes... now take as much as you can in your... oh, God..." Sophia's fervor more than made up for her lack of experience. She did things that Eleanor would never have tried, tugging at his aching flesh, her velvety tongue swirling and lapping. Ross sank to his knees and pulled at her clothes, tearing them, and she gave a breathless laugh at his roughness. His mouth caught greedily at hers, while she wriggled to help him strip the shredded gown down her legs. A primal sound of satisfaction escaped him when Sophia's naked body was finally revealed. He lifted her to the bed, pausing only to remove his trousers before he joined her. Eagerly she slid between his legs and took his sex into her mouth once more, resisting his efforts to bring her face up to his. Groaning repeatedly, he surrendered to her ministrations, his fingers tangling in the locks of her hair. However, he was not satisfied for long- he wanted more, he craved the taste of her. Impatiently he seized her hips, maneuvering her until she was positioned at his mouth. He buried his face amid the intimate curls, his hands gripping her thighs as she jerked with surprise. He searched her with his tongue, licking deeply into the seam of moist folds. Avidly he hunted for the tiny engorged peak where her pleasure was concentrated. Finding it, he nibbled, stroked, darted his tongue at it, as he felt her stiffen in approaching climax. He backed off, gentling, while she moaned pleadingly around his cock. Twice more he brought her to the edge, making her suffer, tormenting until she responded with desperate tugs of her mouth. Each time Sophia drew on him, Ross sank his tongue deep inside her, matching his rhythm to hers, until she shuddered hard as her pleasure finally reached its zenith. She cried out against his groin, her mouth still clamped around him. His own culmination approached rapidly, and he moved his hands to her head. But she resisted his attempts to dislodge her, and the silly strokes of her tongue became too much to bear. The climax broke over him, and he arched and gasped as he was consumed in an explosion of pure white fire.

Predominantly inattentive type Perhaps the majority of girls with AD/HD fall into the primarily inattentive type, and are most likely to go undiagnosed. Generally, these girls are more compliant than disruptive and get by rather passively in the academic arena. They may be hypoactive or lethargic. In the extreme, they may even seem narcoleptic. Because they do not appear to stray from cultural norms, they will rarely come to the attention of their teacher. Early report cards of an inattentive type girl may read, "She is such a sweet little girl. She must try harder to speak up in class." She is often a shy daydreamer who avoids drawing attention to herself. Fearful of expressing herself in class, she is concerned that she will be ridiculed or wrong. She often feels awkward, and may nervously twirl the ends of her hair. Her preferred seating position is in the rear of the classroom. She may appear to be listening to the teacher, even when she has drifted off and her thoughts are far away. These girls avoid challenges, are easily discouraged, and tend to give up quickly. Their lack of confidence in themselves is reflected in their failure excuses, such as, "I can't," "It's too hard," or "I used to know it, but I can't remember it now." The inattentive girl is likely to be disorganized, forgetful, and often anxious about her school work. Teachers may be frustrated because she does not finish class work on time. She may mistakenly be judged as less bright than she really is. These girls are reluctant to volunteer for a project orjoin a group of peers at recess. They worry that other children will humiliate them if they make a mistake, which they are sure they will. Indeed, one of their greatest fears is being called on in class; they may stare down at their book to avoid eye contact with the teacher, hoping that the teacher will forget they exist for the moment. Because interactions with the teacher are often anxiety-ridden, these girls may have trouble expressing themselves, even when they know the answer. Sometimes, it is concluded that they have problems with central auditory processing or expressive language skills. More likely, their anxiety interferes with their concentration, temporarily reducing their capacity to both speak and listen. Generally, these girls don't experience this problem around family or close friends, where they are more relaxed. Inattentive type girls with a high IQ and no learning disabilities will be diagnosed with AD/HD very late, if ever. These bright girls have the ability and the resources to compensate for their cognitive challenges, but it's a mixed blessing. Their psychological distress is internalized, making it less obvious, but no less damaging. Some of these girls will go unnoticed until college or beyond, and many are never diagnosed they are left to live with chronic stress that may develop into anxiety and depression as their exhausting, hidden efforts to succeed take their toll. Issues

