During My Struggle Quotes

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair. Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.

If you’re absent during my struggle, don’t expect to be present during my success

The Lord gives us a spirit of hope and a feeling of comfort and confidence that we can overcome the obstacles we face. He has shown the way to gain strength during our struggles. With His assistance, we have the ability to succeed. Listen to His words of counsel and comfort: 'Fear not, little children, for you are mine, and I have overcome the world and none of them that my Father hath given me shall be lost.

I have spent a great deal of my life during the past thirty-five years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by the way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore, it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the reductively simplifying and confining ones, based on mutual hostility, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.

So often, we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men. The men in my life—my father, Z.G., my husband, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my son—faced, to one degree or another, those great male battles, but their hearts—so fragile—wilted, buckled, crippled, corrupted, broke, or shattered when confronted with the losses women face every day...Our men try to act strong, but it is May, Yen-yen, Joy, and I who must steady them and help them bear their pain, anguish, and shame.

Ah, Robert?” “Shhhh, not while I’m praying,” he said, momentarily losing his place before he started again, “thank you for letting us survive that trip from hell. Thank you for ignoring my prayers for a quick death when I didn’t think that I’d be able to survive another day of starvation,” he said, making her roll her eyes in annoyance. “You were given three full meals a day just like everyone else,” she pointed out, not bothering to mention the fact that, on most days, he’d received second helpings. She sat down on a bench near their luggage, wondering just how much longer he was going to keep this up. “I’m sorry for all the cursing that my wife forced me to do while I was on that boat,” he continued, ignoring her even as he amused her. “As you know, she’s been such a bad influence on me. Thank you for pulling me from near death and somehow giving me the strength to survive.” “Near death?” she asked, frowning. “When were you near death?” “When was I near death?” he asked in stunned disbelief as he opened his eyes so that he could glare at her. “How could you forget all those times that I could barely move? When I struggled to find the will to live so that I wouldn’t leave you a young widow? Did my struggle for survival mean nothing to you?” he demanded in outrage, terrifying the people that were forced to walk past him to get to the docks and making her wrack her brain as she struggled to figure out what he was talking about. “Do you mean those few times when you had a touch of seasickness?” she asked, unable to think of anything else that he could be talking about since he’d been the picture of health during the majority of the trip. “A touch?” he repeated in disbelief. “I nearly died!

God doesn’t promise to remove all sin and struggles—but He does promise to be my refuge during every trial.

My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me. At the age of twelve, before I had one year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men's souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

During my trying times, I didn’t give up, I became stronger, and the wing that was clipped grew back.

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary. I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle.

During one of my biggest struggles, the ripple effect was at its worst. I felt as though the ripple was going to turn into a whirlpool – to the point where I thought I was going to drown. My head was under the water and my hands were reaching for something to hold on to. Sadly, there wasn’t anyone or anything I could take hold of. However, when I trusted the waves, they carried me to a peaceful place in my mind, to the hidden aspects of my true self where I could explore my options. I had to find comfort in what was given and make the best of it.

As I delved into stories of courage and resilience during humanity’s darkest hours—like Anne Frank’s diary—my own struggles began to shift into perspective. The hardships faced by those who lived through the war—the fear, the loss, the unimaginable choices—made my own challenges seem more manageable, if not insignificant. And that was comforting, in a way.

As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both. When I picked up the skulls to add to my growing collection of what Vanessa called "Bobo's smelly pile," the hooked horns fell away from each other and the story of the impalas' death struggle was undone.

During my stay in the United States, I witnessed the spontaneous formation of committees in a country for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime. In Europe, a criminal is an unhappy man who is struggling for his life against the agents of power, whilst the people are merely a spectator of the conflict: in America, he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him.

I bickered weekly with my mother, railed against her rule more than I dared to during childhood. I see now that I wasn't fighting against her, but for myself. Defying her voice was my way of making space for my own, however feeble and uncertain. At the heart of our disputes lived my struggle for womanhood, my yearning to trust God's whispers and tune out all others.

I don’t understand. She’s always been so friendly toward me.” “Yes, so long as your work consisted of updating calendars and photocopying golf club bylaws.” “But there was no danger of my taking her place!” “She was never afraid of that.” “Then why denounce me? Why would it upset her if I went to work for you?” “Miss Mori struggled for years to get the job she has now. She probably found it unbearable for you to get that sort of promotion after being with the company only ten weeks.” “I can’t believe it. That’s just so … mean.” “All I can say is that she suffered greatly during the first few years she was here.” “So she wants me to suffer the same fate? It’s too pathetic. I must talk to her.” “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” “Of course. How else are we going to work things out if we don’t talk?” “You just talked to Mister Omochi. Does it strike you that things have been worked out?

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered. Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague." He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors. His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion. At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then, one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left. The only ones who did not move were Allendy, his wife, the Lalous, Marguerite. More protestations. More jeering. But Artaud went on, until the last gasp. And stayed on the floor. Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. He asked me to go to the cafe with him.

Calming allows us to rest, and resting is a precondition for healing. When animals in the forest get wounded, they find a place to lie down, and they rest completely for many days. They don't think about food or anything else. They just rest, and they get the healing they need. When we humans get sick, we just worry! We look for doctors and medicine, but we don't stop. Even when we go to the beach or the mountains for a vacation, we don't rest, and we come back more tired than before. We have to learn to rest. Lying down is not the only position for resting. During sitting or walking meditation, we can rest very well. Meditation does not have to be hard labor. Just allow your body and mind to rest like an animal in the forest. Don't struggle. There is no need to attain anything. I am writing a book, but I am not struggling. I am resting also. Please read in a joyful, yet restful way. The Buddha said, "My Dharma is the practice of non-practice." Practice in a way that does not tire you out, but gives your body, emotions, and consciousness a chance to rest. Our body and mind have the capacity to heal themselves if we allow them to rest. Stopping, calming, and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, the course of our destruction will just continue. The world needs healing. Individuals, communities, and nations need healing.

This is what I discovered during my imprisonment. I saw the human character in its naked form. I saw at one end a narrow rank of villainy, and at the other a narrow rank of virtue. In the middle was everyone else. And I understood that the state of the world is the result of the struggle between these two extremes.

I was beginning to understand why my mother preferred solitude during the times that burdened her heart.

It’s so funny to me that just because they weren’t there for my struggles, they think they don’t exist. I’ve overcome a lot in my life. I’ve survived not feeling enough in my mom’s eyes. I’ve cried over plenty of boys. I’ve shed literal blood, sweat, and tears during my med school journey. I’ve suffered heartaches and growing pains. I’ve needed my mom and sister to be a support system more times than I can count. The problem lies within the fact that I never felt they could fulfill that need. I never felt important enough to them to ask.

We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this is ignominious,” etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” – an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.

During my training, a supervisor once told me, “There’s something likable in everyone,” and to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world’s enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along. I’ve found something likable in literally everyone I’ve seen as a therapist, including the guy who attempted murder. (Beneath his rage, he turned out to be a real sweetheart.)

The contrast between his existence during the poverty-stricken English winter and my own L.A. days of champagne cocktails and diets made me realize that the world wasn’t all power struggles between me and pasta.

I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.

I looked at my son and put my hand on his arm. 'I'd really like to know....What could I have done in the past that would have helped when you were growing up? How could I have been a better mother?' He thought about it for a few moments and then answered, 'When I was growing up--and even during my difficult years--I would have liked it if you had listened more to my heart than to my words.' ... Sometimes our children use words or a tone that communicates something completely different from what they are struggling with inside--whether it's fear or insecurity or pain. I realized that this is a great lesson for me to learn and something that could be applied to all my relationships.

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made. I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.

During all those years of struggle and heartache, my mother never worried. She took all her troubles to God in prayer. Every night before we went to bed, Mother would read a chapter from the Bible; frequently Mother or Father would read these comforting words of Jesus: “In my Father’s house are many mansions…. I go to prepare a place for you … that where I am, there ye may be also.” Then we all knelt down before our chairs in that lonely Missouri farmhouse and prayed for God’s love and protection. When William James was professor of philosophy at Harvard, he said, “Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith.” You don’t have to go to Harvard to discover that. My mother found that out on a Missouri farm.

Struggle for justice invariably alters the base culture. So did the long Tamil Eelam struggle. Its crystallization was the Vanni society during the last years of LTTE. My four years experience in Vanni also gave me a unique opportunity to see firsthand the devastating truth about the ways of the powerful on this globe - about which I and many other Tamils have puzzled over for many years. For us Tamils of Tamil Eelam it is a new source of power through knowing. It is also our proud history.

But there was a more recent author and public figure whose work spoke to the core of a new set of issues I was struggling with: the Bronx's own Colin Powell. His book, My American Journey, helped me harmonize my understanding of America's history and my aspiration to serve her in uniform. In his autobiography he talked about going to the Woolworth's in Columbus, Georgia, and being able to shop but not eat there. He talked about how black GIs during World War II had more freedoms when stationed in Germany than back in the country they fought for. But he embraced the progress this nation made and the military's role in helping that change to come about. Colin Powell could have been justifiably angry, but he wasn't. He was thankful. I read and reread one section in particular: The Army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts more than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation. The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all of my heart." -The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (p. 131)

I didn't set out to be a bad mother, however. It just happened. As it was, being a bad mother was child's play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn't do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.

I'm sorry," he says, his fingers closing around mine. "You shouldn't be looking at such..." "Such what?" I ask, a question that is rapidly chased by another. "And why not?" He glances down at the pictures, then tears his gaze away, dragging it back to my face. "Well, because it's improper, for one thing." How cruel it would be of me to ask for a second thing, if only to watch him stumble and stammer while his gaze struggles not to dip down to those portraits a second time. "It may have escaped your notice at some point during our acquaintance, but I am a woman. And as shocking as it may be for you to believe, I have seen myself naked on more than one occasion, so you'll pardon me if I am not offended by anything these ladies have to offer.

In the past, Julien said to her, when I could have been so extraordinarily happy during our walks in the woods at Vergy, furious ambition transported my soul to imaginary realms. Instead of me pressing this lovely arm, which was so near to my lips, my heart, the future took me away from you; I was engaged with the innumerable struggles I would have to endure to amass a vast fortune...

This definition matched everything I saw on the ground during my trip. Perhaps more importantly, Israel’s own leaders have long seen apartheid as well within the range of possibilities for its government. In 2007, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned that without a “two-state solution” Israel would “face a South African–style struggle for equal voting rights.” The result of that struggle in Olmert’s mind would be grim—“the state of Israel [would be] finished.” Three years later, Ehud Barak, then serving as Netanyahu’s defense minister, issued a warning: As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

I like to say the idea of Phantasma came to me all at once, hitting me like a ton of bricks one cloudy afternoon in November 2021, but truly, my experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder has been building to this story for a very long time. During the process of brainstorming the sort of adult romance I wanted to debut with, I was going through a period where my obsessive-compulsive tendencies were flaring up more than usual and the voices in my head were getting a little too bold. To my friends, these compulsions were alarming little anecdotes over lunch—‘that sounds like a horror movie’ one of them said (affectionately)—which is funny because, to me, someone who has lived with OCD my entire life, it was just another day of being unfazed by the increasingly creative scenarios my mind likes to conjure. OCD has such a wide range of symptoms that it makes every person’s experience with it different. Unfortunately, it has also become a commonly misused term conflated with the idea of being overly neat and clean, when in reality a lot of people with OCD have much darker symptoms. In my experience this has made explaining the real effects of OCD very hard as well as making it more difficult for people to regard the condition seriously. It’s so important to me to convey, with the utmost sincerity, that I know people are not doing this to be malicious! Because of the misuse of the term, however, some of the ways this disorder is shown in this book may come off as exaggerated or dramatic—but the details of Ophelia’s OCD are drawn directly from experiences that I, or someone I know who shares my condition, have had first-hand. And it’s still only a fraction of the symptoms we live with daily. Ophelia’s story is a love letter to my journey of getting comfortable being in my own head (as well as my adoration for Gothic aesthetics and hot ghosts). And while her experience with OCD, my experience with OCD, might look a lot different to someone else’s, I hope that the same message rings clear: struggling with your mental health does not make you unworthy of love. And I hope the people you surround yourself with are the sort of people who know that, too.

