Circles Important Quotes

It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.

That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don't expect to get anything back, don't expect recognition for your efforts, don't expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.

The first thing every mage should learn is that magic makes fools of us. Now you may call yourself a mage. You have learned the most important lesson.

Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up. We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist. But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going, but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are. There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind.

What is magic? There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day.

Nothing important is completely explicable.

It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over. Slowly, I began to realize that I could not go back and force things to be as they once were: those two years, which up until then had seemed an endless inferno, were now beginning to show me their true meaning.

One’s options in this world are as vast as the horizon, which is technically a circle and thus infinitely broad. Yet we must choose each step we take with utmost caution, for the footprints we leave behind are as important as the path we will follow. They’re part of the same journey — our story.

When you have something so important, something that you'll stay awake for, something you know that you were designed to do, well, it's worth getting a few dark circles, don't you think?

An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but gets very little done.

But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat. He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.

To the most inconsiderate asshole of a friend, I’m writing you this letter because I know that if I say what I have to say to your face I will probably punch you. I don’t know you anymore. I don’t see you anymore. All I get is a quick text or a rushed e-mail from you every few days. I know you are busy and I know you have Bethany, but hello? I’m supposed to be your best friend. You have no idea what this summer has been like. Ever since we were kids we pushed away every single person that could possibly have been our friend. We blocked people until there was only me and you. You probably haven’t noticed, because you have never been in the position I am in now. You have always had someone. You always had me. I always had you. Now you have Bethany and I have no one. Now I feel like those other people that used to try to become our friend, that tried to push their way into our circle but were met by turned backs. I know you’re probably not doing it deliberately just as we never did it deliberately. It’s not that we didn’t want anyone else, it’s just that we didn’t need them. Sadly now it looks like you don’t need me anymore. Anyway I’m not moaning on about how much I hate her, I’m just trying to tell you that I miss you. And that well . . . I’m lonely. Whenever you cancel nights out I end up staying home with Mum and Dad watching TV. It’s so depressing. This was supposed to be our summer of fun. What happened? Can’t you be friends with two people at once? I know you have found someone who is extra special, and I know you both have a special “bond,” or whatever, that you and I will never have. But we have another bond, we’re best friends. Or does the best friend bond disappear as soon as you meet somebody else? Maybe it does, maybe I just don’t understand that because I haven’t met that “somebody special.” I’m not in any hurry to, either. I liked things the way they were. So maybe Bethany is now your best friend and I have been relegated to just being your “friend.” At least be that to me, Alex. In a few years time if my name ever comes up you will probably say, “Rosie, now there’s a name I haven’t heard in years. We used to be best friends. I wonder what she’s doingnow; I haven’t seen or thought of her in years!” You will sound like my mum and dad when they have dinner parties with friends and talk about old times. They always mention people I’ve never even heard of when they’re talking about some of the most important days of their lives. Yet where are those people now? How could someone who was your bridesmaid 20 years ago not even be someone who you are on talking terms with now? Or in Dad’s case, how could he not know where his own best friend from college lives? He studied with the man for five years! Anyway, my point is (I know, I know, there is one), I don’t want to be one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant memory. I want us to be best friends forever, Alex. I’m happy you’re happy, really I am, but I feel like I’ve been left behind. Maybe our time has come and gone. Maybe your time is now meant to be spent with Bethany. And if that’s the case I won’t bother sending you this letter. And if I’m not sending this letter then what am I doing still writing it? OK I’m going now and I’m ripping these muddled thoughts up. Your friend, Rosie

Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.

Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but utterly vacuous way of people who think it's important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all of this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time. Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed. If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister… Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable. The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy. A long time a go a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty. You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You’re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist’s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That’s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That’s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you. If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill. Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved.

It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and

The reason I don’t care about the approval and acknowledgment of my batchmates and colleagues is that most of them are basically losers. They will latch on to anyone famous in their circles, who can help them get jobs or with their business. They derive their importance and identities through association. These very people will latch on to me for the same, once the time comes. In short, they are irrelevant flies to me, looking for a turd to sit on. Once I become a piece of turd, the flies will come. A turd doesn’t care about the flies.

We must wait," she said. "They are involved in important buisness." Her tone was serious, almost reverntial. The two of them stopped, some five meters from the group of me. They were all leaning forward, staring intently at an upright rock placed in the middle of the circle. Will thought they must be praying, although no words were being said. Then, as one, they all slumped back with a roar of disappointment. "It flew away!" said one figure, and Will recognized the voice. It was the man who had rescued him. "Almost to the top and it flew away!" e lookd questioningly to Cieliema and she rolled her eyes at him. "Grown men gambling on two flies crawling up a stone." "Gambling?" he said. "I thought they were praying. She raised an eyebrow. "To them, it's much the same thing.

I realized a long time ago, with a certain amazement, that no mattter how important something is in your life, no matter how huge it is, how much space it takes up in your heart and in your thoughts, unless you mention it to other people, they have no idea it exists.

How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.

It's perfectly simple," said Wednesday. "In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or...well, you get the idea." "There are churches all across the States, though," said Shadow. "In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists' offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they've never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog, and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.

Why is it so important to have fun? Because if you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you’ll want to do more of it. You’ll think about it before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up; your mind is always in gear. When you’re that engaged, you’ll run circles around other people even if they are more naturally talented. From what we’ve seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do. If they approach their job like—well, a job—they aren’t likely to thrive. But if they’ve somehow convinced themselves that running regressions or interviewing strangers is the funnest thing in the world, you know they have a shot.

Miracles do not belong to religions. Miracles belong to the desperate, which is why every religion, every philosophy, and most importantly, every fairy tale always has a moment of salvation, a eureka, an enlightenment. We are all chasing and chasing tails, running and running in circles, until a wolf or the witch or the stepmother jumps out and trips us, and we fall flat, splat, and we lie bare and bleeding and breathless and finally, finally look and see whatever it is---salvation or eureka or enlightenment or a hunter or prince or a glass slipper---in front of us. And that's what miracles are. Not solutions, but catalysts. Not answers, but chances.

Monica looked even more confused. Nobody ever turned down being part of the queenbee's inner circle. After that second of vulnerability, though, her face hardened. "Don't diss me,Danvers. I'm warning you." "I'm not dissing you." Claire sighed. "I'm ignoring you. There's a difference. Dissing you implies I think you're actually important.

Butterflies are nature’s tragic heroes. They live most of their lives being completely ordinary. And then, one day, the unexpected happens. They burst from their cocoons in a blaze of colors and become utterly extraordinary. It is the shortest phase of their lives, but it holds the greatest importance. It shows us how empowering change can be.

A pen, you see, you hold it between your thumb and your index finger. No, wait, you hold it however you want. After that, it's not hard, you don't even think about it. Your hands don't exist anymore. The important thing happens elsewhere. No, this won't do, it's still too pretty. You're not being asked to come up with something pretty, you know. No one gives a damn about pretty. There are children's drawings and glossy magazines for that. So put on your mittens, little genius, little empty shell, yes, go on, put them on, I tell you, and maybe at last you'll see, you'll draw an almost perfect failed circle.

In Jungian circles, shame is often referred to as the swampland of the soul. I’m not suggesting that we wade out into the swamp and set up camp. I’ve done that and I can tell you that the swampland of the soul is an important place to visit, but you would not want to live there. What I’m proposing is that we learn how to wade through it. We need to see that standing on the shore and catastrophisizing about what could happen if we talked honestly about our fears is actually more painful than grabbing the hand of a trusted companion and crossing the swamp. And, most important, we need to learn why constantly trying to maintain our footing on the shifting shore as we gaze across to the other side of the swamp—where our worthiness waits for us—is much harder work than trudging across.

I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence, than of good sense, goodwill, and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one's environment and the natural inclination to close one's eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: 'What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.' You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable clichés.

Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.

Family and friends become oppressors the moment they teach you that loyalty is more important than what is done to people outside your social circle. What they are really saying is this: Save yourself because God is more interested in an intact family or social circle that looks righteous, rather than you being a person of integrity that has compassion for others. It is this absurdity that teaches the wrong version of God and creates the next generation of "me" centered individuals.

That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.

ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change…

Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one's real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one's days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.

I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t, but if you’ve gone this far I suppose it’s obvious that what was ignited when I loved you continues to burn. But that’s of small importance to you now, and that’s how it should be. Everything is in its place. The past rests, breathing faintly in the darkness. It no longer holds me as it used to; now I must reach back to touch it. It is night and I am alone and there is still time, a moment more. I am standing on a long black stage, with a circle of light on me, which is my love for you, enduring. I have escaped—or have been expelled—from eternity and am back in time. But I step out once more to sing this aria, this confession, this testament without end. My arms open wide, not to embrace you but to embrace the world, the mystery we are caught in. There is no orchestra, no audience; it is an empty theater in the middle of the night and all the clocks in the world are ticking. And now for this last time, Jade, I don’t mind, or even ask if it is madness: I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat.

These stories are important to me, not because they happen to be about South Asians, but because they’re circling around a certain strain of loneliness that goes deeper than cultural dissonance, that has to do with the yearning to connect with someone else, or with some unreachable vision of home.

That was the first important discovery I made about Betty: she was desperately isolated, and she survived this isolation only by virtue of the sustaining myth that her intimate life was being lived elsewhere. Her friends, her circle of acquaintances, were not here, but elsewhere, in New York, in Texas, in the past. In fact, everything of importance was elsewhere. It was at this time that I first began to suspect that for Betty there was no “here” there.

The age wasn't as important as the milestones.

I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and however pretentious that remark sounds... it is an absolute fact-- so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

Jericho saw the land. And he saw the dead underneath the land. He saw them decomposing, their flesh sinking into the ground. The dead became the land. Nutrients for crops, which the living harvested and ate. The dead became the living until the living became the dead. An eternal recurrence. A circle. This was the oldest and most important story humankind told itself: that it could transcend death. All religion, all stories boiled down to this: We are born. We live. We struggle. We love. We search for meaning. We die. Again and again and again.

That second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker! there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?

The newspapers kept stroking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. Evidence suggested that we were not doing well. Researchers gloomily agreed. Environment psychologists were interviewed. Damage had ‘unwittingly’ been done. There were ‘feared lapses’. There were ‘misconceptions’ about potential. Situations had ‘deteriorated’. Cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The populace was confounded, yet didn’t care. Unpublished studies hinted that we were all paying a price. Scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. No one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. And no one argued back. No one challenged anything. Anxiety was soaking up most people’s days. Everyone had become preoccupied with horror. Madness was fluttering everywhere. There was fifty years of research supporting this data. There were diagrams illustrating all of these problems – circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. Most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. You couldn’t help being both afraid and fascinated. Reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn’t seem very important in the long run. We were doomed. We deserved it. I was so tired.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN First of all, you have to sit down, which you’re probably already doing. The traditional way is to sit on a zafu cushion on the floor with your legs crossed, but you can sit on a chair if you want to. The important thing is just to have good posture and not to slouch or lean on anything. Now you can put your hands in your lap and kind of stack them up, so that the back of your left hand is on the palm of your right hand, and your thumb tips come around and meet on top, making a little round circle. The place where your thumbs touch should line up with your bellybutton. Jiko says this way of holding your hands is called hokkai jo-in,113 and it symbolizes the whole cosmic universe, which you are holding on your lap like a great big beautiful egg.

Walker had broken what in his circles were important taboos: Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.

Nothing really important in life is in the realm of provable fact.

It’s what people do is important, not what they say or feel.

Now, okay, important knitting life lesson right here: don’t go acrylic. Just don’t. Acrylic’s what you’re gonna find at, like, Wal-Mart, and acrylic is crap. I have it on good authority that it’s like knitting with barbed wire, that it’s squeaky, yeah, that’s right, squeaky, and that – although I can’t vouch for this one personally – apparently it’s what Satan uses to make Christmas sweaters for the ninth-circle sinners.

As the Taliban circled the bazaar in their Toyota pickup trucks, the ice cream is no longer my enemy. Sunita is risking her life for this pleasure. She is sharing it with me. Finally, my being fat is clearly less important than being free. I eat the ice cream.

I shook my head, smiling in spite of myself, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Adrian. My husband. If anyone had told me a year ago that I'd be married, I would've said they were joking. If they'd told me I'd be married to a vampire, I would've said they were delusional. Looking at Adrian now, I felt a surge of love well up within me, despite our earlier tension. I could no longer imagine a life without him in it. It was impossible. Could I imagine a life with him that didn't involve us being trapped in a suite of rooms with his mother while both our people reviled us and made plans against us? Definitely. There were any number of futures I'd love to have for us, but his was our current path until something spectacular happened. Outside, the Court's gates, my people wanted to imprison me. Inside them, his people wanted to assault him. At least in this suite, we were safe. Most importantly, we were together.

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage might work: Because you wear pink but write poems about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell at your keys when you lose them, and laugh, loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol, gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming. You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents of what you packed were written inside the boxes. Because you think swans are overrated. Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence. Because you underline everything you read, and circle the things you think are important, and put stars next to the things you think I should think are important, and write notes in the margins about all the people you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there. Because you make that pork recipe you found in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed over the windows, you still believe someone outside can see you. And one day five summers ago, when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments— there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, which you paid for with your last damn dime because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but who gets very little done.

But I believe we have even more to gain than a husband’s admiration, and that is compassion. We may not care for concubines, but it’s important to remember that each one came from the womb of a woman. Every girl—no matter how small-minded or unfortunate—had a mother who nursed and cared for her.

His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want.