Are you sure you don't remember? Your mind seems to be working just fine to me." "You know what? Just forget it. Whatever it was, I forgive you. Give me my backpack so I can go back to the office. We're about to get busted anyway, just standing here." "If you really do forgive me, then you wouldn't still be going to the office." He tightens his hold on the strap of my backpack. "Ohmysweetgoodness, Galen, why are we even having this conversation? You don't even know me. What do you care if I change my schedule?" I know I'm being rude. The guy offered to carry my things and walk me to class. And depending on which version of the story I believe, he either asked me out on Monday already, or he did it indirectly a few seconds ago. None of it makes any sense. Why me? Without any effort, I can think of at least ten girls who beat me out in looks, personality, and darker foundation. And Galen could pull any of them. "What, you don't have a question for my question?" I ask after a few seconds. "It just seems silly for you to change your schedule over a disagreement about when the Titanic-" I throw my hands up at him. "Don't you see how weird this is for me?" "I'm trying to, Emma. I really am. But I think you've had a tough couple of weeks, and it's taking a toll on you. You said every time you're around me something bad happens. But you can't really know for sure that's true, unless you spend more time with me. You should at least acknowledge that." Something is wrong with me. Those cafeteria doors must have really worked me over. Otherwise, I wouldn't be pushing Galen away like this. Not with him pleading, not with the way he's leaning toward me, not with the way he smells. "See? You're taking it personally, when there's really nothing personal about it," I whisper. "It's personal to me, Emma. It's true, I don't know you well. But there are some things I do know about you. And I'd like to know more." A glass full of ice water wouldn't cool my cheeks. "The only thing you know about me is that I'm life threatening in flip-flops." That I won't meet his eyes obviously bothers him, because he lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. "That's not all I know," he says. "I know your biggest secret." This time, unlike at the beach, I don't swat his hand away. The electric current in my feet prove that we're really standing so close to each other that our toes touch. "I don't have any secrets," I say, mesmerized." He nods. "I finally figured that out. That you don't actually know about your secret." "You're not making any sense." Or I just can't concentrate because I accidentally looked up at his lips. Maybe he did talk me into swimming... The door to the front office swings open, and Galen grabs my arm and ushers me around the corner. He continues to drag me down the hall, toward world history. "That's it?" I say, exasperated. "You're just going to leave it at that?" He stops us in front of the door. "That depends on you," he says. "Come with me to the beach after school, and I'll tell you." He reaches for the knob, but I grab his hand. "Tell me what? I already told you that I don't have any secrets. And I don't swim." He grins and opens the door. "There's plenty to do at the beach besides swim." Then he pulls me by the hand so close I think he's going to kiss me. Instead, he whispers in my ear, "I'll tell you where your eye color comes from." As I gasp, he puts a gentle hand on the small of my back and propels me into the classroom. Then he ditches me.

From another corner of neuroscience, we’re learning about a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Though there are more than fifty neurotransmitters (that we know of), scientists studying substance problems have given dopamine much of their attention. The brain’s reward system and pleasure centers—the areas most impacted by substance use and compulsive behaviors—have a high concentration of dopamine. Some brains have more of it than others, and some people have a capacity to enjoy a range of experiences more than others, owing to a combination of genetics and environment. The thing about dopamine is that it makes us feel really good. We tend to want more of it. It is naturally generated through ordinary, pleasurable activities like eating and sex, and it is the brain’s way of rewarding us—or nature’s way of rewarding the brain—for activities necessary to our survival, individually or as a species. It is the “mechanism by which ‘instinct’ is manifest.” Our brains arrange for dopamine levels to rise in anticipation and spike during a pleasurable activity to make sure we do it again. It helps focus our attention on all the cues that contributed to our exposure to whatever felt good (these eventually become triggers to use, as we explain later). Drugs and alcohol (and certain behaviors) turn on a gushing fire hose of dopamine in the brain, and we feel good, even euphoric. Dopamine produced by these artificial means, however, throws our pleasure and reward systems out of whack immediately. Flooding the brain repeatedly with dopamine has long-term effects and creates what’s known as tolerance—when we lose our ability to produce or absorb our own dopamine and need more and more of it artificially just to feel okay. Specifically, the brain compensates for the flood of dopamine by decreasing its own production of it or by desensitizing itself to the neurotransmitter by reducing the number of dopamine receptors, or both. The brain is just trying to keep a balance. The problem with the brain’s reduction in natural dopamine production is that when you take the substance or behavior out of the picture, there’s not enough dopamine in the brain to make you feel good. Without enough dopamine, there is no interest or pleasure. Then not only does the brain lose the pleasure associated with using, it might not be able to enjoy a sunset or a back rub, either. A lowered level of dopamine, combined with people’s longing for the rush of dopamine they got from using substances, contributes to “craving” states. Cravings are a physiological process associated with the brain’s struggle to regain its normal dopamine balance, and they can influence a decision to keep using a substance even when a person is experiencing negative consequences that matter to him and a strong desire to change. Depending on the length of time and quantities a person has been using, these craving states can be quite uncomfortable and compelling. The dopamine system can and does recover, starting as soon as we stop flooding it. But it takes time, and in the time between shutting off the artificial supply of dopamine and the brain’s rebuilding its natural resources, people tend to feel worse (before they feel better). On a deep, instinctual level, their brains are telling them that by stopping using, something is missing; something is wrong. This is a huge factor in relapse, despite good intentions and effort to change. Knowing this can help you and your loved one make it across this gap in brain reward systems.