Now come on, we’re off.” He marched out of the room. They heard the front door open, but Dudley did not move and after a few faltering steps Aunt Petunia stopped too. “What now?” barked Uncle Vernon, reappearing in the doorway. It seemed that Dudley was struggling with concepts too difficult to put into words. After several moments of apparently painful internal struggle he said, “But where’s he going to go?” Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon looked at each other. It was clear that Dudley was frightening them. Hestia Jones broke the silence. “But…surely you know where your nephew is going?” she asked, looking bewildered. “Certainly we know,” said Vernon Dursley. “He’s off with some of your lot, isn’t he? Right, Dudley, let’s get in the car, you heard the man, we’re in a hurry.” Again, Vernon Dursley marched as far as the front door, but Dudley did not follow. “Off with some of our lot?” Hestia looked outraged. Harry had met this attitude before: Witches and wizards seemed stunned that his closest living relatives took so little interest in the famous Harry Potter. “It’s fine,” Harry assured her. “It doesn’t matter, honestly.” “Doesn’t matter?” repeated Hestia, her voice rising ominously. “Don’t these people realize what you’ve been through? What danger you are in? The unique position you hold in the hearts of the anti-Voldemort movement?” “Er--no, they don’t,” said Harry. “They think I’m a waste of space, actually, but I’m used to--” “I don’t think you’re a waste of space.” If Harry had not seen Dudley’s lips move, he might not have believed it. As it was, he stared at Dudley for several seconds before accepting that it must have been his cousin who had spoken; for one thing, Dudley had turned red. Harry was embarrassed and astonished himself. “Well…er…thanks, Dudley.” Again, Dudley appeared to grapple with thoughts too unwieldy for expression before mumbling, “You saved my life.” “Not really,” said Harry. “It was your soul the dementor would have taken…” He looked curiously at his cousin. They had had virtually no contact during this summer or last, as Harry had come back to Privet Drive so briefly and kept to his room so much. It now dawned on Harry, however, that the cup of cold tea on which he had trodden that morning might not have been a booby trap at all. Although rather touched, he was nevertheless quite relieved that Dudley appeared to have exhausted his ability to express his feelings. After opening his mouth once or twice more, Dudley subsided into scarlet-faced silence. Aunt Petunia burst into tears. Hestia Jones gave her an approving look that changed to outrage as Aunt Petunia ran forward and embraced Dudley rather than Harry. “S-so sweet, Dudders…” she sobbed into his massive chest. “S-such a lovely b-boy…s-saying thank you…” “But he hasn’t said thank you at all!” said Hestia indignantly. “He only said he didn’t think Harry was a waste of space!” “Yeah, but coming from Dudley that’s like ‘I love you,’” said Harry, torn between annoyance and a desire to laugh as Aunt Petunia continued to clutch at Dudley as if he had just saved Harry from a burning building.

And what form do these take?’ ‘Really, I hardly think——’ Lymond began acidly, but the captain interrupted him. ‘Your pardon, sir. But with the safety of my troops to consider …’ ‘Really, it will hardly affect your troops,’ said Lymond. ‘The lady unhappily suffers fits of extreme violence, during which she struggles, screams and attempts to throw off all her clothes. Now, will you kindly arrange for us to enter?’ Five minutes later, they were all three inside.

Jenny is leaning forward, wanting more, always wanting me to expound on the details of my military service. Tell them about your tour of duty. Tell them about your time as a POW. Tell them about your injuries, the torture. It was an endless struggle during the campaign, one of the things about me that tested most favorably. If my advisers had their way, it would have been just about the only thing I ever discussed. But I never gave in. Some things you just don’t talk about.

And in a major speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler uttered an unmistakable threat to any Jews who did choose to remain behind in his Germany:    I have very often been a prophet in my lifetime and I have usually been laughed at for it. During my struggle for power, it was primarily the Jewish people who just laughed when they heard me prophesy that one day I would become head of state and thereby assume the leadership of the entire people, and that I would then among other things subject the Jewish problem to a solution. I expect that the howls of laughter that rose then from the throats of German Jewry have by now died to a croak.      Today I'm going to turn prophet yet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging our peoples into a world war, then the outcome will not be a Bolshevization of the world and therewith the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe! When

Eventually that energy will flow out as either hostility or love. The energy must and will find a form, a shape, in our lives. It is now, as we wade into the secret distress of the feminine and encounter the largeness of the wound, that we need to be very conscious and keep the despair we might feel from becoming channeled into bitterness. We have to work very hard to keep it flowing toward compassion. The Tamper-Proof Bottle During those months when I was forming my feminist critique, I watched a friend struggle to open a tamper-proof bottle of medication.

I want to quote that poem in something I'm writing," he explained, "and can you tell me the last line of it ? " Lou answered mechanically, as if he had pressed a button: "Death is not a way out of it!" "A very strange theory, that about death," he said. "I wonder if there's anything in it. It would really be too easy if we could get out of our troubles in so simple a fashion. It has always seemed to me that nothing can ever be destroyed. The problems of life are really put together ingeniously in order to baffle one, like a chess problem. We can't untie a real knot in a closed piece of string without the aid of the fourth dimension; but we can disentangle the complexities caused by dipping the string in water-and such things," he added, with an almost malicious gravity in his tone. I knew what he meant. " It might very well be," he continued, " that when we fail to solve the puzzles of life, they remain with us. We have to do them sooner or later ; and it seems reasonable to suppose that the problems of life ought to be solved during life, while we have to our hands the apparatus in which they arose. We might find that after death the problems were unaltered, but that we were impotent to deal with them. Did you ever meet any one that had been indiscreet about taking drugs ? Presumably not. Well, take my word for it, those people get into a state which is in many ways very like death. And the tragic thing about the situation is this ; that they started taking the drugs because life, in one way or another, was one too many for them. And what is the result ? The drugs have not in the least relieved the monotony of life or whatever their trouble was, and yet they have got into a state very like that of death, in which they are impotent to struggle. No, we must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige. We can face that adventure as we've faced the others.

But it is the nature of narcissistic entitlement to see the situation from only one very subjective point of view that says “My feelings and needs are all that matter, and whatever I want, I should get.” Mutuality and reciprocity are entirely alien concepts, because others exist only to agree, obey, flatter, and comfort – in short, to anticipate and meet my every need. If you cannot make yourself useful in meeting my need, you are of no value and will most likely be treated accordingly, and if you defy my will, prepare to feel my wrath. Hell hath no fury like the Narcissist denied. Narcissists hold these unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves uniquely special. In social situations, you will talk about them or what they are interested in because they are more important, more knowledgeable, or more captivating than anyone else. Any other subject is boring and won’t hold interest, and, in their eyes, they most certainly have a right to be entertained. In personal relationships, their sense of entitlement means that you must attend to their needs but they are under no obligation to listen to or understand you. If you insist that they do, you are “being difficult” or challenging their rights. How dare you put yourself before me? they seem to (or may actually) ask. And if they have real power over you, they feel entitled to use you as they see fit and you must not question their authority. Any failure to comply will be considered an attack on their superiority. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger rage and self-righteous aggression. The conviction of entitlement is a holdover from the egocentric stage of early childhood, around the age of one to two, when children experience a natural sense of grandiosity that is an essential part of their development. This is a transitional phase, and soon it becomes necessary for them to integrate their feelings of self-importance and invincibility with an awareness of their real place in the overall scheme of things that includes a respect for others. In some cases, however, the bubble of specialness is never popped, and in others the rupture is too harsh or sudden, as when a parent or caretaker shames excessively or fails to offer soothing in the wake of a shaming experience. Whether overwhelmed with shame or artificially protected from it, children whose infantile fantasies are not gradually transformed into a more balanced view of themselves in relation to others never get over the belief that they are the center of the universe. Such children may become self-absorbed “Entitlement monsters,” socially inept and incapable of the small sacrifices of Self that allow for reciprocity in personal relationships. The undeflated child turns into an arrogant adult who expects others to serve as constant mirrors of his or her wonderfulness. In positions of power, they can be egotistical tyrants who will have their way without regard for anyone else. Like shame, the rage that follows frustrated entitlement is a primitive emotion that we first learn to manage with the help of attuned parents. The child’s normal narcissistic rages, which intensify during the power struggles of age eighteen to thirty months – those “terrible twos” – require “optimal frustration” that is neither overly humiliating nor threatening to the child’s emerging sense of Self. When children encounter instead a rageful, contemptuous or teasing parent during these moments of intense arousal, the image of the parent’s face is stored in the developing brain and called up at times of future stress to whip them into an aggressive frenzy. Furthermore, the failure of parental attunement during this crucial phase can interfere with the development of brain functions that inhibit aggressive behavior, leaving children with lifelong difficulties controlling aggressive impulses.

During our glorious year of 1974–5, while I was dithering over gravitational waves, and Stephen was leading our merged group in black hole research, Stephen himself had an insight even more radical than his discovery of Hawking radiation. He gave a compelling, almost airtight proof that, when a black hole forms and then subsequently evaporates away completely by emitting radiation, the information that went into the black hole cannot come back out. Information is inevitably lost. This is radical because the laws of quantum physics insist unequivocally that information can never get totally lost. So, if Stephen was right, black holes violate a most fundamental quantum mechanical law. How could this be? The black hole’s evaporation is governed by the combined laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity—the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity; and so, Stephen reasoned, the fiery marriage of relativity and quantum physics must lead to information destruction. The great majority of theoretical physicists find this conclusion abhorrent. They are highly sceptical. And so, for forty-four years they have struggled with this so-called information-loss paradox. It is a struggle well worth the effort and anguish that have gone into it, since this paradox is a powerful key for understanding the quantum gravity laws. Stephen himself, in 2003, found a way that information might escape during the hole’s evaporation, but that did not quell theorists’ struggles. Stephen did not prove that the information escapes, so the struggle continues. In my eulogy for Stephen, at the interment of his ashes at Westminster Abbey, I memorialised that struggle with these words: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions. And Hawking’s questions themselves keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later. When ultimately we master the quantum gravity laws, and comprehend fully the birth of our universe, it may largely be by standing on the shoulders of Hawking.

My father, Philip Van Doren Stern, was shaving on Saturday morning, February 12, 1938, while he explored the idea for the story The Greatest Gift—which became the basis for the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. The idea had come from a dream he had during the night. As he wrote in his notes: “The idea came to me complete from start to finish—a most unusual occurrence, as any writer will tell you, for ordinarily a story has to be struggled with, changed around and mixed up.” In contrast to his other writings, mainly on history, he said that the idea for The Greatest Gift had emerged full blown, and he had never considered changing it. What he had to do, he said, was to learn to write it.

Is that what got under your skin? That I shut you out, or that it was so easy for Tarquin to get in?' 'What got under my skin,' Rhys said, his breathing a bit uneven, 'is that you smiled at him.' The rest of the world faded to mist as the words sank in. 'You are jealous.' His shook his head, stalking to the little table against the far wall and knocking back a glass of amber liquid. He braced his hands on the table, the powerful muscles of his back quivering beneath his shirt as the shadow of those wings struggled to take form. 'I heard what you told him,' he said. 'That you thought it would be easy to fall in love with him. You meant it, too.' 'So?' It was the only thing I could think of to say. 'I was jealous- of that. That I'm not... that sort of person. For anyone. The Summer Court has always been neutral; they only showed backbone during those years Under the Mountain. I spared Tarquin's life because I'd heard how he wanted to even out the playing field between High Far and lesser faeries. I've been trying to do that for years. Unsuccessfully, but... I spared him for that alone. And Tarquin, with his neutral court... he will never have to worry about someone walking away because the threat against their life, their children's lives, will always be there. So, yes, I was jealous of him- because it will always be easy for him. And he will never know what it is to look up at the night sky and wish.

My awakening unfolded in phases. It occurred during a time of extreme physical and emotional stress when I was imbalanced in body, mind, and soul. It was a crisis of the Self. Life began to feel intolerable, old and new struggles compounding around me so that I had no choice but to address those that had gotten so far out of hand that they were my “normal.” It’s highly likely that if I had sought outside help again at this time, I would have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety, as I had been in the past. Instead I was intuitively drawn inward to self-witnessing that showed me how disengaged I had been. For the first time ever, I began to view these signs as messengers, not as something to repress or avoid.

They don’t know about the lonely nights in a strange, often dirty, bed in some fleabag hotel on the other side of the world. Lying there for hours on end staring at the rusty ceiling fan that barely moves the air, doing little more than collecting dust. The heat and humidity clog up my head and the sweat streams down my chest despite feeble attempts to cool off. Nights when I struggle to get the aging computer called my mind, a late ‘70s model, to process all the new events and information collected in its memory during the day. Appalling images are engraved on my soul, leaving permanent scars. The nights are spent fixated on the memories that never die, like maggots eating at my brain. I was striving hard for routine.