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature

Finally, I learned that we shouldn’t seek answers as much as we should seek God. We get overanxious. We try to microwave our own answers instead of trusting God’s timing. But here’s an important reminder: If you seek answers you won’t find them, but if you seek God, the answers will find you. There comes a point after you have prayed through that you need to let go and let God. How? By resisting the temptation to manufacture your own answer to your own prayer.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

Bold prayers honor God, and God honors bold prayers. God isn’t offended by your biggest dreams or boldest prayers. He is offended by anything less. If your prayers aren’t impossible to you, they are insulting to God. Prayers are prophecies. They are the best predictors of your spiritual future. Who you become is determined by how you pray. Ultimately, the transcript of your prayers becomes the script of your life. The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked. God does not answer vague prayers. The more specific your prayers are, the more glory God receives. Most of us don’t get what we want because we quit praying. We give up too easily. We give up too soon. We quit praying right before the miracle happens. If you don’t take the risk, you forfeit the miracle. Take a step of faith when God gives you a vision because you trust that the One who gave you the vision is going to make provision. And for the record, if the vision is from God, it will most definitely be beyond your means. We shouldn’t seek answers as much as we should seek God. If you seek answers you won’t find them, but if you seek God, the answers will find you. If your plans aren’t birthed in prayer and bathed in prayer, they won’t succeed. Are your problems bigger than God, or is God bigger than your problems? Our biggest problem is our small view of God. That is the cause of all lesser evils. And it’s a high view of God that is the solution to all other problems. Because you know He can, you can pray with holy confidence. Persistence is the magic bullet. The only way you can fail is if you stop praying. 100 percent of the prayers I don’t pray won’t get answered. Where are you most proficient, most sufficient? Maybe that is precisely where God wants you to trust Him to do something beyond your ability. What we perceive as unanswered prayers are often the greatest answers. Our heavenly Father is far too wise and loves us far too much to give us everything we ask for. Someday we’ll thank God for the prayers He didn’t answer as much or more than the ones He did. You can’t pray for open doors if you aren’t willing accept closed doors, because one leads to the other. Just as our greatest successes often come on the heels of our greatest failures, our greatest answers often come on the heels of our longest and most boring prayers. The biggest difference between success and failure, both spiritually and occupationally, is your waking-up time on your alarm clock. We won’t remember the things that came easy; we’ll remember the things that came hard. It’s not just where you end up that’s important; it’s how you get there. Goal setting begins and ends with prayer. The more you have to circle something in prayer, the more satisfying it is spiritually. And, often, the more glory God gets. I don’t want easy answers or quick answers because I have a tendency to mishandle the blessings that come too easily or too quickly. I take the credit or take them for granted. So now I pray that it will take long enough and be hard enough for God to receive all of the glory. Change your prayer approach from as soon as possible to as long as it takes. Go home. Lock yourself in your room. Kneel down in the middle of the floor, and with a piece of chalk draw a circle around yourself. There, on your knees, pray fervently and brokenly that God would start a revival within that chalk circle.

Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.

The landscape itself is important. This is a liminal zone, between land and water, sea and sky . . .

A quiet but indomitable voice behind me said, “I believe this is my dance.” It was Ren. I could feel his presence. The warmth of him seeped into my back, and I quivered all over like spring leaves in a warm breeze. Kishan narrowed his eyes and said, “I believe it is the lady’s choice.” Kishan looked down at me. I didn’t want to cause a scene, so I simply nodded and removed my arms from his neck. Kishan glared at his replacement and stalked angrily off the dance floor. Ren stepped in front of me, took my hands gently in his, and placed them around his neck, bringing my face achingly close to his. Then he slid his hands slowly and deliberately over my bare arms and down my sides, until they encircled my waist. He traced little circles on my exposes lower back with his fingers, squeezed my waist, and drew my body up tightly against him. He guided me expertly through the slow dance. He didn’t say anything, at least not with words, but he was still sending lots of signals. He pressed his forehead against mine and leaned down to nuzzle my ear. He buried his face in my hair and lifted his hand to stroke down the length of it. His fingers played along my bare arm and at my waist. When the song ended, it took both of us a min to recover our senses and remember where we were. He traced the curve of my bottom lip with his finger then reached up to take my hand from around his neck and led me outside to the porch. I thought he would stop there, but he headed down the stairs and guided me to a wooded area with stone benches. The moon made his skin glow. He was wearing a white shirt with dark slacks. The white made me think of him as the tiger. He pulled me under the shadow of a tree. I stood very still and quiet, afraid that if I spoke I’d say something I’d regret. He cupped my chin and tilted my face up so he could look in my eyes. “Kelsey, there’s something I need to say to you, and I want you to be silent and listen.” I nodded my head hesitantly. “First, I want to let you know that I heard everything you said to me the other night, and I’ve been giving your words some very serious thought. It’s important for you to understand that.” He shifted and picked up a lock of hair, tucked it behind my ear, and trailed his fingers down my cheek to my lips. He smiled sweetly at me, and I felt the little love plant bask in his smile and turn toward it as if it contained the nourishing rays of the sun. “Kelsey,” he brushed a hand through his hair, and his smile turned into a lopsided grin, “the fact is…I’m in love with you, and I have been for some time.” I sucked in a deep breath. He picked up my hand and played with my fingers. “I don’t want you to leave.” He began kissing my fingers while looking directly into my eyes. It was hypnotic. He took something out of his pocket. “I want to give you something.” He held out a golden chain covered with small tinkling bell charms. “It’s an anklet. They’re very popular here, and I got this one so we’d never have to search for a bell again.” He crouched down, wrapping his hand around the back of my calf, and then slid his palm down to my ankle and attached the clasp. I swayed and barely stopped myself from falling over. He trailed his warm fingers lightly over the bells before standing up. Putting his hands on my shoulders, he squeezed, and pulled me closer. “Kells . . . please.” He kissed my temple, my forehead, and my cheek. Between each kiss, he sweetly begged, “Please. Please. Please. Tell me you’ll stay with me.” When his lips brushed lightly against mine, he said, “I need you,” then crushed his lips against mine.

Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed—even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.

All throughout the world, love speaks to us, what it means to cherish and be kind and to respect each other. If we miss the message, we will get lost. We will lose out on what’s important.

The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood, being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson.

I was born the 26th of December. . . Arrive by dint of perseverance, but step by step. . . Tenancy to exaggerate the importance of earthly life. Avaricious of self. Constant in their affections and their hatreds. . . Yes, the Capricorn is a beast of solitude. Slow, steady, and persevering. Lives on several levels at once. Thinks in circles. Fascinated by death. Ever climbing, climbing. In search of the edelweiss, presumably. Or could it be immortelle? Knows no mother. Only "the mothers". Laughs little and usually on the wrong side of the face. . . Speaks truthfully instead of kindly. Metaphysics, abstractions, electromagnetic displays. Dives to the depths. Sees stars, comets, and asteroids where others see only moles, warts, and pimples. Feeds on himself when tired of playing the man-eating shark. A paranoiac. An ambulatory paranoiac. But constant in his affections - and his hatreds. Ouais!

In terms of systems design, shapes are important. Rectangles are not common in nature. That's probably because from a systems design perspective, rectangles often degrade efficiency instead of contributing to efficiency. Yet humans have designed an entire supply chain system based on rectangles, squares and straight lines. If we want to be more efficient, we should replace those rectangles, squares and straight lines with ovals, circles and hexagons. And maybe some other nature inspired geometries.

But this analogy with the members of the Trinity is very important for another reason, it warns us against thinking that union with Christ will ever swallow up our individual personalities. Even though the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have perfect and eternal unity, yet they remain distinct persons. In the same way, even though someday we shall attain perfect unity with other believers and with Christ, yet we shall forever remain distinct persons as well, with our own individual gifts, abilities, interests, responsibilities, circles of personal relationships , preferences and desires

the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

To where," added Leroy, "resides the answer to your question: why are we living? what is essential in life?" He looked hard at the lady. "The essential, in life, is to perpetuate life: it is childbirth, and what precedes it, coitus, and what precedes coitus, seduction, that is to say kisses, hair floating in the wind, silk underwear, well-cut brassieres, and everything else that makes people ready for coitus, for instance good chow - not fine cuisine, a superfluous thing no one appreciates anymore, but the chow everyone buys - and along with chow, defecation, because you know, my dear lady, my beautiful adored lady, you know what an important position the praise of toilet paper and diapers occupies in our profession. Toilet paper, diapers, detergents, chow. That is man's sacred circle, and our mission is not only to discover it, seize it, and map it but to make it beautiful, to transform it into song. Thanks to our influence, toilet paper is almost exclusively pink, and that is a highly edifying fact, which, my dear and anxious lady, I would recommend that you contemplate seriously.

was me against the world. But coming here to James Town has changed me. I have learned to depend on others, especially Reverend Hunt, Captain Smith, and even Richard. I have learned the importance of standing together, of cooperating. My circle has

The fifth stage is one of waste and squandering. In this stage, the ruler wastes on pleasures and amusements the treasures accumulated by his ancestors, through excessive generosity to his inner circle. Also, he acquires bad low-class followers to whom he entrusts the most important matters of state, which they are not qualified to handle by themselves, not knowing which of them they should tackle and which they should leave alone. The ruler seeks to destroy the great clients of his people and followers of his predecessors. (...)Thus, he ruins the foundations his ancestors had laid and tears down what they had built up. In this stage, the dynasty is seized by senility and the chronic disease from which it can hardly ever rid itself, for which it can find no cure, and eventually it is destroyed.

Without their uniforms, they were probably nobodies, rejects. Give a man a uniform. Give him a few sparkly badges, a purpose, a gun ... and suddenly, he was no longer just another kid trying to make it through life without being ridiculed. Suddenly, he was a part of something. Something important. Something powerful. Something greater than he could ever be on his own. It was amazing how empowering the group could be.

Through the radical undoing and debilitation of repeated pain we are reacquainted with the essentialities of place and time and existence itself; in deep pain we have energy only for what we can do wholeheartedly and then, only within a narrow range of motion, metaphorically or physically, from tying our shoelace to holding the essential core conversations that are reciprocal and reinforcing within the close-in circle of those we love. Pain teaches us a fine economy, in movement, in the heart’s affections, in what we ask of ourselves and eventually in what we ask in others.

You carried it in your hand like it was the most precious thing. It reminded me of what I used to be like, when I lived out here... It reminded me of finding something wild and knowing it was important somehow, to something.” You drew another circle over your knee, then filled it in with specks. “It made me realize where I belonged… not in a city park with cheap store-bought spirits, but out here in the land I knew, with the real ones.

[I]t is a matter of indifference what a person's occupation is, or at what job he works. The crucial thing is how he works, whether he in fact fills the place in which he happens to have landed. The radius of his activity is not important; important alone is whether he fills the circle of his tasks.

Big production, no story, as they say around the movie lots. I guess Sylvia is happy enough, though not necessarily with me. In our circle that's not too important. There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun, but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared to the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.

I’ve seen many times over the years how liars get so good at lying, they lose the ability to distinguish between what’s true and what’s not. They surround themselves with other liars. The circle becomes closer and smaller, with those unwilling to surrender their moral compasses pushed out and those willing to tolerate deceit brought closer to the center of power. Perks and access are given to those willing to lie and tolerate lies. This creates a culture, which becomes an entire way of life. The easy, casual lies—those are a very dangerous thing. They open up the path to the bigger lies, in more important places, where the consequences aren’t so harmless.

A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew it all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years. It was a question, which from time to time, caused her some anxiety and left her fretting with a dreadful sense of waste. But now, it seemed, the question had become irrelevant, and so the answer, whatever it was, was no longer of any importance.

She needs you to help her calm herself, and one important aspect of that is giving her space and time.

Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own.Always create happy with your circle.

People didn’t realize how important it was to hug the single people in church—particularly the widows.

There’s less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank,” Bailey said. “They’ll be food pretty soon, so their happiness is less important than the shark’s.

The relation between the white and black races in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes. If the one of the two sexes were told that they did not play any greater part in the life of the other sex than this other sex plays within their own existence, they would be shocked and hurt. […] If they (white people) had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease. If you had told the Natives that they played no greater part in the life of the white people than the white people played in their lives, they would never have believed you, but would have laughed at you. Probably in Natives circles, stories are passing about, and being repeated, which prove the all-absorbing interest of the white people in the Kikuyu or Kavirondo, and their complete dependence upon them.

There can be different types of bonds in life, with different people. But, no bond is less important than the other. And no matter you may not have a certain kind of bond other people have, you can have other types of bonds those people cannot have. And there's more to it – when you don't have a certain type of needful bond, the other bonds you have formed with different people, all of them double (it is like, when one is born blind, their other four senses are doubled). So, I know it is hard, but you must not grieve over what you do not have. Instead, try to embrace what you already have. Do not feel alone or lost. What you are lacking, is added to other types of relationships, and of course, it may not feel the same way as it would if you had a certain bond, but it is not gone, it is still there, only, in another form... Preserve your bonds and fight to protect them – that is the path of a Blade Warrior...

Children inherit the qualities of the parents, no less than their physical features. Environment does play an important part, but the original capital on which a child starts in life is inherited from its ancestors. I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul. Polak and I had often very heated discussions about the desirability or otherwise of giving the children an English education. It has always been my conviction that Indian parents who train their children to think and talk in English from their infancy betray their children and their country. They deprive them of the spiritual and social heritage of the nation, and render them to that extent unfit for the service of the country. Having these convictions, I made a point of always talking to my children in Gujarati. Polak never liked this. He thought I was spoiling their future. He contended, with all the vigour and love at his command, that, if children were to learn a universal language like English from their infancy, they would easily gain considerable advantage over others in the race of life. He failed to convince me. I do not now remember whether I convinced him of the correctness of my attitude, or whether he gave me up as too obstinate. This happened about twenty years ago, and my convictions have only deepened with experience. Though my sons have suffered for want of full literary education, the knowledge of the mother-tongue that they naturally acquired has been all to their and the country’s good, inasmuch as they do not appear the foreigners they would otherwise have appeared. They naturally became bilingual, speaking and writing English with fair ease, because of daily contact with a large circle of English friends, and because of their stay in a country where English was the chief language spoken.

Ideation is important for innovation. But it is only the first step! Incubation must follow and so must acceleration for the circle of innovation to reach completion,or else, you risk expiration.

That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.

Perhaps the most important thing in life is for each person to stay headed in the right direction within his assigned place and not to veer off in vain or run around in circles on ill-defined quests.

Life is a road. The most important thing about a road is its end, where it goes. If the road of life has no real end and goal, it is meaningless. It is a circle or a swamp or a wilderness, not a road.

They both scanned the menus, each pair of eyes starting in the unhelpful middle of the dessert menu for some no-reason, then tipsily circling around and around until most of the important words had been absorbed.

A circle is a shape with infinitely many sides. Mathematicians used this trick of thinking about the circle as a shape with many sides to first try to work out one of the most important numbers in mathematics: pi

In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it onto motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his “intangible preponderance.” His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucratic-organizational qualities. He is distinguished from earlier types of dictators in that he hardly wins through simple violence. Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure his position as leader of the Nazi movement; on the contrary, Röhm, the chief of the SA and able to count upon its loyalty to his own person, was one of Hitler’s inner-party enemies. Stalin won against Trotsky, who not only had a far greater mass appeal but, as chief of the Red Army, held in his hands the greatest power potential in Soviet Russia at the time. Not Stalin, but Trotsky, moreover, was the greatest organizational talent, the ablest bureaucrat of the Russian Revolution. On the other hand, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position to them.

So much of our life is the circling of a dream. The dream, a changeable elusive presence, is at the heart of our identity, it is the fabric to which all our qualities are stitched. Did it matter that the dream never found fruition in the physical world? The important thing was never to relinquish it. It’s the dream which keeps beauty as an animating source of strength in our lives, which reminds us we are connected to a larger reality.

Maybe she’ll have a file labeled, My Evil Plan,” I suggested. “That would be super helpful.” It had taken us three days to come up with a strategy to get into the office. Cal was distracting Lara with questions about his own powers and how they might be useful to “the cause,” while Jenna and Archer kept an eye on Mrs. Casnoff. Since she’d taken to just wandering in circles around the pond, that wasn’t particularly challenging. Which left the most important part to me and Elodie using Elodie’s magic to get into the office and search it for anything that might help us stop the Casnoffs. As far as plans went, it wasn’t exactly D-day, but it was the best next step. Now Elodie looked at my reflection and said, “It’s weird. Looking in a mirror and seeing you.” Yes, I think we’ve established this is kind of awful for everyone involved. Can we go now? We don’t have much time.”

Neoliberalism insists that if we work hard enough, we can earn as much money as anyone else. Of course, the concept of meritocracy is integral to neoliberalism and erases the reality of capital itself, that capitalism is not just material capital but also, importantly, social and cultural capital. Without these forms of capital, (p. 77) one cannot, in fact, “succeed” in a capitalist culture. One obvious example is the art world, where one can only have their work shown in a gallery if they have connections to that gallery (galleries do not, for the most part, accept unsolicited submissions). All the cash in the world can’t create the generations of social connections of a middle-class family, whose circle might include art collectors, gallerists, critics, and artists. It is also the values and unspoken rules of the ruling class that distinguish who is allowed in and who is not.

Inflation, unemployment, the political crises and, not least, the folly of lands abroad, had made the German people restless; a tremendous desire for order animated all circles of the German people, to whom order had always been more important than freedom and justice. And anyone who promised order – even Goethe said that disorder was more distasteful to him than even an injustice – could count on hundreds of thousands of supporters from the start.

We have a very powerful myth in our culture, the myth of the self-made man or woman. But let’s be honest. There’s no such thing.5 Success requires help—and usually lots of it. It’s impossible to discount the influence of our social circle.

First we conceive the "I" and grasp onto it. Then we conceive the "mine" and cling to the material world. Like water trapped on the water wheel, we spin in circles, powerless. I praise the compassion that embraces all beings. – Chandrakirti

None of our sources explain what it was supposed to accomplish, but if it took its name from a key that was carried, then that key must have been of central importance - it must have been used to lock or unlock something significant." [lxxxix]

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

There is an old adage: ready, set, go. And I know it’s predicated on the importance of preparation. But I think it’s backward. You’ll never be ready. You’ll never be set. Sometimes you just need to go for it. The sequence of faith is this: Go. Set. Ready.

I’ve been queen for ages and ages,” Sunny went on. She strutted across the cave floor. “No one dares challenge me for my throne! I am the strongest SandWing queen who ever lived!” “Don’t forget the treasure,” Tsunami hissed, pointing at a pile of loose rocks. “Oh, right,” Sunny said. “It’s probably because of all my treasure! I have so much treasure because I’m such an important queen!” She swept the rocks toward her and gathered them between her talons. “Did someone say treasure?” Clay bellowed, leaping out from behind a large rock formation. Sunny yelped with fright. “No!” Tsunami called. “You’re not scared! You’re Queen Oasis, the big, bad queen of the sand dragons.” “R-right,” Sunny said. “Rargh! What is this tiny scavenger doing in the Kingdom of Sand? I am not afraid of tiny scavengers! I shall go out there and eat him in one bite!” Glory started giggling so hard she had to lie down and cover her face with her wings. Even Tsunami was making faces like she was trying not to laugh. Clay swung his stalagmite in a circle. “Squeak squeak squeak!” he shouted. “And other annoying scavenger noises! I’m here to steal treasure away from a magnificent dragon!” “Not from me, you won’t,” Sunny said, bristling. She stamped forward, spread her wings, and raised her tail threateningly. Without the poisonous barb other SandWings had, Sunny’s tail was not very menacing. But nobody pointed that out. “Yaaaaaaah!” Clay shouted, lunging forward with his rock claw. Sunny darted out of the way, and they circled each other, feinting and jabbing. This was Clay’s favorite part. When Sunny forgot about trying to act queenly and focused on the battle, she was fun to fight. Her small size made it easy for her to dodge and slip under his defenses. But in the end Queen Oasis had to lose — that was how the story went. Clay drove Sunny back against the wall of the cave and thrust the fake claw between her neck and her wing, pretending it went right through her heart. “Aaaaaaaargh,” Sunny howled. “Impossible! A queen defeated by a lowly scavenger! The kingdom will fall apart! Oh, my treasure … my lovely treasure . . .” She collapsed to the ground and let her wings flop lifelessly on either side of her. “Ha ha ha!” Clay said. “And squeak squeak! The treasure is mine!” He scooped up all the rocks and paraded away, lashing his tail proudly.

The widespread (heretical) idea in many evangelical circles that the only important reason Jesus came was to die for our sins is one of the most glaring examples of failure to embrace the full biblical Christ. Tragically, other Christians seem to affirm the (equally heretical) idea that it is only Jesus’s teaching (especially his call to love enemies) that is finally important. If we believe with the church through two millennia that the teacher from Nazareth is God incarnate, then we must embrace the full biblical Christ.

The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps. True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote: You can pray freely But just so God alone can hear. (She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received 'tenners,' the longest term then given. (In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the 'nuns.' Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three-year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)

The golden ratio, as well as the Great Pyramid as an expression of it, is an important key to our universe containing the Earth and the Moon. ... The ratio between the Earth and the Moon is in fact the basis for the mathematical concept of 'squaring the circle' ...

It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and we risk not recognizing each other when we return.

When it comes to the notion of extraterrestrial life,” he began, “there exists a blinding array of bad science, conspiracy theory, and outright fantasy. For the record, let me say this: Crop circles are a hoax. Alien autopsy videos are trick photography. No cow has ever been mutilated by an alien. The Roswell saucer was a government weather balloon called Project Mogul. The Great Pyramids were built by Egyptians without alien technology. And most importantly, every extraterrestrial abduction story ever reported is a flat-out lie.

They were an invisible mob inside an ivory tower. The calls themselves irritated rather than informed her. “They’d do mental masturbation,” said Charity. “Mental masturbation is actually an important concept. It’s when you talk in circles for an hour and reach no decision.

As clear as it is important, the death of Detroit is still mostly ignored. Generally, the slow destruction of a major city would get a fair amount of attention, but the lack of coverage is hardly surprising. After all, the “bad guys” aren’t the popular ones. In most circles, condemning taxation, regulation, unionization, welfarism and protectionism is unfashionable. It’s necessary to check political correctness at the door and appreciate that the case of Detroit isn’t an isolated tragedy. What happened in Detroit could be coming to a city near you.

The summer getting is good, but no amount of talk or trade will encourage Mary to let any of the family up the trail, not today, today is important. The tables arranged in a circle. A bell placed under a special chair in the centre. Those lucky four allowed to come are dressed all in black like Mary and her husband. Mary stands on a box staring through a wall. It was her idea to remove the eyes from the white wolf portrait. It was beautiful and if Mary had of paid she might have thought twice before putting a knife to it, but it was a gift, Tabbot's has a secret admirer.

How do we teach a child--our own, or those in a classroom--to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have--or need--answers.

party.   Being a net addition is different than just not being a net negative. Being simply neutral is often a negative, as you are taking up an attendance slot that could have been used by someone else who could have been an addition. It's important to proactively add to social situations.   Most

To be fair, she called this morning. I stared at the phone. Circled it on my bed. And, eventually, it stopped ringing. If it had been important, she would’ve called back, right? That was the line of thought that ran through my head until halfway through the day, when I started to feel bad about it.

I’m the dad, I’m the one who should have known better. It’s just that it got to be a kind of vicious circle if you know what I mean. Me feeling alienated, bummed-out, drinking a lot. And I never should have let that happen. I missed, like, some really important years in your life. I’m the one that has to live with that.

You are already part of a family," Desari reminded him,her body brushing his, her arms circling his waist from behind. She had materialized out of nowhere,her presence filling the healing chamber. She was there.Completing him. His air. His heart.The part of his soul that really lived and loved and mattered. Without conscious thought he sent up a quick prayer of thanks that he had been granted such a priceless treasure when he felt so undeserving of her. Julian loved the way she smelled. He inhaled, and her scent washed over him, clean and sexy. "This mess? With all these males?" Julian allowed a low, rumbling growl to escape. "This is no family. This is a man's nightmare." Desari deliberately moved against him, her body soft and pliant with invitation. "Is that what you think?" "What I think is"-Julian circled her slender throat with his large hand in mock threat- "you are deliberately tempting me when I have important, pressing business to atttend to.

Finally, let me share a feeling of mine, I hope it will not be misinterpreted as pride. I am seventy four now. But still, if they give me a duty in the wooden hut where I used to stay when I was a mentor long years ago, I will gladly run there and try to fulfill that duty. Perhaps, some of our friends can see that task as a simple and trivial one. But I have not underestimated this duty and would never do so. Even today, some people may consider our having lessons with the small circle of young scholars here as a simple and trivial job. However, in my opinion, this is the most important occupation that can take human to the highest levels.

Gradually, however, the liberal story expanded its horizons, and at least in theory came to value the liberties and rights of all human beings without exception. As the circle of liberty expanded, the liberal story also came to recognize the importance of communist-style welfare programs. Liberty is not worth much unless it is coupled with some kind of social safety net. Social-democratic welfare states combined democracy and human rights with state-sponsored education and healthcare. Even the ultracapitalist United States has realized that the protection of liberty requires at least some government welfare services. Starving children have no liberties.

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man, standing alongside the road, shouts, "Where are you going?"and the first man replies, "I don't know! Ask the horse!" This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don't know where we are going, and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We are always running,and it has become a habit. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others. We have to learn the art of stopping.

I’d known, of course, that a blizzard was coming, or I suppose I’d known, for I didn’t own a television or a radio, and I didn’t traffic in circles where people talked excessively about the weather—we had larger, more important things to discuss; weather was something over which our grandmothers, our dull neighbors in the suburbs, obsessed.

One point is certain: In many Gnostic circles women had a prominence they did not have in society at large. Part of the reason for this was that, since it is the spirit and not the body that is important, the shape of one’s body has little to do with eternal realities. Also, in many of the genealogies of eons with which Gnostics explained the origin of the world, there were female as well as male eons. It is quite possible that it was partly in response to this feature in Gnosticism that orthodox Christianity began restricting the role of women in the church, for it is clear that in first-century Christianity women had roles in the church that the second century began to deny them.

He was exasperated because he didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cosy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

This is a roadside attraction,” said Wednesday. “One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.” “Come again?” “It’s perfectly simple,” said Wednesday. “In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples, or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.” “There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow. “In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat-house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.

For some years now there has been considerable conflict in educational circles about what and how children should be taught. The old system was to serve two purposes: to discipline the mind and to provide young people with a background of knowledge about the past, history, philosophy, and the arts. More recently, the influence of Dewey has been powerful in effecting a change in orientation. It is not so important, according to this school, to provide the child with a background of general culture. The essential thing is to relate every fact learned to the tangible world around him. The purpose of his education is to explain to him the things he can feel and see and touch and experience in his daily life.

A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.

Metaphorically we walk in circles—watching silly TV shows, surfing the net, posting to our Facebook page—while waiting for a sense of wholeness, or peace of mind, or purpose to arrive. The rug-scratches of distraction, avoidance, and indulgence are not changing anything of importance. We need a place we can be comfortable, in the original etymological sense of that word: with (com) strength (fort, like “build a fort,” from the Latin fortis). Living with our strength in the world requires far more of us than distraction, avoidance, and indulgence. If you want to find peace of mind and purpose, you will have to let go of finding a way out and instead pivot toward finding a way in. I am acutely aware that this is easier said than done.

After this examination there are still gaps of doubt and apparent contradiction. And it is natural that it be so, because the Eternal Return is an experience. There lies its importance: in the fact of being. The Eternal Return is not the reincarnation as it has been spread in our days. Original Buddhism, on the other hand, could be pointing to something similar. Buddha was a shastriya, that is, a prince of the warrior caste, not a brahman, or priest, and his Doctrine was also for heroes and warriors. Then, it has been transformed by the monks. Buddha, like Nietzsche, talks about a reincarnation without mentioning the soul. What is it that reincarnates, then? As in Nietzsche it could be that 'atom-seed', or 'all those conditions that determine its existence and that they come back to give themselves', in the turn of the Energy, or of the Light that finds the old image. The Buddhist would want to be liberated, to leave the Circle; that's why it kills desire, that makes return. The Will to Power, as we have seen, returns to its 'archive', wishes to possess again its 'non-existence'. The difference: Nietzsche wants to return eternally, incorporates the Will and considers Nirvana a dream of decadents, of warriors who have become priests, monks. However, we do not know what Buddha really thought, because he did not talk about these things, nor did he explain Nirvana. Maybe, he just wanted to get out of this Circle to enter to fight in another wider Circle, that is more immense.