Life sometimes is like tossing a coin in the air calling heads or tails, but it doesn’t matter what side it lands on; life goes on. It is hard when you’ve lost the will to fight because you’ve been fighting for so long. You are smothered by the pain. Mentally, you are drained. Physically, you are weak. Emotionally, you are weighed down. Spiritually, you do not have one tiny mustard seed of faith. The common denominator is that other people’s problems have clouded your mind with all of their negativity. You cannot feel anything; you are numb. You do not have the energy to surrender, and you choose not to escape because you feel safe when you are closed in. As you move throughout the day, you do just enough to get by. Your mindset has changed from giving it your all to—well, something is better than nothing. You move in slow motion like a zombie, and there isn’t any color, just black and white, with every now and then a shade of gray. You’ve shut everyone out and crawled back into the rabbit hole. Life passes you by as you feel like you cannot go on. You look around for help; for someone to take the pain away and to share your suffering, but no one is there. You feel alone, you drift away when you glance ahead and see that there are more uphill battles ahead of you. You do not have the option to turn around because all of the roads are blocked. You stand exactly where you are without making a step. You try to think of something, but you are emotionally bankrupt. Where do you go from here? You do not have a clue. Standing still isn’t helping because you’ve welcomed unwanted visitors; voices are in your head, asking, “What are you waiting for? Take the leap. Jump.” They go on to say, “You’ve had enough. Your burdens are too heavy.” You walk towards the cliff; you turn your head and look at the steep hill towards the mountain. The view isn’t helping; not only do you have to climb the steep hill, but you have to climb up the mountain too. You take a step; rocks and dust fall off the cliff. You stumble and you move forward. The voices in your head call you a coward. You are beginning to second-guess yourself because you want to throw in the towel. You close your eyes; a tear falls and travels to your chin. As your eyes are closed the Great Divine’s voice is louder; yet, calmer, soothing; and you feel peace instantly. Your mind feels light, and your body feels balanced. The Great Divine whispers gently and softly in your ear: “Fallen Warrior, I know you have given everything you’ve got, and you feel like you have nothing left to give. Fallen Warrior, I know it’s been a while since you smiled. Fallen Warrior, I see that you are hurting, and I feel your pain. Fallen Warrior, this is not the end. This is the start of your new beginning. Fallen Warrior, do not doubt My or your abilities; you have more going for you than you have going against you. Fallen Warrior, keep moving, you have what it takes; perseverance is your middle name. Fallen Warrior, you are not the victim! You are the victor! You step back because you know why you are here. You know why you are alive. Sometimes you have to be your own Shero. As a fallen warrior, you are human; and you have your moments. There are days when you have more ups than downs, and some days you have more downs than ups. I most definitely can relate. I was floating through life, but I had to change my mindset. During my worst days, I felt horrible, and when I started to think negatively I felt like I was dishonoring myself. I felt sick, I felt afraid, fear began to control my every move. I felt like demons were trying to break in and take over my life.

For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair. Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?

When I first stopped trying to fix other people, I turned my attention to 'curing' myself. I was in a hurry to get this healing process over. I wanted immediate recovery from the effects of growing up in a family riddled with alcoholism and from being married to an alcoholic. I looked forward to the day I would graduate from Al-Anon and get on with my life. As year two and year three passed, I was still in the program. I began to despair as the character defects I had worked so long to overcome came back to haunt me, particularly during times of stress and during periods when I didn't attend meetings. I have severe arthritis in my joints. To cope with my condition, I have to assess my body each day and patiently respond to its needs. Some days I need a warm bath to get going in the morning. On other days I apply a medicated rub to the painful areas. Yet other days some light stretching and exercise help to loosen me up. I'ave accepted that my arthritis will never go away. It's a condition I manage daily with consistent, on-going care. One day I made a connection between my medical condition and my struggle with recovery. I began to look at myself as having 'arthritis of the personality,' requiring patient, continuous care to keep me from 'stiffening' into old habits and attitudes. This care includes attending meetings, reading Al-Anon literature, calling my sponsor, and engaging in service. Now, as long as I practice patience, recovery is a manageable and adventurous process instead of an arduously sought end point.

By the middle of the day, I'm struggling to keep my head up, so rather than eating during lunch, I sneak back to Gould, curl up in my bed, and cry. If it's going to be this hard, I wonder, why even bother? That's a bad attitude to have, especially on the first day, and it makes me wonder what I'm doing at Browick in the first place, why they gave me a scholarship, why they thought I was smart enough to be here. It's a spiral I've traveled before, and every time I arrive at the same conclusion: that there's probably something wrong with me, an inherent weakness that manifests as laziness, a fear of hard work. Besides, hardly anyone else at Browick seems to struggle like I do. They move from class to class knowing every answer, always prepared. They make it look easy.

At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn't expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they wanted to use the money they'd saved for their grandson to help Charlie. Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me that they "loved him instantly." Charlie's grandmother had died a few months after she first called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie's incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he thought they wouldn't like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family. At one point early on, I tried to caution them against expecting too much from Charlie after his release. 'You know, he's been through a lot. I'm not sure he can just carry on as if nothing has ever happened. I want you to understand he may not be able to do everything you'd like him to do.' They never accepted my warnings. Mrs. Jennings was rarely disagreeable or argumentative, but I had learned that she would grunt when someone said something she didn't completely accept. She told me, 'We've all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don't expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.' The Jenningses helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and insisted on financing his college education. They were there, along with his mother, to take him home when he was released.

A latent warmth flickers behind those golden, burning rings. The Cold struggles to squelch it, shrouding it with the frigid Night. It almost smothers it entirely. Almost. But I know it is still there. It is like the heat of an unassuming coal beneath a blanket of graying ash. It is hidden, but not extinguished. I can feel it. I can feel its gentle breath against my skin, like distant sunlight during newborn spring. I can hear it. I can hear it reaching to divide the curtains of shadow on his face, like the whispers of blossoms unfolding. I can see it. I can see it behind his fiery eyes, flickering like a starlight-dappled pool, dancing in and out of view. It is buried. Buried, but burning nonetheless. Buried but burning, like one last hope in my heart. One last Ember in the dark. -The Penitent God

The former South African archbishop Desmond Tutu used to famously say, “We are prisoners of hope.” Such a statement might be taken as merely rhetorical or even eccentric if you hadn’t seen Bishop Tutu stare down the notorious South African Security Police when they broke into the Cathedral of St. George’s during his sermon at an ecumenical service. I was there and have preached about the dramatic story of his response more times than I can count. The incident taught me more about the power of hope than any other moment of my life. Desmond Tutu stopped preaching and just looked at the intruders as they lined the walls of his cathedral, wielding writing pads and tape recorders to record whatever he said and thereby threatening him with consequences for any bold prophetic utterances. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days to make both a statement and a point: Religious leaders who take on leadership roles in the struggle against apartheid will be treated like any other opponents of the Pretoria regime. After meeting their eyes with his in a steely gaze, the church leader acknowledged their power (“You are powerful, very powerful”) but reminded them that he served a higher power greater than their political authority (“But I serve a God who cannot be mocked!”). Then, in the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny I have ever witnessed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the representatives of South African apartheid, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!” He said it with a smile on his face and enticing warmth in his invitation, but with a clarity and a boldness that took everyone’s breath away. The congregation’s response was electric. The crowd was literally transformed by the bishop’s challenge to power. From a cowering fear of the heavily armed security forces that surrounded the cathedral and greatly outnumbered the band of worshipers, we literally leaped to our feet, shouted the praises of God and began…dancing. (What is it about dancing that enacts and embodies the spirit of hope?) We danced out of the cathedral to meet the awaiting police and military forces of apartheid who hardly expected a confrontation with dancing worshipers. Not knowing what else to do, they backed up to provide the space for the people of faith to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa.

Tobias is standing in the hallway outside the dormitory. I am breathless, and I can feel my heartbeat even in my fingertips; I am overwhelmed, teeming with loss and wonder and anger and longing. “Tris,” Tobias says, his brow furrowed with concern. “Are you all right?” I shake my head, still struggling for air, and crush him against the wall with my body, my lips finding his. For a moment he tries to push me away, but then he must decide that he doesn’t care if I’m all right, doesn’t care if he’s all right, doesn’t care. We haven’t been alone together in days. Weeks. Months. His fingers slide into my hair, and I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate. He is stronger than anyone I know, and warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, and will keep, for the rest of my life. He leans down and kisses my throat, hard, and his hands smooth over me, securing themselves at my waist. I hook my fingers in his belt loops, my eyes closing. In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future. I hear footsteps and laughter at the end of the hallway, and we break apart. Someone--probably Uriah--whistles, but I barely hear it over the pulsing in my ears. Tobias’s eyes meet mine, and it’s like the first time I really looked at him during my initiation, after my fear simulation; we stare too long, too intently. “Shut up,” I call out to Uriah, without looking away. Uriah and Christina walk into the dormitory, and Tobias and I follow them, like nothing happened.

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards, morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory - not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be - would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego. Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark.

Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the later decades of his life he was compelled almost to withdraw from the war on political corruption and oppression. “Politics is not in my line: I have always confined myself to doing my little best to make men less foolish and more honorable.” He knew how complex a matter political philosophy can become, and he shed his certainties as he grew. “I am tired of all these people who govern states from the recesses of their garrets”;95 “these legislators who rule the world at two cents a sheet; . . . unable to govern their wives or their households they take great pleasure in regulating the universe.”96 It is impossible to settle these matters with simple and general formulae, or by dividing all people into fools and knaves on the one hand, and on the other, ourselves. “Truth has not the name of a party”; and he writes to Vauvenargues: “It is the duty of a man like you to have preferences, but not exclusions.”97

You don't know the books I've struggled over, the lectures I've sat in on at Beekman, and yet whenever I talk about something, I see how impatient you are, as if it were all childish. I wanted you to be intelligent. I wanted to hdp you and share with you-and now you've shut me out of your life." As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me. I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her. She was crying silendy as we left the school, and I found myself without words. All during the ride on the bus I thought to myself how upside-down the situation had become. She was terrified of me. The ice had broken betWeen us and the gap was widening as the current of my mind carried me swiftly into the open sea. She was right in refusing to torture herself by being with me. We no longer had anything in common. Simple conversation had become strained. And all there was between us now was the embarrassed silence and unsatisfied longing in a darkened room.

The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realise how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought that life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day i would look back on my life and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.

I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world … This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream … In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

I was certainly not the best mother. That goes without saying. I didn’t set out to be a bad mother, however. It just happened. As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul. Why did I allow Grace to make Mia cry? Why did I snap at Mia to stop just to silence the noise? Why did I sneak to a quiet place, whenever I could? Why did I rush the days—will them to hurry by—so I could be alone? Other mothers took their children to museums, the gardens, the beach. I kept mine indoors, as much as I could, so we wouldn’t cause a scene. I lie awake at night wondering: what if I never have a chance to make it up to Mia? What if I’m never able to show her the kind of mother I always longed to be? The kind who played endless hours of hide-and-seek, who gossiped side by side on their daughters’ beds about which boys in the junior high were cute. I always envisioned a friendship between my daughters and me. I imagined shopping together and sharing secrets, rather than the formal, obligatory relationship that now exists between myself and Grace and Mia. I list in my head all the things that I would tell Mia if I could. That I chose the name Mia for my great-grandmother, Amelia, vetoing James’s alternative: Abigail. That the Christmas she turned four, James stayed up until 3:00 a.m. assembling the dollhouse of her dreams. That even though her memories of her father are filled with nothing but malaise, there were split seconds of goodness: James teaching her how to swim, James helping her prepare for a fourth-grade spelling test. That I mourn each and every time I turned down an extra book before bed, desperate now for just five more minutes of laughing at Harry the Dirty Dog. That I go to the bookstore and purchase a copy after unsuccessfully ransacking the basement for the one that used to be hers. That I sit on the floor of her old bedroom and read it again and again and again. That I love her. That I’m sorry. Colin

I think that today young people come toward marriage as growing, searching men and women; and suddenly marriage and parenthood is represented as a stoppage of all that. I mean, young married people become members of a social community, and come under the authority of a political community. Once children come, even some of our more radical youth feel themselves no longer so free to protest various wrongs - because they need work and on their children's account feel more dependent on, more vulnerable to, the power of a town or city or county. They are expected to join with other consumers. They are expected to prepare the next generation for the next wars and for an expansion of the same, the very same community... I think the Church as I have experienced it during, let's say, thirty years of membership in my order, the Church is speaking less and less to the realities before us. Just one instance is the Church's failure to face and deal with the social and political difficulties of believers. And then when one moves out to another scene, as I have been doing, and meets the people of very mixed religious and ethnic backgrounds, one sees how tragically unresponsive the Church has been - because it has not heard and been moved by the ethical struggles of people on the 'outside,' yet maybe nearer to Christ's own struggle. More and more I see the need for flexibility in the Church. And I feel that one's responsibility to the Church can no longer be expressed by the priest's or parishioner's traditional compliance before powerful and sometimes corrupt 'authority.' I would like to see the resources of the Church brought to bear upon the realities that the Church alone cannot deal with - though it can shed certain light upon many troublesome issues. It is such matters I am discussing now with the families I stay with. I hope we can come upon something new, which will help us in the very real and new situations we are facing, I hope there is a spiritual breakthrough of sorts awaiting us, so that we can learn to live together in a new and stronger and less 'adjusted' way - 'adjusted' to the forces in America which plunder other countries and our own country as well.