The Temple of Hekate at Lagina, Caria, Anatolia was the last major temple built during the Hellenistic period. The temple was constructed on the site of an older settlement, which may have included an earlier temple. Lagina is the largest known temple which was dedicated entirely to Hekate and is famous for being the site of a key-bearing procession. In this procession, a key was carried by a young girl along the Sacred Way, an 11km road which connected the temple at Lagina to the nearby city of Stratonicea. Unfortunately, we don’t have reliable information on the purpose of the ceremony. Johnston writes that: "None of our sources explain what it was supposed to accomplish, but if it took its name from a key that was carried, then that key must have been of central importance - it must have been used to lock or unlock something significant." [89] Johnston further explains that although we don’t know what the key opened, the number of inscriptions naming the festival indicates that it was a significant festival. We can speculate that it was the key to the city, the key to the temple at Lagina, or the key to another (unknown) precinct. Considering Hekate’s ability to traverse between the worlds of the living and the dead, it is conceivable that the key opened the way to some form of ritual katabasis. At Lagina, the goddess Hekate was given the epithet Kleidouchos (key-bearer), so it is also possible that the young girl who carried the keys in the procession represented the goddess in the ceremony.

So what is this place?” asked Shadow, as they walked through the parking lot toward a low, unimpressive wooden building. “This is a roadside attraction,” said Wednesday. “One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.” “Come again?” “It’s perfectly simple,” said Wednesday. “In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.” “There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow. “In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a giant bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.

Women have to support each other more. Women get women. We understand each other when we are happy or sad, when we have our period, start a new job, or fall in love. We are typically the caretakers. Let’s take care of each other, start building each other up. The stereotype with women is that we are catty and vindictive. It’s important to fight against that notion. I have a no BS policy in my circle.

The deepest and most important spiritual lessons I ever learned came from a circle of drunks, fighting desperately not to drink today, whom I initially viewed as low-life losers, and who ultimately came to be for me the oracles of God. The Twelve Steps in no way diminished my appreciation for the gospel of Jesus Christ—quite the contrary—I am more convinced than ever of the reality of the gospel story.

For several months they'd been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can't afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs. [10] It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teenage gangs and racial tensions. The Hell's Angels' massive publicity -- coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley -- was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels' aggressive, antisocial stance -- their alienation, as it were -- had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell's Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully bucking authority, and to the frustrated student radical this was a powerful image indeed. The Angels didn't masturbate, they raped. They didn't come on with theories and songs and quotations, but with noise and muscle and sheer balls.

Glaciers are frozen manuscripts that tell stories just like tree circles and sedimentary deposits; from them, you can gather information and create a picture of the past. Glaciers store histories of volcanic activity. They store pollen, rainwater and air that reveal the chemical make-up of the atmosphere tens of thousands of years back in time. They are important sources of details about vegetation and precipitation of the past.

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is 'finding his place in it', while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth... You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.

Perhaps the most important Stoic legacy to the history of moral thought was the concept of universal humanity. In his famous Elements of Ethics, the second-century Stoic philosopher Hierocles imagines every individual as standing at the centre of a series of concentric circles. The first circle is the individual, next comes the immediate family, followed by the extended family, the local community, the country, and finally the entire human race. To be virtuous, Hierocles suggested, is to draw these circles together, constantly to transfer people from the outer circles to the inner circles, to treat strangers as cousins and cousins as brothers and sisters, making all human beings part of our concern. The Stoics called this process of drawing the circles together oikeiosis, a word that is almost untranslatable but means something like the process by which everything is made into your home.

My initiation into the true philosophical method began the moment I threw overboard verbal solutions, having found in the inner life an important field of experiment. After that, all progress was an enlarging of this field. It is an inclination natural to the human mind to extend a conclusion logically, to apply it to other objects without actually having enlarged the circle of its investigations, but it is one to which we must never yield. But that is what philosophy does quite ingenuously when it is pure dialectic, that is, when it attempts to construct a metaphysics with the rudimentary knowledge one finds stored up in language. It continues to do so when it sets up certain facts as “general principles” applicable to all things outside those facts. All my philosophical activity was a protestation against this way of philosophizing. I thus had to put aside important questions, which I could easily have made a show of answering by extending to them the results of my preceding works. I shall answer certain of these questions only if I am granted time and strength to solve them in themselves, for themselves. If not, grateful to my method for having given me what I believe to be the precise solution of a certain number of problems, finding that as far as I am concerned, I cannot get more out of it, I shall be content to stop where I am.

Even if I lead the most stunted, lethargic life, I still have the feeling of being caught up in an unprecedented whirlwind that has to be slowed before I can do anything else. Trying to escape the busyness that arises from the emptiness of life by resorting to still more emptiness, that is the vicious circle that threatens us. Whereas in our colorless lives we need tranquility less than authentic activities, important and meaningful events, dazzling moments that prostrate us or transport us. Time, that great thief, is constantly stealing from us; but it is one thing to be robbed magnificently and to grow old in the awareness that one has lived a full and rich life, and it is another to be cheaply gnawed away, hour by hour, for things that we have not even known. Our contemporaries' hell is called platitude. The paradise they seek is called plenitude. Some have lived; the others have simply endured.

Any girl faced with daily attention from a gorgeous boy with a cute accent and perfect hair would be hard-pressed not to develop a big,stinking, painful,all-the-time,all consuming crush. Not that that's what's happening to me. Like I said.It's a relief to know it won't happen. It makes things easier. Most girls laugh too hard at his jokes and find excuses to gently press his arm. To touch him.Instead,I argue and roll my eyes and act indifferent. And when I touch his arm,I shove it.Because that's what friends do. Besides,I have more important things on my mind: movies. I've been in France for a month, and though I have ridden the elevators to the top of La Tour Eiffel (Mer took me while St. Clair and Rashmi waited below on the lawn-St. Clair because he's afraid of falling and Rashmi because she refuses to do anything touristy), and though I have walked the viewing platform of L'Arc de Triomphe (Mer took me again,of course, while St. Clair stayed below and threatened to push Josh and Rashmi into the insane traffic circle),I still haven't been to the movies. Actually,I have yet to leave campus alone. Kind of embarrassing. But I have a plan.First,I'll convince someone to go to a theater with me. Shouldn't be too difficult; everyone likes the movies.And then I'll take notes on everything they say and do, and then I'll be comfortable going back to that theater alone.A

You've given me everything I need of you-thanks to you I have all my heart desires, all I thought I might never have. All I need for a wonderful, fulfilling future. And I nearly lost it all." She held his gaze but was wise enough not to interrupt. If she had... He drew breath and forged on, "Nearly dying clarified things. When you stand on the border between life and death, the truly important things are easy to discern. One of the things I saw and finally understood was that only fools and cowards leave the truth of love unsaid. Only the weak leave love unacknowledged." Holding her gaze, all but lost in the shimmery blue of her eyes, he raised her hand to his lips, gently kissed. "So, my darling Heather, even though you already know it, let me put the truth-my truth-into words. I love you. With all my heart, to the depths of my soul. And I will love you forever, until the day I die." Her smile lit his world. "Just as well." Happiness shone in her eyes. She pressed his fingers. "Because I plan to be with you, by your side, every day for the rest of your life, and in spirit far beyond. I'm yours for all eternity." Smiling, he closed his hand about hers. "Mine to protect for our eternity." Yes. Neither said the word, yet the sense of it vibrated in the air all around them. A high-pitched giggle broke the spell, had them both looking along the path. TO Lucilla and Marcus, who slipped out from behind a raised bed and raced toward them. Reaching them, laughing with delight, the pair whooped and circled. Heather glanced to left and right, trying to keep the twins in sight, uncertain of what had them so excited. So exhilarated. Almost as if they were reacting to the emotions coursing through her, and presumably Breckenridge. Her husband-to-be. "You're getting married!" Lucilla crowed. Catching Lucilla's eyes as the pair slowed their circling dance, Heather nodded. "Yes, we are. And I rather think you two will have to come down in London to be flower girl and page boy." Absolute delight broke across Lucilla's face. She looked at her brother. "See? I told you-the Lady never makes a mistake, and if you do what shetells you, you get a reward." "I suppose." Marcus looked up at Breckenridge. "London will be fun." He switched his gaze to Lucilla. "Come on! Let's go and tell Mama and Papa.

tear. Short and nebbishy, he had a charmingly awkward persona that concealed a big ambition: to establish Condé Nast as the most prestigious magazine company in the world. Within a year of his father’s death in 1979, Si, in rapid succession, bought the most important publishing house in America, Random House, whose imprints included Alfred A. Knopf, the prestige literary house; oversaw the successful start-up of a pioneering health and fitness magazine, Self; and bought and revamped Gentleman’s Quarterly, better known as GQ. And he was always on the lookout for more. Si was the aesthete in the Newhouse family. He combined an eye for business opportunity with a passion for art, design, and high gloss. Intellectually insecure, he relied on the self-confident baron of taste and flair he had inherited from his father’s circle: Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s editorial director. Liberman—Russian-born, like Alexey Brodovitch, his

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them. Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that ‘something bigger’. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied “that it stands on the back of a large turtle. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: ‘Don’t bother about it. From there onwards it’s turtles all the way down.

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather in the unselfconscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

happens when the Spiral is knocked out of balance. Earthmaker created the universe to have equal portions—Pain and Happiness, Birth and Death, Heat and Cold. That’s why the Spiral is so important. Its circles reach from the thinnest roots that dig into the ground to the perfect motions of the stars. Sometimes humans knock the Spiral out of kilter, sometimes animals do it. Every time a coyote runs through a flock of new lambs, killing for the sheer sport of it, without ever eating its prey … the Spiral tilts.

For more than twenty years I have offered a very simple yet powerful ritual to people before their radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery. I suggest they meet together with some of their closest friends and family the day before their procedure. Before this meeting, I suggest they find an ordinary stone, a piece of the earth, big enough to fit in the palm of their hand, and bring it to the meeting with them. The ritual begins by having everyone sit in a circle. In any order they wish to speak, each person tells the story of a time when they too faced a crisis. People may talk about the death of important persons, the loss of jobs or of relationships, or even about their own illnesses. The person who is speaking holds the stone the patient has brought. When they finish telling their story of survival, they take a moment to reflect on the personal quality that they feel helped them come through that difficult time. People will say things such as, 'What brought me through was determination,' 'What brought me through was faith,' 'What brought me through was humor.' When they have named the quality of their strength, they speak directly to the person preparing for surgery or treatment, saying, 'I put determination into this stone for you,' or, 'I put faith into this stone for you.' After everyone has spoken the stone is given back to the patient, who takes it with them to the hospital, to keep nearby and hold in their hand when things get hard. In an environment which is highly technical and sterile, it connects them to the earth and to each other.

Damn it, there is no world if there is not a human eye to see it, no world of any purpose or meaning, no world of more importance than is any barren planet now circling a burnt-out sun. The world can’t see itself and marvel at its wonders. The mystery of consciousness makes reality, and there is no reality without a fully conscious species to apprehend it. You think the world precious because you’re here to see it. We are the world and the world is us, and neither can be but a dream of no importance without the other.

One of the most important variables in whether an enterprise remains great lies in a simple question: what is the truth about the inner motivations, character, and ambition of those who hold power? Their true, internal motivations will absolutely show up in their decisions and actions—if not immediately, then over time, and certainly under duress—no matter what they say or how they pose. And thus, we return full circle to a central tenet of Covey’s framework: build inner character first—private victory before public victory.

But perhaps the newest and most exciting instrument in the neurologist’s tool kit is optogenetics, which was once considered science fiction. Like a magic wand, it allows you to activate certain pathways controlling behavior by shining a light beam on the brain. Incredibly, a light-sensitive gene that causes a cell to fire can be inserted, with surgical precision, directly into a neuron. Then, by turning on a light beam, the neuron is activated. More importantly, this allows scientists to excite these pathways, so that you can turn on and off certain behaviors by flicking a switch. Although this technology is only a decade old, optogenetics has already proven successful in controlling certain animal behaviors. By turning on a light switch, it is possible to make fruit flies suddenly fly off, worms stop wiggling, and mice run around madly in circles. Monkey trials are now beginning, and even human trials are in discussion. There is great hope that this technology will have a direct application in treating disorders like Parkinson’s and depression.

Virtually all the authors of popular books on the subject assert that ADD is a heritable genetic disorder. With some notable exceptions, the genetic view also dominates much of the discussion within professional circles, a view I do not agree with. I believe that ADD can be better understood if we examine people’s lives, not only bits of DNA. Heredity does make an important contribution, but far less than usually assumed. At the same time, it would serve no purpose to set up the false opposition of environment to genetic inheritance. No such split exists in nature, or in the mind of any serious scientist. There are many biological events involving body and brain that are not directly programmed by heredity, and so to say that ADD is not primarily genetic is not in any sense to deny its biological features — either those that are inherited or those that are acquired as a result of experience. The genetic blueprints for the architecture and the workings of the human brain develop in a process of interaction with the environment. ADD does reflect biological malfunctions in certain brain centers, but many of its features — including the underlying biology itself — are also inextricably connected to a person’s physical and emotional experiences in the world. There is in ADD an inherited predisposition, but that’s very far from saying there is a genetic predetermination. A predetermination dictates that something will inevitably happen. A predisposition only makes it more likely that it may happen, depending on circumstances. The actual outcome is influenced by many other factors.

Can we get this makeup thing over before we’re late for school?” “Oh, right.” She jumped up from the bed and opened up her backpack. I hated wearing makeup, which was why I never wore any. So needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to this. She held out a tube of something for me to see. “This will help conceal the dark circles under your eyes. And this,” she said, showing me another tube, “will help to conceal the blotchy spots on your cheeks.” I grunted. “Do you have anything that will help conceal the hump on my back?

Reasonably democratic, reasonably egalitarian, wary of privilege and outsiders, they were accustomed to tending their own affairs, choosing their own ministers, militia officers, and political leaders. Convinced that their elected assemblies were equal in stature and authority to Parliament, they believed that governance by consent was paramount. They had not consented to being taxed, to being occupied, to seeing their councils dismissed and their port sealed like a graveyard crypt. They were godly, of course, placed here by the Almighty to do His will. Sometimes political strife was also a moral contest between right and wrong, good and evil. This struggle, as the historian Gordon S. Wood later wrote, would prove their blessedness. Warren circled round to that very point: Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful, but we have many friends, determining to be free.… On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.