How did you find me?" "I've followed you for a long time." He must have mistaken the look on my face for alarm or fear, and said, "Not literally. I just mean I never lost track." But it wasn't fear, or anything like that. It was an instant of realization I'd have a lot in the coming days: I'd been thinking of him as coming back from the dead, but the fact was he'd been there all along. He'd been alive when I cried in my room over him being gone. He'd been alive when I started a new school without him, the day I made my first friend a Jones Hall, the time I ran into Ethan at the library. Cameron Quick and I had existed simultaneously on the planet during all of those moments. It didn't seem possible that we could have been leading separate lives, not after everything we'd been through together. "...then I looked you up online," he was saying, "and found your mom's wedding announcement from before you changed your name. I didn't even need to do that. It's easy to find someone you never lost." I struggled to understand what he was saying. "You mean...you could have written to me, or seen me, sooner?" "I wanted to. Almost did, a bunch of times." "Why didn't you? I wish you had." And I did, I wished it so much, imagined how it would have been to know all those years that he was there, thinking of me. "Things seemed different for you," he said, matter-of-fact. "Better. I could tell that from the bits of information I found...like an interview with the parents who were putting their kids in your school when it first started. Or an article about that essay contest you won a couple years ago." "You knew about that?" He nodded. "That one had a picture. I could see just from looking at you that you had a good thing going. Didn't need me coming along and messing it up." "Don't say that," I said quickly. Then: "You were never part of what I wanted to forget." "Nice of you to say, but I know it's not true." I knew what he was thinking, could see that he'd been carrying around the same burden all those years as me. "You didn't do anything wrong." It was getting cold on the porch, and late, and the looming topic scared me. I got up. "Let's go in. I can make coffee or hot chocolate or something?" "I have to go." "No! Already?" I didn't want to let him out of my sight. "Don't worry," he said. "Just have to go to work. I'll be around." "Give me your number. I'll call you." "I don't have a phone right now." "Find me at school," I said, "or anytime. Eat lunch with us tomorrow." He didn't answer. "Really," I continued, "you should meet my friends and stuff." "You have a boyfriend," he finally said. "I saw you guys holding hands." I nodded. "Ethan." "For how long?" "Three months, almost." I couldn't picture Cameron Quick dating anyone, though he must have at some point. If I'd found Ethan, I was sure Cameron had some Ashley or Becca or Caitlin along the way. I didn't ask. "He's nice," I added. "He's..." I don't know what I'd planned to say, but whatever it was it seemed insignificant so I finished that sentence with a shrug. "You lost your lisp." And about twenty-five pounds, I thought. "I guess speech therapy worked for both of us." He smiled. "I always liked that, you know. Your lisp. It was...you." He started down the porch steps. "See you tomorrow, okay?" "Yeah," I said, unable to take my eyes off of him. "Tomorrow.

In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes. We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music. We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)

Lot of questions came up during that struggle between life and death. Are such bonds, with a husband and sons, necessary for women? I thought they were not, so I moved away from them. I am living with my art. I give the same advice to my students. I don’t make a sand pot often. I make it occasionally so that I don’t forget the fragile nature of paativratyam.’ ‘Does a woman have a world other than her husband’s? Is there a higher meaning to a woman’s life than motherhood? Your experience may have been different. But to preach everyone on the basis of your experience …’ ‘A woman thinks she doesn’t have a world other than that of her husband’s. True. But some day that very husband will tell her that there is no place for her in his world. Then what’s left for her? She thinks giving birth to sons is the ultimate goal of her life. But those sons become heirs to their father, and even before we realize it, they leave her hands and go under the wing of their father. They submit to his authority. Or they begin to legislate our lives. Why bear such sons? Nobody will experience this as harshly as I have. Having realized this bitter truth, isn’t it my responsibility to share it with other women? But you Brahmins give no value for my words anyway. I teach my skills to people of different tribes in this forest and give them the essence of my experience.

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming. I have struggled to find such. I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side.

a like position, can understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting. For more than a quarter of a century I have lived among you, and during all that time I have received nothing but kindness at your hands. Here I have lived from my youth until now I am an old man. Here the most sacred ties of earth were assumed; here all my children were born; and here one of them lies buried.” Lincoln would turn fifty-two the next day. The death he referred to was that of his second son, Edward, who had died in 1850 just shy of his fourth birthday, the cause thought to have been tuberculosis. “To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am. All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind. To-day I leave you; I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.” Only with God’s guidance and support, the same that “directed and protected” George Washington, would he succeed, he said. “Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now. To him I commend you all—permit me to ask that with equal security and faith you all will invoke His wisdom and guidance for me.” By this point, witnesses agree, as rain fell and Lincoln visibly struggled with powerful emotions, a veil of eye-glistening sorrow descended over the crowd. “With these few words,” he said, “I must leave you—for how long I know not. Friends, one and all, I must now bid you an affectionate farewell.

for I saw them, while I was still struggling through the bushes, looking out of the back window,—and yet drove on indifferently? Did he suppose that in all the wide world there could be forgiveness for such people? He shrugged his shoulders. “Aprés tout, madame,” he said, “cc n’est qu’un chien.” It seemed to me as I drove home, with Woosie wrapped in a cloth I had begged of the vet, at my feet—Woosie so quiet now, who had never yet been quiet, so for ever acquiescent,—it seemed to me as if I saw for the first time, in their just proportions, the cruelty and suffering which is life, and the sure release, the one real consolation, which is death. From having thought highly of being alive—for, with a few stretches of misery, I have been a fortunate and a happy person,—I began to think highly of being dead. Out of it all. Done with torment. Safe from further piteous woes. My mind, that is, during the drive, ran in directions which the comfortable would call morbid; it ran, in other words, in the direction of stark truth. And I don’t see how it could do anything else with a little dead thing, a thing so lately of my intimate acquaintance, which an hour before had been almost fiercely alive and furiously enjoying itself, lying at my feet in the awful meekness of death. Finished, Woosie was; and the manner of his ending left me with a great desire, if only it were possible, to beg his pardon, and the pardon of all poor helpless creatures, for the tragic unkindness of human beings. I

Now that the worst cold is over, now that the snow is beginning to thaw in the Crimea and in southern Russia, I am unable to leave my post, as preparations for the final confrontation are being made, to settle accounts with this conspiracy in which the banking houses in the plutocratic world and the vaults of the Kremlin pursue the same goal: the extermination of the Aryan people and races. This community of Jewish capitalism and Communism is nothing new to us old National Socialists, especially to you, my oldest comrades in arms. As before, during, and after the First World War in our country, so today the Jews and again only the Jews have to be held responsible for tearing apart the nations. There is a difference, however, if we compare the present world struggle with the end of the war from 1914–1918. In 1919, we National Socialists were a small group of believers who not only recognized the international enemy of mankind but also fought him. Today, the ideas of our National Socialist and Fascist revolution have conquered great and mighty states. My prophecy will be fulfilled that this war will not destroy the Aryan, but, instead, it will exterminate the Jew. Whatever the struggle may bring, however long it may last, this will be its final result. And only then, after the elimination of these parasites, a long era of international understanding, and therefore of true peace, will come over the suffering world. Adolf Hitler – proclamation for the 22-th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. (read by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner) Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1942

I. G.’s sufferings were positively transient compared to Hannah Allen’s. As a teenager in the 1650s, Allen went through a period of despair in which she was convinced she was damned. She found a more even keel when she married, but when her husband died in 1664, her spiritual agonies returned worse than ever. She considered suicide, repeatedly harmed herself, and once crawled into a roof void in order to starve to death (her resolve broke after three days). In the end the fog gradually lifted, which she ascribed to God’s mercy, her family’s love and the passage of time. What matters for us is that during her struggles, her family repeatedly tried to persuade her of God’s mercy, but she would have none of it. Once she heard a thunderclap, and told her aunt it was a message from God that she was damned. Surely not, said the aunt: God would not send a miracle to convince someone of their damnation. ‘We do not read of such a thing in all the Scripture.’ But Allen would not be reasoned with. ‘My Answer was, “Therefore my condition is unparalleled; there was never such a one [as me] since God made any Creature, either Angels or Men, nor never will be to the end of the world.”’ She begged friends not to pray for her, since ‘it would but sink me the deeper into Hell’. At first she worried that she had committed the ‘unpardonable sin’ mentioned in the Gospels, but soon she concluded that that sin was for amateurs and she had committed even worse: My Sins are so great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man, mine are greater. There is no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of the Creation.

JANUARY 26 Being Kind-I You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.” The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pastures. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish. —KAHLIL GIBRAN The great and fierce mystic William Blake said, There is no greater act than putting another before you. This speaks to a selfless giving that seems to be at the base of meaningful love. Yet having struggled for a lifetime with letting the needs of others define me, I've come to understand that without the healthiest form of self-love—without honoring the essence of life that this thing called “self” carries, the way a pod carries a seed—putting another before you can result in damaging self-sacrifice and endless codependence. I have in many ways over many years suppressed my own needs and insights in an effort not to disappoint others, even when no one asked me to. This is not unique to me. Somehow, in the course of learning to be good, we have all been asked to wrestle with a false dilemma: being kind to ourselves or being kind to others. In truth, though, being kind to ourselves is a prerequisite to being kind to others. Honoring ourselves is, in fact, the only lasting way to release a truly selfless kindness to others. It is, I believe, as Mencius, the grandson of Confucius, says, that just as water unobstructed will flow downhill, we, given the chance to be what we are, will extend ourselves in kindness. So, the real and lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so that we can be who we are, holding nothing back. If we can work toward this kind of authenticity, then the living kindness—the water of compassion—will naturally flow. We do not need discipline to be kind, just an open heart. Center yourself and meditate on the water of compassion that pools in your heart. As you breathe, simply let it flow, without intent, into the air about you. JANUARY 27 Being Kind-II We love what we attend. —MWALIMU IMARA There were two brothers who never got along. One was forever ambushing everything in his path, looking for the next treasure while the first was still in his hand. He swaggered his shield and cursed everything he held. The other brother wandered in the open with very little protection, attending whatever he came upon. He would linger with every leaf and twig and broken stone. He blessed everything he held. This little story suggests that when we dare to move past hiding, a deeper law arises. When we bare our inwardness fully, exposing our strengths and frailties alike, we discover a kinship in all living things, and from this kinship a kindness moves through us and between us. The mystery is that being authentic is the only thing that reveals to us our kinship with life. In this way, we can unfold the opposite of Blake's truth and say, there is no greater act than putting yourself before another. Not before another as in coming first, but rather as in opening yourself before another, exposing your essence before another. Only in being this authentic can real kinship be known and real kindness released. It is why we are moved, even if we won't admit it, when strangers let down and show themselves. It is why we stop to help the wounded and the real. When we put ourselves fully before another, it makes love possible, the way the stubborn land goes soft before the sea. Place a favorite object in front of you, and as you breathe, put yourself fully before it and feel what makes it special to you. As you breathe, meditate on the place in you where that specialness comes from. Keep breathing evenly, and know this specialness as a kinship between you and your favorite object. During your day, take the time to put yourself fully before something that is new to you, and as you breathe, try to feel your kinship to it.