The old men had a set rabbit-hunting strategy that they had always used. Usually when a dog jumps a rabbit, and the rabbit gets away, that rabbit will always somehow instinctively run in a circle and return sooner or later past the very spot where he originally was jumped. Well, the old men would just sit and wait in hiding somewhere for the rabbit to come back, then get their shots at him. I got to thinking about it, and finally I thought of a plan. I would separate from them and Big Boy and I would go to a point where I figured that the rabbit, returning, would have to pass me first. It worked like magic. I began to get three and four rabbits before they got one. The astonishing thing was that none of the old men ever figured out why. They outdid themselves exclaiming what a sure shot I was. I was about twelve, then. All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life—that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business—you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli’s Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evidently both the ancestor and the descendant of the Virgins of Fra Filippo Lippi: the ancestor in her pre-Christian meaning, the descendant in absorbing all that had been achieved through the artistic representation of the Virgin Mary as the symbol of untainted flesh. The post-Renaissance rehabilitation of sexual desire laid the foundations for a genuinely erotic art, an art that would display the human being as both subject and object of desire, but also as a free individual whose desire is a favour consciously bestowed. But this rehabilitation of sex leads us to raise what has become one of the most important questions confronting art and the criticism of art in our time: that of the difference, if there is one, between erotic art and pornography. Art can be erotic and also beautiful, like a Titian Venus. But it cannot be beautiful and also pornographic—so we believe, at least. And it is important to see why. In distinguishing the erotic and the pornographic we are really distinguishing two kinds of interest: interest in the embodied person and interest in the body—and, in the sense that I intend, these interests are incompatible. (See the discussion in Chapter 2.) Normal desire is an inter-personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me—through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. Normal desire is a person to person response, one that seeks the selfhood that it gives. Objects can be substituted for each other, subjects not. Subjects, as Kant persuasively argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves.

Questions to explore: If you were to look back on this next chapter of your life and feel proud and content with how you faced life’s challenges, how would you be approaching daily life? What would the next chapter look like? In your answer try to focus on your own choices, actions and attitude, not other people or events that are out of your control. Try to consider how you would approach life, whatever happens. What do you want to stand for in your relationship with yourself, your health and personal growth? What is important to you about these? What kind of person do you want to be for the people in your life? How do you want to interact with them and contribute to their lives? How do you want the people in your life to feel when you are around? What do you want to represent in your circle of friends and family? If you only get to live once, what impact do you want to have while you are here? If no one knew how you spent your time, would you still be doing this? As you move forward through this day or this week, what is one value that you will try to bring to each choice and action? Examples here might be ‘Today I choose to bring enthusiasm/courage/compassion/curiosity to each experience, choice and action. I will do this by . . .

I have given a brief explanation of the various meanings of dharma according to the Abhidharma, but what I want to say next is much more important. In Mahayana Buddhism, and especially in Dōgen Zenji's teachings, the meaning of dharma has more depth. According to the concepts we accept, we think that everything exists as objects outside the self. For example, we usually think that all phenomenal things that appear before our eyes, or this twentieth-century human society, have existence outside our individual self. We believe that when we are born we appear on this world's stage, and when we die we leave that stage. All of us think this way. But the truth is that this common-sense concept is questionable. Mahayana Buddhism began from a reexamination of this common-sense attitude. I'll give you one of my favorite examples. I am looking at this cup now. You are also looking at the same cup. We think that we are looking at the very same cup, but this is not true. I am looking at it from my angle, with my eyesight, in the lighting that occurs where I am sitting, and with my own feelings or emotions. Furthermore, the angle, my feeling, and everything else is changing from moment to moment. This cup I am looking at now is not the same one that I will be looking at in the next moment. Each of you is also looking at it from your own angle, with your eyesight, with your own feelings, and these also are constantly changing. This is the way actual life experience is. However, if we use our common-sense way of thinking, we think we are looking at the very same cup. This is an abstraction and not the reality of life. Abstract concepts and living reality are entirely different. The Buddhist view is completely different from our ordinary thinking. Western philosophy's way of thinking is also based on abstractions. It assumes that all of us are seeing the same cup. Greek philosophers went further and further in their abstractions until they came up with the concept of the idea that cannot be seen or felt. One example is Venus, the goddess of beauty. In the real world, no woman is as well-proportioned as Venus, or embodies perfect beauty as she does. Yet the Greeks idealized beauty and created a statue of Venus, just as they had thought of the "idea" of a circle that is abstracted from something round. In other words, the Greek way of thinking is abstraction to the highest degree. Buddhism is different. Buddhism puts emphasis on life, the actual life experience of the reality of the self.

Imprinting isn't a life sentence. Our people thrive with our significant by our side. We all know the importance of what has happened since Maggie came into our lives. The proof of how destiny works and moves is right here in this circle, in these four couples that will be joined today. But more than destiny and purpose is love. The love one feels for his significant is bigger than any ocean, deeper than any well, more powerful than any storm. When we join these significants today, they are telling us that they want no one else, will always be there for each other and will never part from their mate. Not that I have to tell them that.

Captain Bailey’s face went rigid as he stepped aside, revealing another bicorne-crowned officer just behind him. The gentleman joined their circle, probing Milly with his gaze. He was handsome, more so than the other two. The upward tilt of his chin, confident set to his shoulders, and seductive smile lifting one corner of his mouth sent a wave of disquiet through her middle. She’d met this sort before. The silver tassels on his epaulettes glimmered in the firelight and spoke of power, and she lowered her eyes, pointedly aware she didn’t belong here, surrounded by such important men, addressing them as if anything she said were worthy of their consideration. She sucked in a deliberate breath and drew back ever so slightly. Captain Bailey matched her move and slipped a hand to the back of her elbow. She suspected the touch was meant to be one of support. Instead, she felt trapped. “Miss Milly Wilkins, may I present Captain Jameson Collins?” Captain Bailey’s voice was clipped, and Milly feared he was beginning to see through the ruse. The sound of rattling chains stemmed from the shadows and her eyes darted toward it. Any minute these officers would realize she should be shackled as well. Could they see through the shadows of her hood to the pulse pounding in her neck?

Two-hands,” Zak said more emphatically. Matron Malice motioned for him to continue, unable to deny the grace of her youngest son’s display. “Could you do it again?” Zak asked Drizzt. With each hand working independently, Drizzt soon had the coins stacked atop his index fingers, ready to flip. Zak stopped him there and pulled out four more coins, building each of the piles five high. Zak paused a moment to study the concentration of the young drow (and also to keep his hands over the coins and ensure that they were brightened enough by the warmth of his body heat for Drizzt to properly see them in their flight). “Catch them all, Secondboy,” he said in all seriousness. “Catch them all, or you will land in Sorcere, the school of magic. That is not where you belong!” Drizzt still had only a vague idea of what Zak was talking about, but he could tell from the weapons master’s intensity that it must be important. He took a deep breath to steady himself, then snapped the coins up. He sorted their glow quickly, discerning each individual item. The first two fell easily into his hands, but Drizzt saw that the scattering pattern of the rest would not drop them so readily in line. Drizzt exploded into action, spinning a complete circle, his hands an indecipherable blur of motion. Then he straightened suddenly and stood before Zak. His hands were in fists at his sides and a grim look lay on his face. Zak and Matron Malice exchanged glances, neither quite sure of what had happened. Drizzt held his fists out to Zak and slowly opened them, a confident smile widening across his childish face. Five coins in each hand. Zak blew a silent whistle. It had taken him, the weapons master of the house, a dozen tries to complete that maneuver with ten coins. He walked over to Matron Malice. “Two-hands,” he said a third time. “He is a fighter, and I am out of coins.” “How many could he do?” Malice breathed, obviously impressed in spite of herself. “How many could we stack?” Zaknafein shot back with a triumphant smile.

I don't think that many performers necessarily want to see their audience empowered. I think a lot of performers, no different from priests, need the hierarchy. Modern, celebrity-driven entertainment turns the stage into an altar, and so many celebrities refuse to be removed from those altars once they manage to ascend. They will not be taken down— the Goddess is offended … As a storyteller in the old tradition, you held an important place at the circle. Your position was fluid, not necessarily permanent, but it demanded that you respected the others witnessing your performance as much as they respected you. All storytellers, all troubadours worth their salt knew their myths.

There are other noteworthy characteristics of this rock art style: Anthropomorphs without headdresses instead sport horns, or antennae, or a series of concentric circles. Also prominent in many of the figures' hands are scepters--each one an expression of something significant in the natural world. Some look like lightning bolts, some like snakes; other burst from the fingers like stalks of ricegrass. Colorado Plateau rock-art expert Polly Schaafsma has interpreted these figures as otherworldly--drawn by shamans in isolated and special locations, seemingly as part of a ceremonial retreat. Schaafsma and others believe that the style reflects a spirituality common to all hunter-gatherer societies across the globe--a way of life that appreciates the natural world and employs the use of visions to gain understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the earth. Typically, Schaafsma says, it is a spirituality that identifies strongly with animals and other aspects of nature--and one that does so with an interdependent rather than dominant perspective. To underscore the importance of art in such a culture, Schaafsma points to Aboriginal Australians, noting how, in a so-called primitive society, where forms of written and oral communication are considered (at least by our standards) to be limited, making art is "one means of defining the mystic tenets of one's faith.

Things you shouldn’t do when someone is dying: Don’t talk about when your aunt or your grandmother or your dog died. This isn’t about you, and the sick person shouldn’t have to comfort you; it should be the other way around. There are concentric circles of grief: the patient is at the center, the next layer is the caregiver, then their kids, then close friends, and so on. Figure out what circle you’re in. If you are looking into the concentric circles, you give comfort. If you’re looking out, you receive it. Don’t say things that aren’t true: You’re going to beat this cancer! It’s all about a positive outlook! You look stronger! You aren’t fooling anyone. Don’t overact your happiness. It’s okay to be sad with someone who is dying. They’ve invited you close at a very tender time, and that’s a moment of grace you can share. Don’t think you have to discuss the illness. Sometimes, a sick person needs a break. And if you ask up front if he wants to talk about how he feels—or doesn’t—you’re giving him control at a time when he doesn’t have a lot of choices. Don’t be afraid of the silence. It’s okay to say nothing. Don’t forget: No one knows what to say to someone who’s dying. Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It’s more important to be there than to be right. Win and I have reached the stage where we can sit in quiet, without a background noise of NPR on the radio or the television murmuring.

Boosting your self-confidence is a key step in ridding your life of comparison as it gives you agency over your actions and ownership of your thoughts and behaviour. It allows you to leverage your own resources, no matter how plentiful or scarce they happen to be, and it ultimately allows you the impetus to use your inner power to work towards what is important to you. Without self-confidence, words go unsaid, ideas undeveloped and your time is often spent on the wrong things, with the wrong people, because we feel too scared to make a change or we hope the change will magically make itself. This naturally leads to a growing sense of discontent and in those conditions, comparison thrives, and the vicious circle continues.

The empress—the most important woman in the world—is confined to the Great Within. Women like those who live in the Garden of Fragrant Delights and the Mansion of Golden Light may be among the most elite in China, but we’re also the most constrained, having lived our entire lives in the inner chambers in first our parents’ homes, then our husbands’. Concubines and servants get glimpses of the outside world, but they are bought and sold. Common women—those married to farmers, butchers, and shopkeepers, those who labor in silk factories or sort tea leaves, and those who fall under the category of the Three Aunties and Six Grannies—may work in the outside world of men, but they can’t avoid the hardships that come as a result.

Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solutions.” I don’t think this is because Einstein was afraid of solutions or was just worrying in circles and beating himself up about the problem (as many of us do). I think Einstein understood the importance of getting clear about the problem he was really trying to solve. Think about how often we need to solve the problem of finishing a report for work, but instead we think we need chips. Or we need to solve the problem of getting rest, but instead we scroll through social media. We need respect and acknowledgement from our boss, yet instead of talking to our boss we go home and pick a fight with our spouse.

The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the Peace-makers, is how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ. I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly falseas they are t their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and fair. I think rather, they must be the babbling lairs of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited human families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or grotesque, is a separating and scattering force. And these forces are multitudinous, these points of radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important. …the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious of bonds, poisen whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating hearts.

And what does he feel?" "He feels uneasy. A little afaid. Angry. Oddly, a hint of pride." "Good," Henry said. "ANd where are you?" "Backstage." Henry shook his head gravely. "THere's no such thing as backstage. The play begins, and there's only the world it dramatizes. Now, where are you?" "With my father, the president. In his chambers." "Right. With me. Your father. And now--this is important--do you love me?" Nelson considered this; or rather, Nelson, as Alejo, considered this. "Yes," he said after a moment. "I do." "Good. Remember that. In every scene--even when you hate me, you also love me. That's why it hurts. Got it?" Nelson said that he did. "Are you sure?" "Yes." "Good. Because it does hurt," Henry said. "DOn't forget that. It's supposed to. Always.