Our Best Days at Work WHEN ASKED, “WHAT was one of your best days at work?” very few of us recount the time everything went smoothly and the big project we were working on came in on time and under budget. Considering how we work so hard to make things go well, that example should count as a pretty good day at work. But strangely, the days everything goes smoothly and as planned are not the ones we remember with fondness. For most of us, we have warmer feelings for the projects we worked on where everything seemed to go wrong. We remember how the group stayed at work until 3 a.m., ate cold pizza and barely made the deadline. Those are the experiences we remember as some of our best days at work. It was not because of the hardship, per se, but because the hardship was shared. It is not the work we remember with fondness, but the camaraderie, how the group came together to get things done. And the reason is, once again, natural. In an effort to get us to help one another during times of struggle, our bodies release oxytocin. In other words, when we share the hardship, we biologically grow closer. You may be getting sick of my saying this over and over, but our bodies are trying to incentivize us to repeat behavior in our best interest. And in hard times, what better way to protect the tribe, organization or species than to make us feel good for helping one another? Our “best days at work” were the ones when we helped each other endure or overcome hardship. And if those days do not come with fond memories, it is probably because the team didn’t come together, and backstabbing and selfishness prevailed. When we work in a culture in which we are left to fend for ourselves, even a “good day at work,” from a biological perspective, is still a bad day at work. Those in the military often speak with fondness of their time deployed. It seems strange that a group living in austere conditions, with real

My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it. For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’. Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme.

Sean Penn mourned the death of the fifty-eight-year-old socialist creep. Sean wrote in a statement sent to the Hollywood Reporter: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” He added: “I lost a friend I was blessed to have.” Penn needs to tell you that he knew the guy. A world leader. That’s cool. I guess playing Jeff Spicoli and marrying Madonna wasn’t enough (one made your career, the other ruined your urinary tract). Yeah, this is the same chap who told Piers Morgan that Ted Cruz should be institutionalized. Talk about the pot calling the kettle batshit crazy. If Penn got any nuttier, he’d be a Snickers bar. Of course it would be uncool to point out to Penn that Chávez was no champion of the poor. Under his rule people became far poorer in Venezuela. And in the midst of an oil boom, Chávez engineered a murder boom. The murder rate in his country tripled during Chávez’s tyrannical tenure, hitting a high of 67 per 100,000 residents in 2011, compared with a murder rate of less than 5 per 100,000 in the United States (and that includes Baltimore). And about 10 or 20 less than the last Penn movie. Penn was joined, per usual, by director Oliver Stone, who said, solemnly, somewhere: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.” He added: “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chávez will live forever in history. “My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.” This is from an adult, mind you. And no list of apologists for evil is complete without Michael Moore. This nugget comes from the Michigan Live website, which reports Moore praising Chávez in a feeble collection of Twitter messages, on the night the Venezuelan viper expired. Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous. US

Knowing Chris was getting married, his fellow Team members decided that they had to send him off with a proper SEAL bachelor party. That meant getting him drunk, of course. It also meant writing all over him with permanent markers-an indelible celebration, to be sure. Fortunately, they liked him, so his face wasn’t marked up-not by them, at least; he’d torn his eyebrow and scratched his lip during training. Under his clothes, he looked quite the sight. And the words wouldn’t come off no matter how he, or I scrubbed. I pretended to be horrified, but honestly, that didn’t bother me much. I was just happy to have him with me, and very excited to be spending the rest of my life with the man I loved. It’s funny, the things you get obsessed about. Days before the wedding, I spent forty-five minutes picking out exactly the right shape of lipstick, splurging on expensive cosmetics-then forgot to take it with me the morning of the wedding. My poor sister and mom had to run to Walgreens for a substitute; they came back with five different shades, not one of which matched the one I’d picked out. Did it matter? Not at all, although I still remember the vivid marks the lipstick made when I kissed him on the cheek-marking my man. Lipstick, location, time of day-none of that mattered in the end. What did matter were our families and friends, who came in for the ceremony. Chris liked my parents, and vice versa. I truly loved his mom and dad. I have a photo from that day taped near my work area. My aunt took it. It’s become my favorite picture, an accidental shot that captured us perfectly. We stand together, beaming, with an American flag in the background. Chris is handsome and beaming; I’m beaming at him, practically glowing in my white gown. We look so young, happy, and unworried about what was to come. It’s that courage about facing the unknown, the unshakable confidence that we’d do it together, that makes the picture so precious to me. It’s a quality many wedding photos possess. Most couples struggle to make those visions realities. We would have our struggles as well.

I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself, agreeably to the old laws of our Junto, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix'd opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right. And this mode, which I at first put on with some violence to natural inclination, became at length so easy, and so habitual to me, that perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me. And to this habit (after my character of integrity) I think it principally owing that I had early so much weight with my fellow-citizens when I proposed new institutions, or alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils when I became a member; for I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent, subject to much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in language, and yet I generally carried my points. In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.

During the war, I was constantly afraid Chris would die. What made it worse was that he told me many times that he wanted to die on the battlefield. Let me refine that. He didn’t want to die, but if he had to die, then he couldn’t imagine anything better than dying on the battlefield. It was part of his sense of duty: dying on the battlefield would mean that he had been doing his utmost to protect others. There was no higher calling, and no higher proof of dedication, for Chris. So there was no sense fearing death in combat. It would be an honor. That idea hurt me. I knew my husband wasn’t reckless--far from it--but in war there is a very thin line between being brave and being foolish, and when Chris talked like that I worried the line might be crossed. I started going to church more during his first deployment, and eventually went to women’s Bible studies to learn more about the Bible. But fitting the idea of God and faith and service together was never easy. What should I pray for? My husband to live, certainly. But wasn’t that selfish? What if that wasn’t God’s will? I prayed Chris would make the right decision when it came time to reenlist or leave the Navy. I wanted him to leave, yet that wasn’t exactly what I prayed for. Yet I was disappointed when he reenlisted. Was I disappointed with God, or Chris? Had my prayers even been heard? If it was God’s plan that he reenlist, I should have been at peace with it. Yet I can’t say that I was. Right after he made his decision, I took a walk with a friend whose faith ran very deep. She knew the Bible much better than I did, and was far more active in the church. I cried to her. “I have to believe this is the best thing for our family,” I told her. “But I don’t know how it can be. I’m really struggling to accept it.” “It’s okay to be angry with God,” she told me. That caught me short. “I--I don’t think we’re supposed to be.” “Why not?” “Well…Jesus was never mad at God, and--“ “That’s wrong,” she said. “Don’t you remember in the temple with the money changers? Or in the garden before he was crucified, his doubts? Or on the cross? It’s okay to have those feelings.” We talked some more. “I do believe that if Chris dies,” I said finally, “God must be saying it’s still okay for our family, even if I don’t know how.” She teared up. “I’m in awe,” she confessed. “I don’t know if I could say that.

In Mississippi, where I lived from 1967 to 1974, people who challenged the system anticipated menace, battery, even murder, every day. In this context, I sometimes felt ashamed that my contributions at the time were not more radical. I taught in two local black colleges, I wrote about the Movement, and I created tiny history booklets which were used to teach the teachers of children enrolled in Head Start. And, of course, I was interracially married, which was illegal. It was perhaps in Mississippi during those years that I understood how the daily news of disaster can become, for the spirit, a numbing assault, and that one's own activism, however modest, fighting against this tide of death, provides at least the possibility of generating a different kind of "news." A "news" that empowers rather that defeats. There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women's rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who, fearing an unknown freedom, looks longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine. During my years of being close to people engaged in changing the world I have seen fear turn into courage. Sorrow into joy. Funerals into celebrations. Because whatever the consequences, people, standing side by side, have expressed who they really are, and that ultimately they believe in the love of the world and each other enough *to be that* - which is the foundation of activism. It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame. This is the tragedy of our world. For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile. In this regard, I have a story to tell.

most of the other sciences deal with things that do not move, that are fixed. You can analyse the chair, the chair does not fly from you. But this science deals with the mind, which moves all the time; the moment you want to study it, it slips. Now the mind is in one mood, the next moment, perhaps, it is different, changing, changing all the time. In the midst of all this change it has to be studied, understood, grasped, and controlled. How much more difficult, then, is this science! It requires rigorous training. People ask me why I do not give them practical lessons. Why, it is no joke. I stand upon this platform talking to you and you go home and find no benefit; nor do I. Then you say, "It is all bosh." It is because you wanted to make a bosh of it. I know very little of this science, but the little that I gained I worked for thirty years of my life, and for six years I have been telling people the little that I know. It took me thirty years to learn it; thirty years of hard struggle. Sometimes I worked at it twenty hours during the twenty-four; sometimes I slept only one hour in the night; sometimes I worked whole nights; sometimes I lived in places where there was hardly a sound, hardly a breath; sometimes I had to live in caves. Think of that. And yet I know little or nothing; I have barely touched the hem of the garment of this science. But I can understand that it is true and vast and wonderful. Now, if there is any one amongst you who really wants to study this science, he will have to start with that sort of determination, the same as, nay even more than, that which he puts into any business of life. And what an amount of attention does business require, and what a rigorous taskmaster it is! Even if the father, the mother, the wife, or the child dies, business cannot stop! Even if the heart is breaking, we still have to go to our place of business, when every hour of work is a pang. That is business, and we think that it is just, that it is right. This science calls for more application than any business can ever require. Many men can succeed in business; very few in this. Because so much depends upon the particular constitution of the person studying it. As in business all may not make a fortune, but everyone can make something, so in the study of this science each one can get a glimpse which will convince him of its truth and of the fact that there have been men who realised it fully. This is the outline of the science. It stands upon its own feet and in its own light, and challenges comparison with any other science. There have been charlatans, there have been magicians, there have been cheats, and more here than in any other field. W

During this time my father was in a labor camp, for the crime of wanting to leave the country, and my mother struggled to care for us, alone and with few provisions. One day she went out to the back patio to do the wash and saw a cute little frog sitting by the door to the kitchen. My mother has always liked frogs, and this frog by the kitchen door gave her an idea. She began to spin wonderful stories about a crazy, adventurous frog named Antonica who would overcome great odds with her daring and creativity. Antonica helped us dream of freedom and possibilities. These exciting tales were reserved for mealtime. We ate until our bowls were empty, distracted from the bland food by the flavor of Antonica’s world. Mamina knew her children were well nourished, comforted, and prepared for the challenges and adventures to come. In 2007, I was preparing to host a TV show on a local station and was struggling with self-doubt. With encouragement and coaching from a friend, I finally realized that I had been preparing for this opportunity most of my life. All I needed was confidence in myself, the kind of confidence Antonica had taught me about, way back in Cuba. Through this process of self-discovery, the idea came to me to start cooking with my mother. We all loved my Mamina’s cooking, but I had never been interested in learning to cook like her. I began to write down her recipes and take pictures of her delicious food. I also started to write down the stories I had heard from my parents, of our lives in Cuba and coming to the United States. At some point I realized I had ninety recipes. This is a significant number to Cuban exiles, as there are ninety miles between Cuba and Key West, Florida. A relatively short distance, but oh, so far! My effort to grow closer to my mother through cooking became another dream waiting to be fulfilled, through a book called 90 Miles 90 Recipes: My Journey to Understanding. My mother now seemed as significant as our journey to the United States. While learning how she orchestrated these flavors, I began to understand my mother as a woman with many gifts. Through cooking together, my appreciation for her has grown. I’ve come to realize why feeding everyone was so important to her. Nourishing the body is part of nurturing the soul. My mother is doing very poorly now. Most of my time in the last few months has been dedicated to caring for her. Though our book has not yet been published, it has already proven valuable. It has taught me about dreams from a different perspective—helping me recognize that the lives my sisters and I enjoy are the realization of my parents’ dream of freedom and opportunity for them, and especially for us.