Most people-all, in fact, who regard the whole heaven as finite-say it lies at the centre. But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre. They further construct another earth in opposition to ours to which they give the name counterearth. In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own. But there are many others who would agree that it is wrong to give the earth the central position, looking for confirmation rather to theory than to the facts of observation. Their view is that the most precious place befits the most precious thing: but fire, they say, is more precious than earth, and the limit than the intermediate, and the circumference and the centre are limits. Reasoning on this basis they take the view that it is not earth that lies at the centre of the sphere, but rather fire. The Pythagoreans have a further reason. They hold that the most important part of the world, which is the centre, should be most strictly guarded, and name it, or rather the fire which occupies that place, the 'Guardhouse of Zeus', as if the word 'centre' were quite unequivocal, and the centre of the mathematical figure were always the same with that of the thing or the natural centre. But it is better to conceive of the case of the whole heaven as analogous to that of animals, in which the centre of the animal and that of the body are different. For this reason they have no need to be so disturbed about the world, or to call in a guard for its centre: rather let them look for the centre in the other sense and tell us what it is like and where nature has set it. That centre will be something primary and precious; but to the mere position we should give the last place rather than the first. For the middle is what is defined, and what defines it is the limit, and that which contains or limits is more precious than that which is limited, see ing that the latter is the matter and the former the essence of the system. (2-13-1) There are similar disputes about the shape of the earth. Some think it is spherical, others that it is flat and drum-shaped. For evidence they bring the fact that, as the sun rises and sets, the part concealed by the earth shows a straight and not a curved edge, whereas if the earth were spherical the line of section would have to be circular. In this they leave out of account the great distance of the sun from the earth and the great size of the circumference, which, seen from a distance on these apparently small circles appears straight. Such an appearance ought not to make them doubt the circular shape of the earth. But they have another argument. They say that because it is at rest, the earth must necessarily have this shape. For there are many different ways in which the movement or rest of the earth has been conceived. (2-13-3)

[I]t's a con, at children's expense. When self-esteem advocates tell us to flatter the young about their views, in reality they ask adults to abandon the difficult task of disciplining them. Emphasizing that adults must 'express unconditional positive regard and acceptance for children' effectively destroys the inter-generational duty of passing on knowledge, setting boundaries for behavior and the broader task of socialization. It is not good for children and can mean adults indulging even the most destructive aspects of young people's behavior. In 2013, a self-harming pupil at Unsted Park School in Godalming, Surrey was given a disposable safety razor to slash himself with, supervised by a teacher. A spokeswoman from selfharm.co.uk justified this irresponsible collapse of adult judgement using the mantras of pupil voice and self-esteem: 'The best way to help is to listen without judging, accept that the recovery process may take a while and avoid "taking away" the self-harm' because 'self-harm can be about control, so it's important that the young person in the center feels in control of the steps taken to help them'. That's an extreme case but it touches on how focusing on the schoolchild's self-esteem can create the impression that the world should circle around pupils' desires. This in turn puts pressure on adults to tip-toe around young people's sensitivities and to accede to their opinions. Combined with student voice orthodoxies, this can lead to the peculiar diktat that teachers express respect for pupils' views, however childish or even poisonous.

In every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste"... [is] produce[d by the devil and his angels]. This they do bu working through the small circle of artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus [they] have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females-and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste [they] have varied a good deal. At one time [they] have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, [they] have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present [they] are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and [they] now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, [they] thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many [successful] results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. [They] have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, or course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result [they] are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.

I want to be married,” I blurted. “I want you to marry me.” Fuuuuuuuck. And so my entire carefully constructed speech was thrown out the window. My grandmother’s antique ring was in a box in the dresser—nowhere near me—and my plan to kneel and do everything right just evaporated. In the circle of my arms, Chloe grew very still. “What did you just say?” I had completely botched the plan, but it was too late to turn back now. “I know we have only been together for a little over a year,” I explained, quickly. “Maybe it’s too soon? I understand if it’s too soon. It’s just that how you feel about the way we kiss? I feel that way about everything we do together. I love it. I love to be inside you, I love working with you, I love watching you work, I love fighting with you, and I love just sitting on the couch and laughing with you. I’m lost when I’m not with you, Chloe. I can’t think of anything, or anyone, who is more important to me, every second. And so for me, that means we’re already sort of married in my head. I guess I wanted to make it official somehow. Maybe I sound like an idiot?” I looked over at her, feeling my heart try to jackhammer its way up my throat. “I never expected to feel this way about someone.” She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and fuck, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to you, I mean.” Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.” Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—” She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face. I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the fuck is that? “What the fuck is that?” I asked. “You tell me, genius.” “Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.” “It’s a ring, dummy. For you.” My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for me?” She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle. “You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?” She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.” “So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?” “You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling. “Technically you haven’t asked yet.” “Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!” “Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing. “Will you marry me?” With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.

Singer, and Jones (1965) on the campus of Yale University. The subjects were Yale seniors who were given some persuasive education about the risks of tetanus and the importance of going to the health center to receive an inoculation. Most of the students were convinced by the lecture and said that they planned to go get the shot, but these good intentions did not lead to much action. Only 3 percent actually went and got the shot. Other subjects were given the same lecture but were also given a copy of a campus map with the location of the health center circled. They were then asked to look at their weekly schedules, make a plan for when they would go and get the shot, and look at the map and decide what route they would take. With these nudges, 28 percent of the students managed to show up and get their tetanus shot. Notice that this manipulation was very

I am not suggesting here that a non-ADHD spouse should simply roll over and say, “She’s ignoring me because she’s eccentric [or because she has ADHD]. Oh well!” In fact, having an ADHD spouse take charge of creating a systematic approach to treatment is one of the most important elements of improving your marriage. The “symptom” is, after all, at the beginning of the symptom-response-response sequence, and not much changes until the symptoms are under control—and that task can be accomplished only by the ADHD spouse. But ADHD in relationships is like a dance. One partner leads and initiates the steps, but both must understand their role to successfully circle the floor. In an ADHD partnership, an ADHD partner can address her symptoms, but the couple will be unsuccessful if the non-ADHD partner’s response doesn’t change, too. The inverse, of course, is also true.

Absinthe, or wormwood, the liquorice-flavoured, plant-based liqueur, had been popular in France throughout the 19th century. Though the drink was of Swiss origin, heavy tax on import had encouraged H.L. Pernod to start producing it commercially in France at the end of the 18th century.12 It was a tremendous success, and as the 19th century unfolded, its popularity soared. Exceedingly potent, it was closer to a soft drug than a drink. ‘The drunkenness it gives does not resemble any known drunkenness,’ bemoaned Alfred Delvau. ‘It makes you lose your footing right away […] You think you are headed towards infinity, like all great dreamers, and you are only headed towards incoherence.’13 In excess, absinthe could have a fatal effect on the nervous system, and by the time Maria started attending the bars and cafés where it was served, it had become a national curse. A favourite drink among the working classes precisely because of its relative cheapness for the effect produced, absinthe became the scapegoat for a host of social ills, not least the Commune. (...) Absinthe found a dedicated following among artists, writers and poets (including Charles Baudelaire), for whom the liquor became the entrancing ‘green fairy’. Its popularity in these circles was due primarily to its intoxicating effect, but also because its consumption was accompanied by a curious ritual which appealed to quirky individuals with a taste for the extraordinary. To counteract the drink’s inherent bitterness, a sugar lump was placed on a special spoon with a hole in it, which was held above the glass while water was poured over it, with the effect of sweetening the absinthe. Not surprisingly, absinthe flowed freely through the bars and cafés of Montmartre.

THERE are few things in human affairs more curious than the structure of what is called society, wherever it is met with, whether in the most primitive of its developments or on the higher levels. The perpetual recurrence of a circle within which the sayings and doings of certain individuals are more important than anything else in earth or heaven, and where the conversation persistently rolls back, whatever may be its starting-point, to what this or that little knot of people are doing, to the eccentricities of one and the banalities of another, to some favorite individual scene of tragedy or comedy which forms the centre of the moral landscape, is always apparent to the observer, whether his observations are made in Kamtchatka or in London, among washerwomen or princesses. But under no circumstances is this so evident as to a new-comer in a region where all the people know each other.

Dealing with the death of loved one is always difficult. No matter how much we know of death, of the process of Life, no amount of preparation to accept death is sufficient. When death comes calling in our circle, we are always caught struggling to cope. Immersing yourself in celebrating the Life of the one you lose is one better way of coping. In celebration, there is an uplifting energy. It helps you to look back at each moment you can recall with the person you lost and relive them. Or support causes they supported. Through these acts you heal yourself, you train your mind to let go and move on. It is a slow process, but it works. Important, don't try to fight your sadness. It is futile. Sadness is a natural response. Feeling sad is integral to the process of dealing with a loss. Instead understand your sadness, go its root, understand its futility...and then pluck it and discard it...

The 1990s to the present: feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, ethics There has never been a better time to study Virginia Woolf. Woolf studies, in the 1990s and in the new millennium, has continued to flourish and diversify in all its numerous and proliferating aspects. In this recent period the topics that occupied earlier critics continue in new debates, on her modernism, her philosophy and ethics, her feminism and her aesthetics; and there have also been marked turns in new directions. Woolf and her work have been increasingly examined in the context of empire, drawing on the influential field of postcolonial studies; and, stimulated by the impetus of new historicism and cultural materialism, there have been new attempts to understand Woolf ’s writing and persona in the context of the public and private spheres, in the present as well as in her own time. Woolf in the context of war and fascism, and in the contexts of modernity, science and technology, continue to exercise critics. Serious, sustained readings of lesbianism in Woolf ’s writing and in her life have marked recent feminist interpretations in Woolf studies. Enormous advances have also been made in the study of Woolf ’s literary and cultural influences and allusions. Numerous annotated and scholarly editions of Woolf ’s works have been appearing since she briefly came out of copyright in 1991, accompanied by several more scholarly editions of her works in draft and holograph, encouraging further critical scrutiny of her compositional methods. There have been several important reference works on Woolf. Many biographies of Woolf and her circle have also appeared, renewing biographical criticism, along with a number of works concerned with Woolf in geographical context, from landscape and London sites to Woolf ’s and her circle’s many houses and holiday retreats.

In about 1951, a quality approach called Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) came on the Japanese scene. Its focus is on maintenance rather than on production. One of the major pillars of TPM is the set of so-called 5S principles. 5S is a set of disciplines—and here I use the term “discipline” instructively. These 5S principles are in fact at the foundations of Lean—another buzzword on the Western scene, and an increasingly prominent buzzword in software circles. These principles are not an option. As Uncle Bob relates in his front matter, good software practice requires such discipline: focus, presence of mind, and thinking. It is not always just about doing, about pushing the factory equipment to produce at the optimal velocity. The 5S philosophy comprises these concepts: • Seiri, or organization (think “sort” in English). Knowing where things are—using approaches such as suitable naming—is crucial. You think naming identifiers isn’t important? Read on in the following chapters. • Seiton, or tidiness (think “systematize” in English). There is an old American saying: A place for everything, and everything in its place. A piece of code should be where you expect to find it—and, if not, you should re-factor to get it there. • Seiso, or cleaning (think “shine” in English): Keep the workplace free of hanging wires, grease, scraps, and waste. What do the authors here say about littering your code with comments and commented-out code lines that capture history or wishes for the future? Get rid of them. • Seiketsu, or standardization: The group agrees about how to keep the workplace clean. Do you think this book says anything about having a consistent coding style and set of practices within the group? Where do those standards come from? Read on. • Shutsuke, or discipline (self-discipline). This means having the discipline to follow the practices and to frequently reflect on one’s work and be willing to change.

Erin. “No matter what else has happened, you’re water and your element is welcome in our circle, but we don’t need any negative energy here—this is too important.” I nodded to the spiders. Erin’s gaze followed mine and she gasped. “What the hell is that?” I opened my mouth to evade her question, but my gut stopped me. I met Erin’s blue eyes. “I think it’s what’s left of Neferet. I know it’s evil and it doesn’t belong at our school. Will you help us kick it out?” “Spiders are disgusting,” she began, but her voice faltered as she glanced at Shaunee. She lifted her chin and cleared her throat. “Disgusting things should go.” Resolutely, she walked to Shaunee and paused. “This is my school, too.” I thought Erin’s voice sounded weird and kinda raspy. I hoped that meant that her emotions were unfreezing and that, maybe, she was coming back around to being the kid we used to know. Shaunee held out her hand. Erin took it. “I’m glad you’re here,” I heard Shaunee whisper. Erin said nothing. “Be discreet,” I told her. Erin nodded tightly. “Water, come to me.” I could smell the sea and spring rains. “Make them wet,” she continued. Water beaded the cages and a puddle began to form under them. A fist-sized clump of spiders lost their hold on the metal and splashed into the waiting wetness. “Stevie Rae.” I held my hand out to her. She took mine, then Erin’s, completing the circle. “Earth, come to me,” she said. The scents and sounds of a meadow surrounded us. “Don’t let this pollute our campus.” Ever so slightly, the earth beneath us trembled. More spiders tumbled from the cages and fell into the pooling water, making it churn. Finally, it was my turn. “Spirit, come to me. Support the elements in expelling this Darkness that does not belong at our school.” There was a whooshing sound and all of the spiders dropped from the cages, falling into the waiting pool of water. The water quivered and began to change form, elongating—expanding. I focused, feeling the indwelling of spirit, the element for which I had the greatest affinity, and in my mind I pictured the pool of spiders being thrown out of our campus, like someone had emptied a pot of disgusting toilet water. Keeping that image in mind, I commanded: “Now get out!” “Out!” Damien echoed. “Go!” Shaunee said. “Leave!” Erin said. “Bye-bye now!” Stevie Rae said. Then, just like in my imagination, the pool of spiders lifted up, like they were going to be hurled from the earth. But in the space of a single breath the dark image reformed again into a familiar silhouette—curvaceous, beautiful, deadly. Neferet! Her features weren’t fully formed, but I recognized her and the malicious energy she radiated. “No!” I shouted. “Spirit! Strengthen each of the elements with the power of our love and loyalty! Air! Fire! Water! Earth! I call on thee, so mote it be!” There was a terrible shriek, and the Neferet apparition rushed forward. It surged from our circle, breaking over Erin

Yesterday while I was on the side of the mat next to some wrestlers who were warming up for their next match, I found myself standing side by side next to an extraordinary wrestler. He was warming up and he had that look of desperation on his face that wrestlers get when their match is about to start and their coach is across the gym coaching on another mat in a match that is already in progress. “Hey do you have a coach.” I asked him. “He's not here right now.” He quietly answered me ready to take on the task of wrestling his opponent alone. “Would you mind if I coached you?” His face tilted up at me with a slight smile and said. “That would be great.” Through the sounds of whistles and yelling fans I heard him ask me what my name was. “My name is John.” I replied. “Hi John, I am Nishan” he said while extending his hand for a handshake. He paused for a second and then he said to me: “John I am going to lose this match”. He said that as if he was preparing me so I wouldn’t get hurt when my coaching skills didn’t work magic with him today. I just said, “Nishan - No score of a match will ever make you a winner. You are already a winner by stepping onto that mat.” With that he just smiled and slowly ran on to the mat, ready for battle, but half knowing what the probable outcome would be. When you first see Nishan you will notice that his legs are frail - very frail. So frail that they have to be supported by custom made, form fitted braces to help support and straighten his limbs. Braces that I recognize all to well. Some would say Nishan has a handicap. I say that he has a gift. To me the word handicap is a word that describes what one “can’t do”. That doesn’t describe Nishan. Nishan is doing. The word “gift” is a word that describes something of value that you give to others. And without knowing it, Nishan is giving us all a gift. I believe Nishan’s gift is inspiration. The ability to look the odds in the eye and say “You don’t pertain to me.” The ability to keep moving forward. Perseverance. A “Whatever it takes” attitude. As he predicted, the outcome of his match wasn’t great. That is, if the only thing you judge a wrestling match by is the actual score. Nishan tried as hard as he could, but he couldn’t overcome the twenty-six pound weight difference that he was giving up to his opponent on this day in order to compete. You see, Nishan weighs only 80 pounds and the lowest weight class in this tournament was 106. Nishan knew he was spotting his opponent 26 pounds going into every match on this day. He wrestled anyway. I never did get the chance to ask him why he wrestles, but if I had to guess I would say, after watching him all day long, that Nishan wrestles for the same reasons that we all wrestle for. We wrestle to feel alive, to push ourselves to our mental, physical and emotional limits - levels we never knew we could reach. We wrestle to learn to use 100% of what we have today in hopes that our maximum today will be our minimum tomorrow. We wrestle to measure where we started from, to know where we are now, and to plan on getting where we want to be in the future. We wrestle to look the seemingly insurmountable opponent right in the eye and say, “Bring it on. - I can take whatever you can dish out.” Sometimes life is your opponent and just showing up is a victory. You don't need to score more points than your opponent in order to accomplish that. No Nishan didn’t score more points than any of his opponents on this day, that would have been nice, but I don’t believe that was the most important thing to Nishan. Without knowing for sure - the most important thing to him on this day was to walk with pride like a wrestler up to a thirty two foot circle, have all eyes from the crowd on him, to watch him compete one on one against his opponent - giving it all that he had. That is what competition is all about. Most of the times in wrestlin

The stars in their courses fought against her! External opposition one could cut through or get round; but this deep spiritual unease in the loved one’s soul, that — ah! that — one could not reach; and the unreachable could not be pushed away, cut through, or circumvented. She looked up at the stars that fought against her. Did the ancients really believe that, or was it, with them, as with her, just a manner of speaking? Did those bright wheeling jewels on the indigo velvet of all space really concern themselves with little men, the lives and loves of human insects, who, born from an embrace, met and clung and died and became dust? Those candescent worlds, circled by little offsplit planets — were their names taken in vain, or were they really in their motions and their relative positions the writing on the wall for men to read? No! That was only human self-importance! To his small wheel man bound the Universe. Swing low, sweet chariots! But they didn’t! Man swung with them — in space. . . . .

There are a few consolations. First and foremost, a ravaged incensed defiance, a fuck you to the universe and all those who peddle sentimental nonsense that doesn’t fit our reality. A certain kind of art works too, the sort created by unflinching genius realists who went through as much loneliness as we have, who understood our sadness ahead of time, grief-stricken masters like Baudelaire and Leopardi, Pessoa and Pascal, who can express our petty domestic sorrow in mighty transcendental terms and induct us to the most dignified kind of regret. They were there too and, in the most abstract accomplished ways, tell us ‘I know’. And we have friendship, not the kind that obliterates the loneliness, but that allows us to commune around it. We can’t help each other directly, we’re more like a group of the dying in a hospice talking circle who won’t be able to eradicate the end but know they are at least not alone with it. We get better too at understanding statistics: that this is normal for a benighted group of us. We belong to an important minority party in the parliament of human suffering.

... The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was felt less through their paintings than through a book, The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Moxon and wonderfully illustrated by Rossetti and Millais. The influence on Maeterlinck stems less from the poems themselves than from the illustrations. The revival of illustrated books in the last two years of the century derives from this Tennyson, the books printed at William Morris' press, the albums of Walter Crane. These last two and the ravishing little books for children by Kate Greenaway were heralded by Huysmans as early as 1881. Generally speaking, it is the English Aesthetic Movement rather than the Pre-Raphaelites which influenced the Symbolists, a new life-style rather than a school of painting. The Continent, passing through the Industrial Revolution some fifty years after England, found valuable advice on how to escape from materialism on the other side of the Channel. Everything that one heard about the refinements practised in Chelsea enchanted Frenchmen of taste: furniture by Godwin, open-air theatricals by Lady Archibald Campbell, the Peacock Room by Whistler, Liberty prints. As the pressure of morality was much less pronounced in France than in England, the ideal of Aestheticism was not a revolt but a retreat towards an exquisite world which left hearty good living to the readers of the magazine La Vie Parisienne ('Paris Life') and success to the readers of Zola. If one could not write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, one could always choose materials or arrange bouquets of flowers. Aesthetic ardour smothered the anglophobia in the Symbolist circle. The ideal of a harmonious life suggested in Baudelaire's poem L' Invitation au Voyage seemed capable of realization in England, whose fashions were brought back by celebrated travellers: Mallarmé after 1862, Verlaine in 1872. Carrière spent a long time in London, as did Khnopff later on. People read books by Gabriel Mourey on Swinburne, and his Passé le Détroit ('Beyond the Channel') is particularly important for the artistic way of life ... Thus England is represented in this hall of visual influences by the works of Burne-Jones and Watts, by illustrated books, and by objets d'art ...

My childhood was like every other kid. But I got a good chance to study Jainism, though that did not feel much of importance during that time. Living in a society of some hard core religious followers, but with my mother being atheist I really did not get too much affected by the staunch beliefs. I have been lucky enough to grown with such an environment that gave sanity to my thoughts but it always have been liberal enough making me have my own view. When I moved out of town for education, realised there are many more beliefs and much more to know about. But this was not it. The world around slowly made me feel the hate and cruelty which I was actually kept away from. There I started realising value of the society I was grown up in and the religious education I got. And for sure my religion is the one that helped me keep these beliefs alive while the circle around was full of people with cruel habits and nature. I used not to believe so much in sharing thoughts. But hearing of so much negativity being spread by many of mean leaders, I really felt that it is everyone's responsibility and I should also do my part.

And she loved you with all her heart." He sprang to his feet and walked up and down the small room. "I don't want love. I haven't time for it. It's weakness. I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I’ve satisfied my passion I'm ready for other things.I can't overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions. “ I had never heard Strickland speak so much at one time. He spoke with a passion of indignation. But neither here nor elsewhere do I pretend to give his exact words; his vocabulary was small, and he had no gift for framing sentences, so that one had to piece his meaning together out of interjections, the expression of his face, gestures and hackneyed phrases. "You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the masters of slaves, “ I said. "It just happens that I am a completely normal man." I could not help laughing at this remark, made in all seriousness; but he went on, walking up and down the room like a caged beast, intent on expressing what he felt, but found such difficulty in putting coherently. "When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.She has a small mind and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account-book. Do you remember my wife? I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks. With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me. She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.

Della & I are drunk at the top of Mont-Royal. We have an open blue plastic thermos of red wine at our feet. It's the first day of spring & it's midnight & we've been peeling off layers of winter all day. We stand facing each other, as if to exchange vows, chests heaving from racing up & down the mountain to the sky. My face is hurting from smiling so much, aching at the edges of my words. She reaches out to hold my face in her hands, dirty palms form a bowl to rest my chin. I’m standing on a tree stump so we’re eye to eye. It’s hard to stay steady. I worry I may start to drool or laugh, I feel so unhinged from my body. It’s been one of those days I don’t want to end. Our goal was to shirk all responsibility merely to enjoy the lack of everyday obligations, to create fullness & purpose out of each other. Our knees are the colour of the ground-in grass. Our boots are caked in mud caskets. Under our nails is a mixture of minerals & organic matter, knuckles scraped by tree bark. We are the thaw embodied. She says, You have changed me, Eve, you are the single most important person in my life. If you were to leave me, I would die. At that moment, our breath circling from my lungs & into hers, I am changed. Perhaps before this I could describe our relationship as an experiment, a happy accident, but this was irrefutable. I was completely consumed & consuming. It was as though we created some sort of object between us that we could see & almost hold. I would risk everything I’ve ever known to know only this. I wanted to honour her in a way that was understandable to every part of me. It was as though I could distill the meaning of us into something I could pour into a porcelain cup. Our bodies on top of this city, rulers of love. Originally, we were celebrating the fact that I got into Concordia’s visual arts program. But the congratulatory brunch she took me to at Café Santropol had turned into wine, which had turned into a day for declarations. I had a sense of spring in my body, that this season would meld into summer like a running-jump movie kiss. There would be days & days like this. XXXX gone away on a sojurn I didn’t care to note the details of, she simply ceased to be. Summer in Montreal in love is almost too much emotion to hold in an open mouth, it spills over, it causes me to not need any sleep. I don’t think I will ever feel as awake as I did in the summer of 1995.

In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger—the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication. Henry George is strong when he portrays the rottenness of the present system. We are, to say the least, not yet ready for his remedy. We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property.

The psychological importance of sexuality and the existence of plausible sexual analogies make a deviation into sex extremely easy in cases of regression, so that it naturally seems as if all one’s troubles were due to a sexual wish that is unjustly denied fulfilment. This reasoning is typical of the neurotic. Primitives seem to know instinctively the dangers of this deviation: when celebrating the hieros gamos, the Wachandi, of Australia, may not look at a woman during the entire ceremony. Among a certain tribe of American Indians, it was the custom for the warriors, before setting out on the warpath, to move in a circle round a beautiful young girl standing naked in the centre. Whoever got an erection was disqualified as unfit for military operations. The deviation into sex is used—not always, but very frequently—as a means of escaping the real problem. One makes oneself and others believe that the problem is purely sexual, that the trouble started long ago and that its causes lie in the remote past. This provides a heaven-sent way out of the problem of the present by shifting the whole question on to another and less dangerous plane. But the illicit gain is purchased at the expense of adaptation, and one gets a neurosis into the bargain.

The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the Peace-makers, is how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ. I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly false, as they are to their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and fair. I think rather, they must be the babbling lairs of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited human families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or grotesque, is a separating and scattering force. And these forces are multitudinous, these points of radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important. …the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious of bonds, poison whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating hearts.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

When Diana returned to work on Monday, September 16, she came directly to my bedroom and announced, “Mrs. Robertson, I have something important to tell you.” I could see out of the corner of my eye that she had a slight, mischievous grin on her face. “Go right ahead,” I said as I continued to blow-dry my hair in front of the mirror above the dresser. “No, Mrs. Robertson, I’d like your full attention.” I switched off my hair dryer and faced her as she stood in the doorway. “When you leave for work this morning, you’ll notice a lot of reporters and photographers at the entrance to the mews.” I wondered aloud if the press were following either Lord Vestey, a notorious international financier, or John Browne, a bright young M.P. known as one of “Maggie’s boys,” both of whom lived on our small street. “No, actually, Mrs. Robertson, they’re waiting for me,” Diana said with a great deal of blushing, staring at the floor, and throat clearing. “Good heavens, Diana, why?” “Well . . . I spent last weekend at Balmoral.” “With Prince Andrew?” I asked, remembering my friend Lee’s comment on the way to Glyndebourne. “No, actually, I was there to see Prince Charles.” More blushes and throat clearing, quickly followed by her disclaimer, “But he didn’t invite me. His mother did.” Hearing Diana speak of Her Majesty the Queen as “his mother” certainly gave me a clear picture of the circles in which Diana moved. I gasped and asked, probably rather tactlessly, “Gosh, do you think there’s any chance of a romance developing?” “Not really,” she said with noticeable regret. “After all, he’s thirty-one and I’m only nineteen. He’d never look seriously at me.” So modest, so appealing. I couldn’t imagine him not learning to love her. We certainly had. “Well, Diana, I wouldn’t be so sure,” I replied, thinking of my prediction from July.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL

always close my books with my 10 Commandments for Looking Young and Feeling Great. 1. Thou shalt love thyself. Self-love is essential to survival. There is no successful, authentic relationship with others without self-love. We cannot water the land from a dry well. Self-love is not selfish or self-indulgent. We have to take care of our needs first so we can give to others from abundance. 2. Thou shalt take responsibility for thine own health and well-being. If you want to be healthy, have more energy, and feel great, you must take the time to learn what is involved and apply it to your own life. You have to watch what goes into your mouth, how much exercise and physical activity you get, and what thoughts you’re thinking throughout the day. 3. Thou shalt sleep. Sleep and rest is the body’s way of recharging the system. Sleep is the easiest yet most underrated activity for healing the body. Lack of sleep definitely saps your glow and instantly ages you, giving you puffy red eyes with dark circles under them. 4.Thou shalt detoxify and cleanse the body. Detoxifying the body means ridding the body of wastes and toxins so that you can speed up weight loss and restore great health. Releasing toxins releases weight. 5. Thou shalt remember that a healthy body is a sexy body. Real women’s bodies look beautiful! A healthy body is a beautiful body. It’s about getting healthy and having style and confidence and wearing clothes that match your body type. 6. Thou shalt eat healthy, natural, whole foods. Healthy eating can turn back the hands of time and return the body to a more youthful state. When you eat natural foods, you simply look and feel better. You keep the body clean at the cellular level and look radiant despite your age. Eating healthy should be part of your “beauty regimen.” 7. Thou shalt embrace healthy aging. The goal is not to stop the aging process but to embrace it. Healthy aging is staying healthy as you age, which is looking and feeling great despite your age. 8. Thou shalt commit to a lifestyle change. Losing weight permanently requires a commitment to changes . . . in your thinking, your lifestyle, your mind-set. It requires gaining knowledge and making permanent changes in your life for the better! 9. Thou shalt embrace the journey. This is a journey that will change your life; it’s not a diet but a lifestyle! Be kind and supportive to yourself. Learn to applaud yourself for the smallest accomplishment. And when you slip up sometimes, know that it is okay; it is called being human. 10. Thou shalt live, love, and laugh. Laughter is still good for the soul. Live your life with passion! Never give up on your dreams! And most important . . . love! Remember that love never fails! Now that you have experienced the power of healthy living, be sure to share your success story with others and help them to reclaim their health and vitality.