From the Author Matthew 16:25 says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  This is a perfect picture of the life of Nate Saint; he gave up his life so God could reveal a greater glory in him and through him. I first heard the story of Operation Auca when I was eight years old, and ever since then I have been inspired by Nate’s commitment to the cause of Christ. He was determined to carry out God’s will for his life in spite of fears, failures, and physical challenges. For several years of my life, I lived and ministered with my parents who were missionaries on the island of Jamaica. My experiences during those years gave me a passion for sharing the stories of those who make great sacrifices to carry the gospel around the world. As I wrote this book, learning more about Nate Saint’s life—seeing his spirit and his struggles—was both enlightening and encouraging to me. It is my prayer that this book will provide a window into Nate Saint’s vision—his desires, dreams, and dedication. I pray his example will convince young people to step out of their comfort zones and wholeheartedly seek God’s will for their lives. That is Nate Saint’s legacy: changing the world for Christ, one person and one day at a time.   Nate Saint Timeline 1923 Nate Saint born. 1924 Stalin rises to power in Russia. 1930 Nate’s first flight, aged 7 with his brother, Sam. 1933 Nate’s second flight with his brother, Sam. 1936 Nate made his public profession of faith. 1937 Nate develops bone infection. 1939 World War II begins. 1940 Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister. 1941 Nate graduates from Wheaton College. Nate takes first flying lesson. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 1942 Nate’s induction into the Army Air Corps. 1943 Nate learns he is to be transferred to Indiana. 1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by U.S. 1946 Nate discharged from the Army. 1947 Nate accepted for Wheaton College. 1948 Nate and Marj are married and begin work in Eduador. Nate crashes his plane in Quito. 1949 Nate’s first child, Kathy, is born. Germany divided into East and West. 1950 Korean War begins. 1951 Nate’s second child, Stephen, is born. 1952 The Saint family return home to the U.S. 1953 Nate comes down with pneumonia. Nate and Henry fly to Ecuador. 1954 The first nuclear-powered submarine is launched. Nate’s third child, Phillip, is born. 1955 Nate is joined by Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. Nate spots an Auca village for the first time. Operation Auca commences. 1956 The group sets up camp four miles from the Auca territory. Nate and the group are killed on “Palm Beach”.

On trial were two men, one in a plaid shirt, and the other with a long, ZZ Top-style beard. They looked intimated by the crowd that had turned out, even though Plaid Shirt stood six foot four. He was the main perpetrator, charged with animal cruelty. He had brought his young son along during the bear killing for which he was on trial. The main reason the state managed to bring charges is that the hunters had made a videotape of their gruesome acts. The state trooper who confiscated the video couldn’t even testify at the time of the trial, he was so emotionally overcome. Then they showed the video in court, and I understood why. ZZ Top and Plaid Shirt cornered the bear cub. In order to preserve the integrity of the pelt, they attempted to kill the cub by stabbing it in the eyes. It was absolutely gut-wrenching to watch. The bear struggled for its life, but Plaid Shirt kept thrusting his knife, moving back as the animal twisted frantically away, then moving forward to stab again. The bear cub screamed, and it sounded eerily as though the bear was actually crying “Mama,” over and over. Plaid Shirt and ZZ Top sat unfazed in court. The bear screamed, “Mama, mama, mama.” From my place in the gallery, I watched as a towering man in a police uniform burst into tears and walked out of the courtroom. At the end of the video, Plaid Shirt brought his nine-year-old son over to stand triumphantly next to the dead bear cub. “Clearly, you deserve jail,” the judge told Plaid Shirt as he stood for sentencing. “Unfortunately, the jails are filled with people even more heinous than you: rapists, murderers, and armed robbers. So I am going to sentence you to three thousand hours of community service.” I approached the judge after the trial, furious that this man might end up collecting a bit of rubbish along the highway as his penance. “I want him,” I said, referring to Plaid Shirt. I said that I ran a wildlife rehabilitation facility and could use a volunteer. The first day Plaid Shirt showed up, he actually looked scared of me. He cleaned cages, fed animals, and worked hard. He liked the bobcat I was taking care of, “Bobby.” He said it was the biggest one he had ever seen. It would make a prize trophy. I asked him every question I could think of: where he hunted, how he hunted, why he hunted. Whether he had any kind of shirt other than plaid. I felt as though I was in the presence of true evil. For months he helped. He had some skills, like carpentry, and he could lift heavy things. He fulfilled his community service. In the end, I couldn’t tell if I had made any difference or not. I was only slightly encouraged by his parting words. “You know,” Plaid Shirt said, “I never knew cougars purred.

Page 25: …Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist. Towards the end of the [Guide to the Perplexed], in a crucial chapter (book III, chapter 51) he discusses how various sections of humanity can attain the supreme religious value, the true worship of God. Among those who are incapable of even approaching this are: "Some of the Turks [i.e., the Mongol race] and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does." Now, what does one do with such a passage in a most important and necessary work of Judaism? Face the truth and its consequences? God forbid! Admit (as so many Christian scholars, for example, have done in similar circumstances) that a very important Jewish authority held also rabid anti-Black views, and by this admission make an attempt at self-education in real humanity? Perish the thought. I can almost imagine Jewish scholars in the USA consulting among themselves, ‘What is to be done?’ – for the book had to be translated, due to the decline in the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews. Whether by consultation or by individual inspiration, a happy ‘solution’ was found: in the popular American translation of the Guide by one Friedlander, first published as far back as 1925 and since then reprinted in many editions, including several in paperback, the Hebrew word Kushim, which means Blacks, was simply transliterated and appears as ‘Kushites’, a word which means nothing to those who have no knowledge of Hebrew, or to whom an obliging rabbi will not give an oral explanation. During all these years, not a word has been said to point out the initial deception or the social facts underlying its continuation – and this throughout the excitement of Martin Luther King’s campaigns, which were supported by so many rabbis, not to mention other Jewish figures, some of whom must have been aware of the anti-Black racist attitude which forms part of their Jewish heritage. Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle – and back – and back again.

As their uncle, Earl Spencer, says their characters are very different from the public image. “The press have always written up William as the terror and Harry as a rather quiet second son. In fact William is a very self-possessed, intelligent and mature boy and quite shy. He is quite formal and stiff, sounding older than his years when he answers the phone.” It is Harry who is the mischievous imp of the family. Harry’s puckish character manifested itself to his uncle during the return flight from Necker, the Caribbean island owned by Virgin airline boss Richard Branson. He recalls: “Harry was presented with his breakfast. He had his headphones on and a computer game in front of him but he was determined to eat his croissant. It took him about five minutes to manoeuvre all his electronic gear, his knife, his croissant and his butter. When he eventually managed to get a mouthful there was a look of such complete satisfaction on his face. It was a really wonderful moment.” His godparent Carolyn Bartholomew says, without an ounce of prejudice, that Harry is “the most affectionate, demonstrative and huggable little boy” while William is very much like his mother, “intuitive, switched on and highly perceptive.” At first she thought the future king was a “little terror.” “He was naughty and had tantrums,” she recalls. “But when I had my two children I realized that they are all like that at some point. In fact William is kind-hearted, very much like Diana. He would give you his last Rolo sweet. In fact he did on one occasion. He was longing for this sweet, he only had one left and he gave it to me.” Further evidence of his generous heart occurred when he gathered together all his pocket money, which only amounted to a few pence, and solemnly handed it over to her. But he is no angel as Carolyn saw when she visited Highgrove. Diana had just finished a swim in the open air pool and had changed into a white toweling dressing gown as she waited for William to follow her. Instead he splashed about as though he were drowning and slowly sank to the bottom. His mother, not knowing whether it was a fake or not, struggled to get out of her robe. Then, realizing the urgency, she dived in still in her dressing gown. At that moment he resurfaced, shouting and laughing at the success of his ruse. Diana was not amused. Generally William is a youngster who displays qualities of responsibility and thoughtfulness beyond his years and enjoys a close rapport with his younger brother whom friends believe will make an admirable adviser behind the scenes when William eventually becomes king. Diana feels that it is a sign that in some way they will share the burdens of monarchy in the years to come. Her approach is conditioned by her firmly held belief that she will never become queen and that her husband will never become King Charles III.

Although I am still far from this kind of interior understanding of myself, with profound respect for its significance I have sought to preserve my individuality―worshipped the unknown God. With a premature anxiety I have tried to avoid coming in close contact with those things whose force of attraction might be too powerful for me. I have sought to appropriate much from them, studied their distinctive characteristics and meaning in human life, but at the same time guarded against coming, like the moth, too close to the flame. I have had little to win or to lose in association with the ordinary run of men, partly because what they do―so-called practical life―does not interest me much, partly because their coldness and indifference to the spiritual and deeper currents in man alienate me even more from them. With few exceptions my companions have had no special influence upon me. A life that has not arrived at clarity about itself must necessarily exhibit an uneven side-surface; confronted by certain facts [*Facta*] and their apparent disharmony, they simply halted there, for, as I see it, they did not have sufficient interest to seek a resolution in a higher harmony or to recognize the necessity of it. Their opinion of me was always one-sided, and I have vacillated between putting too much or too little weight on what they said. I have now withdrawn from their influence and the potential variations of my life's compass resulting from it. Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself "I" in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself "I" in a profounder sense. But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. I will remember that philosopher's method of having his disciples keep silent for three years; then I dare say it will come. Just as one does not begin a feast at sunrise but at sundown, just so in the spiritual world one must first work forward for some time before the sun really shines for us and rises in all its glory; for although it is true as it says that God lets his sun shine upon the good and the evil and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world. So let the die be cast―I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it. I will not lament the past―why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill." ―from_Journals_, (The Search for Personal Meaning)

And now, my young Comrades, you must understand one thing: in the year 1919, I took up a struggle which appeared nearly hopeless at the time. An unknown man who undertook to rid a world of resistance, to tear down walls of prejudice. Prejudice at times is worse than divine force. A man took a stand against all the bearers of public life back then, against the parties, against their press, against the whole system of capitalist fabrication of public opinion. I led this struggle until the final seizure of power. You must understand one thing: that at this moment I could have only one wish, namely, that if this war is indeed inevitable, that it still be fought during my lifetime, because I am the man who possesses the greatest authority with the German Volk. And moreover, because I believe that based on the experiences of my life, I am the most able to strengthen the nation in this battle and to lead it into this battle. Thus, once I became aware that England was determined to fight this battle, I did not capitulate, but in an instant determined to do everything to prepare Germany to hold its own in this most difficult struggle for its existence. And my appeal to the German nation was not in vain. I labored in these years to build up armament for the German Volk. I subordinated everything to the one thought: how can Germany be made strong? How can its armament be made powerful? I was determined to do nothing by half-measures, but to stake everything on one throw. I knew that this struggle would determine whether Germany will be or will not be. It is not a question of a system. It is a question of whether these 85 million people, in their national unity, can carry through on their right to life or not. If yes, then the future of Europe belongs to this Volk. If no, then this Volk shall perish, shall sink back, and it will no longer be worthwhile to live in this Volk. Faced with this alternative, I was determined to employ all means-down to the last-in this struggle. The nation understood this. Millions of men never spoke of it. Still all thought the same. And throughout this period, nobody ever reproached me for this enormous mobilization of public means for the one goal: national armament. I also wished that, if the hour was to come and come it would, the German soldier should not set out against the enemy as, regrettably, this has been the case far too often in Germany’s past. This phrase, “the best weapons for the best soldier in the world,” has profound meaning. The best soldier must and will despair once it dawns on him that, in spite of his valor, the effectiveness of his arms does not suffice to force the victory. Therefore, I was determined to do my utmost to secure for us the best arms. And, before German history, I may be faulted on many a thing, but on one topic assuredly not: that I had not done my utmost, what was humanly possible, to prepare the German Volk better for this struggle than, regrettably, it was prepared in the year 1914. In this, I found the support of countless people, men of the state, the Party, and in particular the Wehrmacht. They walked by my side. And thus we were able, in barely seven years, to make the German Wehrmacht once more the world’s best. And, for my person, I have always been convinced that for us Germans there are only two possibilities: either we are no soldiers or we are the world’s best. There is no in-between. Adolf Hitler - speech at the annual rally of young officer cadets at the Berlin Sportpalast December 18, 1940

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

The year 1944 was the year of the greatest burdens in this mighty struggle. It was a year that again proved conclusively that the bourgeois social order is no longer capable of braving the storms of the present or of the coming age. State after state that does not find its way to a truly social reorganization will go down the path to chaos. The liberal age is a thing of the past. The belief that you can counter this invasion of the people by parliamentary-democratic half-measures is childish and just as naive as Metternich’s methods when the national drives for unification were making their way through the nineteenth century. The lack of a truly social, new form of life results in the lack of the mental will to resist not only in the nations but also in the lack of the moral power of resistance of their leaders. In all countries we see that the attempted renaissance of a democracy has proved fruitless. The confused tangle of political dilettantes and military politicians of a bygone bourgeois world who order each other around is, with deadly certainty, preparing for a plunge into chaos and, insofar as Europe is concerned, into an economic and ethnic catastrophe. And, after all, one thing has already been proved: this most densely populated continent in the world will either have to live with an order that gives the greatest consideration to individual abilities, guarantees the greatest accomplishments, and, by taming all egotistical drives, prevents their excesses, or states such as we have in central and western Europe will prove unfit for life, which means that their nations are thereby doomed to perish! In this manner-following the example of royal Italy-Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary collapsed during this year. This collapse is primarily the result of the cowardice and lack of resolve of their leaders. They and their actions can be understood only in light of the corrupt and socially amoral atmosphere of the bourgeois world. The hatred which many statesmen, especially in these countries, express for the present German Reich is nothing other than the voice of a guilty conscience, an expression of an inferiority complex in view of our organization of a human community that is suspicious to them because we successfully pursue goals that again do not correspond to their own narrow economic egotism and their resulting political shortsightedness. For us, my German Volksgenossen, this, however, represents a new obligation to recognize ever more clearly that the existence or nonexistence of a German future depends on the uncompromising organization of our Volksstaat, that all the sacrifices which our Volk must make are conceivable only under the condition of a social order which clears away all privileges and thereby makes the entire Volk not only bear the same duties but also possess the same vital rights. Above all, it must mercilessly destroy the social phantoms of a bygone era. In their stead, it must place the most valuable reality there is, namely the Volk, the masses which, tied together by the same blood, essence, and experiences of a long history, owe their origin as an individual existence not to an earthly arbitrariness but to the inscrutable will of the Almighty. The insight into the moral value of our conviction and the resulting objectives of our struggle for life give us and, above all, give me the strength to continue to wage this fight in the most difficult hours with the strongest faith and with an unshakable confidence. In such hours, this conviction also ties the Volk to its leadership. It assured the unanimous approval of the appeal that I was forced to direct to the German Volk in a particularly urgent way this year. New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades Fuhrer Headquarters, January 1, 1945

The experience of my love for my mother at the end is very difficult to put into words, but it’s analogous to the experience of struggling during intentional trying adversity. The desire to go contrary to what is most efficient is what’s special about being alive. Instead of protecting myself, and “wasting” energy on fighting an inevitable even though it might have been the most rational choice, I chose to struggle anyway.