NOTE: Practice your most effective relaxation techniques before you begin these exercises (refer to Chapter 6 if necessary). People are better able to concentrate when they are relaxed. Listening -Pay attention to the sounds coming from outside: from the street, from above in the air, from as far away as possible. Then focus on one sound only. -Pay attention to the sounds coming from a nearby room—the kitchen, living room, etc. Identify each one, then focus on a single sound. -Pay attention to the sounds coming from the room you are in: the windows, the electrical appliances. Then focus on one sound only. -Listen to your breathing. -Hear a short tune and attempt to re-create it. -Listen to a sound, such as a ringing doorbell, a knock on the door, a telephone ringing, or a siren. How does it make you feel? -Listen to a voice on the telephone. Really focus on it. -Listen to the voices of family members, colleagues, or fellow students, paying close attention to their intonation, pacing, and accent. What mood are they conveying? Looking -Look around the room and differentiate colors or patterns, such as straight lines, circles, and squares. -Look at the architecture of the room. Now close your eyes. Can you describe it? Could you draw it? -Look at one object in the room: chair, desk, chest of drawers, whatever. Close your eyes and try to picture the shape, the material, and the colors. -Notice any changes in your environment at home, at school, or in your workplace. -Look at magazine photos and try to guess what emotions the subjects’ expressions show. -Observe the effect of light around you. How does it change shapes? Expressions? Moods? Touching -When shaking a person’s hand, notice the temperature of the hand. Then notice the temperature of your own hand. -Hold an object in your hands, such as a cup of coffee, a brick, a tennis ball, or anything else that is available. Then put it down. Close your eyes and remember the shape, size, and texture of the object. -Feel different objects and then, with your eyes closed, touch them again. Be aware of how the sensations change. -Explore different textures and surfaces with your eyes first open and then closed. Smelling and Tasting -Be aware of the smells around you; come up with words to describe them. -Try to remember the taste of a special meal that you enjoyed in the past. Use words to describe the flavors—not just the names of the dishes. -Search your memory for important smells or tastes. -Think of places with a strong tie to smell. These sensory exercises are an excellent way to boost your awareness and increase your ability to concentrate. What is learned in the fullest way—using all five senses—is unlikely to be forgotten. As you learn concentration, you will find that you are able to be more in tune with what is going on around you in a social situation, which in turn allows you to interact more fully.

Suddenly he felt his foot catch on something and he stumbled over one of the trailing cables that lay across the laboratory floor. The cable went tight and pulled one of the instruments monitoring the beam over, sending it falling sideways and knocking the edge of the frame that held the refractive shielding plate in position. For what seemed like a very long time the stand wobbled back and forth before it tipped slowly backwards with a crash. ‘Take cover!’ Professor Pike screamed, diving behind one of the nearby workbenches as the other Alpha students scattered, trying to shield themselves behind the most solid objects they could find. The beam punched straight through the laboratory wall in a cloud of vapour and alarm klaxons started wailing all over the school. Professor Pike scrambled across the floor towards the bundle of thick power cables that led to the super-laser, pulling them from the back of the machine and extinguishing the bright green beam. ‘Oops,’ Franz said as the emergency lighting kicked in and the rest of the Alphas slowly emerged from their hiding places. At the back of the room there was a perfectly circular, twenty-centimetre hole in the wall surrounded by scorch marks. ‘I am thinking that this is not being good.’ Otto walked cautiously up to the smouldering hole, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the beam emitter that was making a gentle clicking sound as it cooled down. ‘Woah,’ he said as he peered into the hole. Clearly visible were a series of further holes beyond that got smaller and smaller with perspective. Dimly visible at the far end was what could only be a small circle of bright daylight. ‘Erm, I don’t know how to tell you this, Franz,’ Otto said, turning towards his friend with a broad grin on his face, ‘but it looks like you just made a hole in the school.’ ‘Oh dear,’ Professor Pike said, coming up beside Otto and also peering into the hole. ‘I do hope that we haven’t damaged anything important.’ ‘Or anyone important,’ Shelby added as she and the rest of the Alphas gathered round. ‘It is not being my fault,’ Franz moaned. ‘I am tripping over the cable.’ A couple of minutes later, the door at the far end of the lab hissed open and Chief Dekker came running into the room, flanked by two guards in their familiar orange jumpsuits. Otto and the others winced as they saw her. It was well known already that she had no particular love for H.I.V.E.’s Alpha stream and she seemed to have a special dislike for their year in particular. ‘What happened?’ she demanded as she strode across the room towards the Professor. Her thin, tight lips and sharp cheekbones gave the impression that she was someone who’d heard of this thing called smiling but had decided that it was not for her. ‘There was a slight . . . erm . . . malfunction,’ the Professor replied with a fleeting glance in Franz’s direction. ‘Has anyone been injured?’ ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ Dekker replied tersely, ‘but I think it’s safe to say that Colonel Francisco won’t be using that particular toilet cubicle again.’ Franz visibly paled at the thought of the Colonel finding out that he had been in any way responsible for whatever indignity he had just suffered. He had a sudden horribly clear vision of many laps of the school gym somewhere in his not too distant future.

22. Giving up Distraction Week #4 Saturday Scripture Verses •Hebrews 12:1–2 •Mark 1:35 •John 1:14–18 Questions to Consider •What distracts you from being present with other people around you? •What distracts you from living out God’s agenda for your life? •What helps you to focus and be the most productive? •How does Jesus help us focus on what is most important in any given moment? Plan of Action •At your next lunch, have everyone set their phone facing down at the middle of the table. The first person who picks up their phone pays for the meal. •Challenge yourself that the first thing you watch, read, or listen to in the morning when you wake up is God’s Word (not email or Facebook). •Do a digital detox. Turn off everything with a screen for 24 hours. Tomorrow would be a great day to do it, since there is no “40 Things Devotion” on Sunday. Reflection We live in an ever connected world. With smart phones at the tip of our fingers, we can instantly communicate with people on the other side of the world. It is an amazing time to live in. I love the possibilities and the opportunities. With the rise of social media, we not only connect with our current circle of friends and family, but we are also able to connect with circles from the past. We can build new communities in the virtual world to find like-minded people we cannot find in our physical world. Services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram all have tremendous power. They have a way of connecting us with others to shine the light of Jesus. While all of these wonderful things open up incredible possibilities, there are also many dangers that lurk. One of the biggest dangers is distraction. They keep us from living in the moment and they keep us from enjoying the people sitting right across the room from us. We’ve all seen that picture where the family is texting one another from across the table. They are not looking at each other. They are looking at the tablet or the phone in front of them. They are distracted in the moment. Today we are giving up distraction and we are going to live in the moment. Distraction doesn’t just come from modern technology. We are distracted by our work. We are distracted by hobbies. We are distracted by entertainment. We are distracted by busyness. The opposite of distraction is focus. It is setting our hearts and our minds on Jesus. It’s not just putting him first. It’s about him being a part of everything. It is about making our choices to be God’s choices. It is about letting him determine how we use our time and focus our attention. He is the one setting our agenda. I saw a statistic that 80% of smartphone users will check their phone within the first 15 minutes of waking up. Many of those are checking their phones before they even get out of bed. What are they checking? Social media? Email? The news of the day? Think about that for a moment. My personal challenge is the first thing I open up every day is God’s word. I might open up the Bible on my phone, but I want to make sure the first thing I am looking at is God’s agenda. When I open up my email, my mind is quickly set to the tasks those emails generate rather than the tasks God would put before me. Who do I want to set my agenda? For me personally, I know that if God is going to set the agenda, I need to hear from him before I hear from anyone else. There is a myth called multitasking. We talk about doing it, but it is something impossible to do. We are very good at switching back and forth from different tasks very quickly, but we are never truly doing two things at once. So the challenge is to be present where God has planted you. In any given moment, know what is the one most important thing. Be present in that one thing. Be present here and now.

At least tell me the truth about Blakeborough,” he said hoarsely. “Do you love him?” “Why does it matter?” His eyes ate her up. “If you do, I’ll keep my distance. I’ll stay out of your life from now on.” “You’ve been doing that easily enough for the past twelve years,” she snapped. “I don’t see why my feelings for Edwin should change anything.” “Easily? It was never easy, I assure you.” His expression was stony. “And you’re avoiding the question. Are you in love with Blakeborough?” How she wished she could lie about it. Dom would take himself off, and she wouldn’t be tempted by him anymore. Unfortunately, he could always tell when she was lying. “And if I say I’m not?” “Then I won’t rest until you’re mine again.” The determination in his voice shocked her. Unsettled her. Thrilled her. No! “I don’t want that.” His fingers dug into her arm. “Because you love Blakeborough?” “Because love is a lie designed to make a woman desire what is only a figure of smoke in the wind. Love is too dangerous.” He released a heavy breath. “So you don’t love him.” His persistence sparked her temper, and she pushed free of him. “Oh, for pity’s sake, if you must know, I don’t.” She faced him down. “Not that it matters one whit. I don’t need love to have a good marriage, an amiable marriage. I don’t even want love.” It hurt too much when her heart was trampled upon. Dom had done that once before. How could she be sure he wouldn’t do it again? Eyes gleaming in the firelight, he said in a low voice, “You used to want love.” “I was practically a child. I didn’t know any better. But I do now.” “Do you? I wonder.” He circled her like a wolf assessing its prey’s weaknesses. “Very well, let’s forget about love for the moment. What about passion?” “What about it?” she asked unsteadily as he slipped behind her. Nervous, she edged nearer the impressively massive pianoforte that sat in the center of the room. “What part does passion play in your plan for a safe and loveless marriage?” She pivoted to face him, startled to find that he’d stepped to within a breath of her. “None at all.” He chuckled. “Does Blakeborough know that?” “Not that it’s any of your concern, but Edwin and I have an arrangement. He’ll give me children; I’ll help him make sure Yvette finds a good husband. We both agree that passion is…unimportant to our plans.” “Really?” He raised an eyebrow. “It certainly aids in the production of those children you’re hoping for. To quote a certain lady, ‘You can set a plan in motion, but as soon as it involves people, it will rarely commence exactly as you wish.’ You may not want passion to be important, sweeting, but it always is.” “Not to us,” she said, though with him standing so close her legs felt like rubber and her blood raced wildly through her veins. “Not to me.” With his gaze darkening, he lifted his hand to run his thumb over the pounding pulse at her throat. “Yes, I can tell how unimportant it is to you.” “That doesn’t mean…anything.” “Doesn’t it?” He backed her against the pianoforte. “So the way you trembled in my arms this morning means nothing.” It meant far too much. It meant her body was susceptible to him, even when her mind had the good sense to resist. And curse him to the devil, he knew it. He slipped his hand about her waist to pull her against him. “It means nothing that every time we’re together, we ignite.” “People do not…ignite,” she said shakily, though her entire body was on fire. “What an absurd idea.” She held her breath and waited for his attempt to kiss her, determined to refuse it this time. But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he fondled her breast through her gown, catching her so by surprise that she gasped, then moaned as the feel of his hand caressing her made liquid heat swirl in her belly. Devil take the man.

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

Okay,let's do it," Robbie said, slapping his hands together as he stood. He stepped towards me with his arms outstreched and I tripped back. " What? No" " What? Yes," he said. He hit the rewind button and the tape zipped backward. He paused it right as the dance began. " You don't really expect me to ask Tama to dance with me without any practice. Even I'm not that stupid." I was suddenly very aware of my heartbeat. " There's no way I'm dancing with you." " You really know how to stroke a guy's ego," Robbie joked. "Come on. I'm not that repulsive." "You're not repulsive at all, it's just-" " Well, that's good to hear," Robbie said with a teasing smile. He was enjoying this. "it's just that I don't dance," I admitted. Never had. Not once. Not with a guy. I was a dance free-zone. " Well, neither do II mean, except on stage. But i've never danced like this, so we're even" he said. He hit "play". The music started and Robbie pulled me toward him by my wrist. he grabbed my hand, which was sweating, and held it, then put his other hand on my waist. My boobs pressed sgsinst his chest and I flinched, but Robbie didn't seem to notice. He was too busy consulting the TV screen. " Here goes nothing," he said. "Okay, it's a waltz, so one, two, three,,, one, two, three. Looks like a big step on one and two little steps on two and three. Got it?" "Sure." I so didn't have it. " Okay, go." He started to step in a circle, pulling me with him.I staggered along, mortified. " One, two, three. One two, three," he counted under his breath. My foot caught on his ankle. " Oops! Sorry." I was sweating like mad now, wishing I'd taken off my sweater, at least. " I got ya," he said, his grip tightiening on my hand. " K eep going." " One, two, three," I counted, staring down at our feet. He slammed one of his hip into one of the set chairs. " Ow. Dammit!" " Are you okay?"I asked."Yeah. Keep going," he said through his teeth. " One, two, three," I counted. I glanced up at the Tv screen, and the second I took my eyes off our feet, they got hopelessly tangled. I felt that instant swoop of gravity and shouted as we went down. The floor was not soft. " Oof?" " Ow. Okay, ow," Robbie said, grabbing his elbow. " That was not a good bone to fall on." He shook his arm out and I brought my knees up under my chin. " Maybe this wasn't the best idea." "No! No. We cannot give up that easily," Robbie said, standing. He took my hands and hoisted my up. " Maybe we just need to simplify it a little. " Actually i think its the twirl and the dip at the end that are really important," I theorized. It seemed like the most romantic part to me. " Okay, good." Robbie was phsyched by this development. "So maybe instead of going in circles, we just step side to side and do the twirl thing a couple of times. " Sounds like a plan," I said. " Let's do it." Robbie rewound the tape and we started from the beginning of the music. He took my hand again and held it up, then placed his other hand on my waist. This time we simply swayed back and forth. I was just getting used to the motion, when I realized that Robbie was staring at me.Big time." What?" i said, my skin prickling. " Trying to make eye contact," he said. " I hear eye contact while dancing is key." " Where would you hear something like that?" I said. " My grandmother. She's a wise woman," he said. His grandmother. How cute was that? His eyes were completely focused on my face. I tried to stare back into them, but I keep cracking up laughing. And he thought I'd make a good actress. " Wow. You suck at eye contact," he said. "Come on. Give me something to work here." I took a deep breath and steeled myself. It's just Robbie Delano, KJ. You can do this. And so I did. I looked right back into his eyes. And we continued to sway at to the music. His hand around mine. His hand on my waist. Our chests pressed together. I stared into his eyes, and soon i found that laughing was the last thing on my mind. " How's this working for you?