He told her they needed an official divorce because he was going to narry a Cuban woman he had met during the struggle. I didn't quite understand his handwriting, so I asked him who was the young woman he intended to marry. He looked at me with surprise and said that it was me. The fact is, up until that moment, we had not discussed marriage.

At the age of five, she was forced to flee an area of the world that is now Pakistan. It was during the time of the bloody Indian subcontinent partition. Along with her family, my mother joined one of the largest human migrations in history. After arriving in India, she lived as a refugee for the next several years, struggling to survive. People in those refugee camps didn’t have the luxury of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Yet her mother (my grandmother), Gopibai Hingorani, a woman who had completed only the fourth grade, told her she was going to make sure her daughter received something that no one could ever take away from her: an education. It still gives me shivers to imagine a young girl trapped in a camp being told she would one day become someone who mattered. By keeping her promise, my grandmother initially gave my mother her sense of purpose. My mom completed engineering college in India and made history as the first female engineer there. It was just the beginning of her life in a male-dominated space. After reading a biography of Henry Ford, she dreamed of working for the company that he’d built. Again, my grandparents came through. They took their savings of a lifetime to send my mom to the United States in 1965. At age twenty-four, she became the first woman hired as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. My parents are now retired in Florida, but they stay active, playing a lot of bridge, singing karaoke, and traveling. My mother spends a lot of time with her five granddaughters, teaching them the value of a life lived with purpose.

Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected: ‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.’ Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf? Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forces’ earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoples’ collective consciousness.

During my office hours, I met talented, brilliant students who lacked access to basic resources, worked multiple jobs, commuted obscene hours, and even struggled with homelessness.

but turned over new soil, and, with new seeds, it brought love and renewal. If you had told me during those fiery, dark days that eventually everything would be okay as long as everyone kept talking about their feelings and setting boundaries, and that one day, all four of my divorced and remarried parents and in-laws would be in the hospital room cheering as I gave birth to my children, I would have called you a liar. What’s been rebuilt is far from perfect, and there are still heartaches and family struggles—fights, bruised relationships, hurt feelings, and the occasional throw-down—but the pretending and the silence are gone. They just don’t work anymore

In one such study, mentioned in Pink’s book, researchers at Cornell followed over three hundred small businesses, half of which focused on giving control to their employees and half of which did not. The control-centric businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts. In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.

Gandhi wrote: ‘I seem to have detected a flaw in me which is unworthy of a votary of truth and ahimsa. I am going through a process of self-introspection, the results of which I cannot foresee. I find myself for the first time during the past 50 years in a Slough of Despond.’ One wonders what readers of the press statement made of this decidedly odd interpolation. To them, the cause, manifestation and the precise nature of this flaw was left unelaborated. Gandhi’s close disciples knew the details; and the labours of the editors of his Collected Works have since made them public for us to examine it. Here is what happened. On 14 April 1938, Gandhi awoke with an erection; and despite efforts to contain his excitement, had a masturbatory experience. He was sleeping alone, and it was decades since he had been aroused in such a way. The details of the incident were kept from his ‘political’ followers such as Jawaharlal Nehru, but discussed with the spiritual followers who had stayed with him in Sabarmati and Segaon. To one Gujarati ashramite he wrote that ‘I was in such a wretched and pitiable condition that in spite of my utmost efforts I could not stop the discharge though I was fully awake.... After the event, restlessness has become acute beyond words. Where am I, where is my place, and how can a person subject to passion represent non-violence and truth?’ To Mira, Gandhi wrote in a language even more vivid in its self-abasement: ‘That dirty, degrading, torturing experience of 14th April shook me to bits and made me feel as if I was hurled by God from an imaginary paradise where I had no right to be in my uncleanliness.’ To his other close woman disciple, Amrit Kaur, Gandhi spoke of ‘an unaccountable dissatisfaction with myself’. But he had not lost faith, and was resolved to overcome the memory of his failure. ‘The sexual sense is the hardest to overcome in my case,’ he remarked. ‘It has been an incessant struggle. It is for me a miracle how I have survived it. The one I am engaged in may be, ought to be, the final struggle.’ Gandhi had taken a vow of brahmacharya, as far back as 1906. He thought sex was necessary only for procreation, and rejected the idea that sex might be pleasurable in and of itself. In his writings and speeches, he had often spoken of the importance of the preservation and husbanding of sperm, which he termed ‘the vital fluid’. After this (to him) shocking experience, how could Gandhi best control his passions, best preserve and husband that vital fluid? Several ashramites (Amrit Kaur among them) thought he should avoid close physical contact with women, especially younger women. He should abandon ashram girls as supports while walking (he rested his hands on their shoulders to propel his frail frame along), and discontinue the practice of having his nails cut or his body massaged by women disciples. Gandhi was not convinced of the sagacity of this advice. He had, he reminded one disciple, not ‘advocated total avoidance of innocent contact between the two sexes and I have had a certain measure of success in this’. To Amrit Kaur, he insisted that ‘it is not the woman who is to blame. I am the culprit. I must attain the required purity.’ Gandhi had wanted to write about the experience of 14 April in Harijan, baring to the world his failure and lack of self-control. He discussed this with Rajagopalachari, who was then in Segaon. Rajaji dissuaded him from making his experience public. Afterwards, Rajaji wrote to his son-in-law Devadas, who was also Gandhi’s son. The Mahatma, he said, was deeply worried ‘that he was still unable to overcome the reflex action of his flesh. He discovered, it seems, one day and he was so shocked and felt so unworthy that he was deceiving people and he wrote an article about it for publication in Harijan, which, thank God, I have stopped, after a very quarrelsome hour'.

It was,” the man said. “But when I returned from re-education, I discovered that my supply of copper wires was gone. During the Great Leap Forward, people broke down my door and carried away all the metal. You remember the slogan, ‘Struggle to produce 10.7 million tonnes of steel.’ When Chairman Mao instructed the villages to industrialize, my neighbours discovered all my bits and pieces, even my voltage meter, my collection of batteries, pinhole cameras and metal coils, not to mention my cooking pots and metal spoons, and fed them to the smelter that you’ll see if you walk fifty paces to the east of here. They managed to produce a surprising quantity of steel but, sadly, none of it was useable.” He shrugged and one of the electric lights fizzled, dimmed and then gleamed brightly again. “Upon my release, my neighbours all came and said, ‘Isn’t it a shame, Teacher Edison, you weren’t here to help us fulfill our steel quota?’ And then I was glad that I hadn’t been present to hand over all my spatulas and wires, as well as my mother’s wedding ring and the German stein my father brought from Düsseldorf many years ago, as well as my bicycle. Sometimes it is better not to say goodbye.

Being full of both grace and truth is part of his glory revealed. It’s not a balancing act. The goal is to max out both, neglecting neither. This fullness defined Jesus, yet our pendulum tends to swing a mile to the left or a mile to the right, depending on what our formative faith environment emphasized. Very few of us have been nurtured toward both. Some of us grew up in a truth-focused faith environment or church. Typically, these environments value doctrine over method or, at the bare minimum, focus more on Scripture, study, and obedience than on understanding freedom and grace. While this environment may result in a more developed view of a doctrinal gospel, it often lacks the ability to empathize appropriately during a situational or social issue. Our default becomes a form of legalism, and our confidence is often misinterpreted as arrogance or even judgment. Conversely, some of us grew up in a grace-focused faith environment or church. Typically, it is these “it’s the heart that matters” environments that often value the how over the what. The life that accompanies this focus is often expressed outside the walls of a church service or Bible study. Our default is grace, at times seemingly at the expense of truth, and our freedom is often misinterpreted as being too compromising. Those of us who grew up in truth-focused environments most likely struggle with extending grace to ourselves and others. Those of us who grew up in grace-focused environments most likely struggle with applying truth to ourselves and others. And so we clash when we come together to pursue gospel living, not always realizing the reason we see things so differently. What can we do about this? Knowing where our roots lie is a great place to start. From there we can ask the questions, Do I need to apply more truth to this situation, issue, or relationship, or do I need to extend more grace? and, How is my perspective perhaps skewed by my faith environment background?

If you’ve traveled the long, often confounding road of talk therapy, you may know the feeling of giving your power over to a total stranger and struggling to translate what you hear into feeling better, all the while trailed by the never-ending stream of bills (or bar tabs). We are all too susceptible to seduction by navel-gazing. It can be titillating to dig down into the past, lift up the rocks and see what’s down there. You never know what interesting creature will be staring up at you and what fascinating things it will have to say. Over the years I’ve orated a few hundred riveting TED Talks to a rapt audience of one. During those strainings I picked up an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge about what’s kicking around in my psyche. But all too often the return on investment wasn’t particularly high. The optimal response to our dilemma has little to do with running our mouths.

When considering your child’s sleep problems, it’s important to remember this truth: sleep struggles are ultimately separation struggles, because during the night children are tasked with being alone for ten(ish) hours and also with feeling safe enough that their body is able to drift off to sleep. And because separation struggles are at the root of sleep problems, sleep “solutions” need to be formulated around an understanding of attachment theory. Remember, the attachment system is based in proximity seeking, because children feel safest when their parents are next to them. Nighttime can feel truly dangerous to kids—it means darkness, aloneness, the slowing down of the body and the speeding up of the mind, the emergence of scary thoughts, and even existential worries about permanence (“Are my parents really there when I can’t see them?”). Sleep is also a time when kids might express anxieties and struggles from other

Cannon Films […] already had a Vietnam script for its own kicking around. Impressed by Norris in a way they had not been by Van Damme, Golan and Globus signed him up to a five-film contract and greenlit both of the war pictures, to be released as Missing in Action and Missing in Action 2. The first was set during the conflict itself, with Norris’s character, American POW Jim Braddock, tormented by his Vietnamese captors. One torture scene called for Braddock to be hung upside down from a tree, a sack placed over his head, and a ravenous rat placed inside it. After a violent tussle, it would end with the reveal that Braddock has bitten the creature to death, rather than vice versa. “They were getting ready to do this scene, and I see all these mountain rats in cages,” remembers Norris. “I say, ‘Where’s the fake rat?’ No one says anything. So I say to the director, ‘How are you going to do this scene?’ And he says, ‘I haven´t really thought about it that much.’” Norris faced a choice: cancel the scene or have an actual rat killed and placed inside his mouth (the American Humane Association had clearly not been invited on set). But he didn’t see it as a choice at all. He ordered the animal killed, bit into its bulbous, furry corpse, and was hoisted up for the scene, shaking to simulate a struggle while fake blood poured down the rope. “The blood is coming down into my mouth, mixed with the saliva of the rat. I’m shaking all over, and finally I’m about to throw up,” Norris says, shuddering. “All I can taste is this rat in my mouth and I’m thinking I’ve got the bubonic plague from doing this with a mountain rat. But the scene was good.” Norris’s wife, Dianne, refused to kiss him for a week.

Cannon Films […] already had a Vietnam script for its own kicking around. Impressed by Norris in a way they had not been by Van Damme, Golan and Globus signed him up to a five-film contract and greenlit both of the war pictures, to be released as Missing in Action and Missing in Action 2. The first was set during the conflict itself, with Norris’s character, American POW Jim Braddock, tormented by his Vietnamese captors. One torture scene called for Braddock to be hung upside down from a tree, a sack placed over his head, and a ravenous rat placed inside it. After a violent tussle, it would end with the reveal that Braddock has bitten the creature to death, rather than vice versa. “They were getting ready to do this scene, and I see all these mountain rats in cages,” remembers Norris. “I say, ‘Where’s the fake rat?’ No one says anything. So I say to the director, ‘How are you going to do this scene?’ And he says, ‘I haven´t really thought about it that much.’” Norris faced a choice: cancel the scene or have an actual rat killed and placed inside his mouth (the American Humane Association had clearly not been invited on set). But he didn’t see it as a choice at all. He ordered the animal killed, bit into its bulbous, furry corpse, and was hoisted up for the scene, shaking to simulate a struggle while fake blood poured down the rope. “The blood is coming down into my mouth, mixed with the saliva of the rat. I’m shaking all over, and finally I’m about to throw up,” Norris says, shuddering. “All I can taste is this rat in my mouth and I’m thinking I’ve got the bubonic plague from doing this with a mountain rat. But the scene was good.” Norris’s wife, Dianne, refused to kiss him for a week.

The Lord is not a divine vending machine," says a friend, who cautions against taking a procedural approach to listening. I just try to pay attention to God, especially when I am praying. I have always struggled to quiet myself and listen for his word. I have learned to reserve moments of silence during my prayer times to let God have an opportunity to say something. Better pray-ers than I recommend that at the very least we take five minutes

I have often pointed out to students that the Jim Crow order had a specific and relatively brief life span. It was not completely consolidated until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. All of my grandparents were fully sentient and aware of their social environments, if not full adults, before the order's features took definite shape and assumed the form of normal politics and everyday life. And during the roughly three decades or so between the regime's consolidation and its slow, painful unraveling, the system was placed under considerable strain and reorganized internally by the Great Migration of black people out of the South or to cities within it, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the emergence of the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the war. And in large and small ways, black people never stopped challenging its boundaries and constraints–from the struggle over its imposition to its eventual defeat.

There are several things to listen for when talking with customers. Two important ones are: What specific words (adjectives & adverbs) they use. Let them find the words, and press them to explain more. So when a customer describes something as “big” don’t say: “Oh yeah it IS really big”. Instead, say “Big? What makes it big? Big compared to what? What else did you try that was big?” How often they use them. The more a customer uses a particular word or phrase to describe their struggle or what they want, the closer the association. Even better is when different customers, independently, use the same words. If different customers keep saying that they like to use an air freshener because it reminds them of “home”. Well. You’ve got some great copy ideas to start with. What makes found copy so much better than, say, copy you thought up during a brainstorming session? You are not your customer. You simply cannot describe your customer’s struggle as well as they can. Using the customer’s words to describe their problem back to them will make them feel understood and their brain will jump to: “Yup, that’s exactly what it’s like when I’m in that situation. This product must be close to what I want because they know, exactly, my struggle.” And that’s what we want when we write copy. We want our prospects to see themselves on the page. It may take more words, but those words are more likely to be read because they’re real for your prospect – they’re not just abstracted marketing talk.

The first stacked dolls better known as Russian Nesting Dolls, matryoshka dolls or Babushka Dolls, were first made in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin. Much of the artistry is in the painting of the usual 5 dolls, although the world record is 51 dolls. Each doll, which when opened reveals a smaller doll of the same type inside ending with the smallest innermost doll, which is considered the baby doll and is carved from a single piece of wood. Frequently these dolls are of a woman, dressed in a full length traditional Russian peasant dress called a sarafan. When I served with the Military Intelligence Corps of the U.S.Army, the concept of onion skins was a similar metaphor used to denote that we were always encouraged to look beyond the obvious. That it was essential to delve deeper into a subject, so as to arrive at the essence of the situation or matter. This is the same principle I employed in writing my award winning book, The Exciting Story of Cuba. Although it can be considered a history book, it is actually a book comprised of many stories or vignettes that when woven together give the reader a view into the inner workings of the Island Nation, just 90 miles south of Key West. The early 1950’s are an example of this. At that time President Batista was hailed a champion of business interests and considered this a direct endorsement of his régime. Sugar prices remained high during this period and Cuba enjoyed some of its best years agriculturally. For those at the top of the ladder, the Cuban economy flourished! However, it was during this same period that the people lower on the economic ladder struggled. A populist movement was started, resulting in a number of rebel bands to challenge the entrenched regime, including the followers of autocrats such as Fidel and Raul Castro. Castro’s M 26 7 militia had a reputation of indiscriminately placing bombs, one of which blew a young woman to pieces in the once-grand theater, “Teatro America.” A farmer, who failed to cooperate with Batista’s army, was locked into his home with his wife and his daughter, which was then set on fire killing them all. What had been a corrupt but peaceful government, quickly turned into a war zone. Despite of Batista’s constitutional abuses and his alliance with the Mafia, the years under his régime were still the most prosperous ones in Cuba’s history. Of course most of the money went to those at the top of the economic ladder and on the lower end of the scale a house maid was lucky to make $25 to $30 a month.

That dog has been my companion for two years,” Christopher snapped. “The last thing I would subject him to is that bedlam of a household. He doesn’t need chaos. He doesn’t need noise and confusion--” He was interrupted by an explosion of wild barking, accompanied by an earsplitting metallic crash. Albert had come racing through the entrance hall and had crossed paths with a housemaid bearing a tray of polished silver flatware. Beatrix caught a glimpse of forks and spoons scattering to the doorway, just before she was thrown bodily to the receiving room floor. The impact robbed her of breath. Stunned, she found herself pinned to the carpet and covered by a heavy masculine weight. Dazedly she tried to take in the situation. Christopher had jumped on her. His arms were around her head…he had instinctively moved to shelter her with his own body. They lay together in a confusion of limbs and disheveled garments and panting breaths. Lifting his head, Christopher cast a wary glance at their surroundings. For a moment, the blank ferocity of his face frightened Beatrix. This, she realized, was how he had looked in battle. This was what his enemies had seen as he had cut them down. Albert rushed toward them, baying furiously. “No,” Beatrix said in a low tone, extending her arm to point at him. “Down.” The dog’s barking flattened into a growl, and he slowly lowered to the floor. His gaze didn’t move from his master. Beatrix turned her attention back to Christopher. He was gasping and swallowing, struggling to regain his wits. “Christopher,” she said carefully, but he didn’t seem to hear. At this moment, no words would reach him. She slid her arms around him, one at his shoulders, the other at his waist. He was a large man, superbly fit, his powerful body trembling. A feeling of searing tenderness swept through her, and she let her fingers stroke the rigid nape of his neck. Albert whined softly, watching the two of them. Beyond Christopher’s shoulder, Beatrix glimpsed the housemaid standing uncertainly at the doorway, stray forks clutched in her hand. Although Beatrix didn’t give a fig about appearances or scandal, she cared very much about shielding Christopher during a vulnerable moment. He would not want anyone to see him when he was not fully in command of himself. “Leave us,” she said quietly. “Yes, miss.” Gratefully the maid fled, closing the door behind her.

I believe this particular part of 1 Corinthians 7 is an important practical resource. Each partner in marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it. In short, the greatest sexual pleasure should be the pleasure of seeing your spouse getting pleasure. When you get to the place where giving arousal is the most arousing thing, you are practicing this principle. When I was doing research for this chapter, I found some old talks that Kathy and I did together. I had forgotten some of the struggles we had in our early days, and some of the notes reminded me that in those years we started to dread having sex. Kathy, in those remarks, said that if she didn’t experience an orgasm during lovemaking, we both felt like failures. If I asked her, “How was that?” and she said, “It just hurt,” I felt devastated, and she did, too. We had a great deal of trouble until we started to see something. As Kathy said in her notes:   We came to realize that orgasm is great, especially climaxing together. But the awe, the wonder, the safety, and the joy of just being one is stirring and stunning even without that. And when we stopped trying to perform and just started trying to simply love one another in sex, things started to move ahead. We stopped worrying about our performance. And we stopped worrying about what we were getting and started to say, “Well, what can we do just to give something to the other?” This concept also has implications for a typical problem that many couples experience in their marital relationship—namely, that one person wants sex more often than the other. If your main purpose in sex is giving pleasure, not getting pleasure, then a person who doesn’t have as much of a sex drive physically can give to the other person as a gift. This is a legitimate act of love, and it shouldn’t be denigrated by saying, “Oh, no, no. Unless you’re going to be all passionate, don’t do it.” Do it as a gift. Related to this are the differences that many spouses experience over what is the most satisfying context for sex. While I am not saying this is universal, I will share that, as a male, context means very little to me. That means, to be blunt, pretty much anytime, anywhere. However, I came to see that that meant I was being oblivious to something that was very important to my wife. Context? Oh, you mean candles or something? And, of course, Kathy, like so many women, did not mean “candles or something.” She meant preparing for sex emotionally. She meant warmth and conversation and things like that. I learned this, but slowly. And so we learned to be very patient with each other when it came to sex. It took years for us to be good at sexually satisfying one another. But the patience paid off. Sex

I started to experience success when I Stopped being afraid of failure. I quit making excuses of not starting, like I was to broke, to busy, Etc ... I started Succeeding when I turned those excuses of Failure into Reasons for me To Get off My Butt, Make it happen and Succeed. Success is a process. Its not a Place or thing that you arrive At or Have. It's during the Journey and Struggles that Success is Made

I’ve got two investor meetings in L.A.—” “And you want me to be there.” “Yeah.” He sat back in his leather chair and crossed his thick arms. “Done.” “You don’t even know when they are,” I pointed out. I reached forward and took hold of my mouse to double-check the timing, but he didn’t wait. “For you, my love, no time is a bad time.” He blew me a kiss. “Why do I put up with you?” I asked, sitting back again and raking a hand through my hair. His response was immediate. “I personally think it’s because you like a reminder of the fine male specimen you’ll never live up to.” I shook my head and smirked, knowing I’d never be the six-foot-five monster he was and not struggling to swallow it even one little bit. My leaner but no less toned six-foot package hadn’t failed me yet. “I’ll see you in L.A. tomorrow night, Adonis.” “No way. I’ll see you here, at the airport, so you can hold my hand during—” Raising my middle finger in salute, I clicked the button to end the call.

During that time, the world seemed completely unforgiving. I was a single father at age twenty-six, divorced after a meaningless marriage that had lasted a year. My mother had died young after a lifetime of misery. My father and I struggled to keep my son from the jaws of death. And all around me, I saw nothing but a kind of farcical futility. I could no longer really see the point of being alive.

Remarkably, Grace never considered pursuing a career and very rarely sought consistent employment. At no time in her long life was Grace driven by the question of how to make a living. Accordingly, political considerations frequently guided her choices about employment, including where to work, for how long, and even whether to take a job. This set of choices, of course, was available to her because of the relative material security she enjoyed at most stages of her life: her comfortable middle-class upbringing and the family support she continued to enjoy when she returned to New York during the 1940s; her marital union with Jimmy; and the support of her political community, as she sometimes worked as a member of the organization’s (minimally) paid staff and later received financial support from Freddy and Lyman. But that alone does not explain her employment decisions. Grace’s indifference to career and upward mobility reflected her decidedly nonacquisitive personality and a complete disinterest in status or the trappings of any sort of professional life. This was evident in 1940 when Grace earned her Ph.D. Securing an academic job “was never on my mind,” she said decades later, thinking back to her mind-set and priorities while completing the degree. With no aspiration of becoming a professor—“ I had not studied philosophy in order to teach it”—Grace had allowed herself to sink into her studies without regard for where they would lead, intellectually or materially. The need to eventually find employment beyond what she had already been doing “was never in my consciousness. It just never bothered me,” she recalled. “What I knew was that by and large I had been able to make a living because I was a very good typist and I figured, if I needed money I can type.” 84 And that is what she did over the next two decades, taking various secretarial and clerical jobs, most of them short term or temporary and some of them part time.

The war years ended the depression, but brought on many other stressful problems, such as living in a country that was at war with my parents’ homeland. Life changed, and with so many men being drafted into the military, jobs at last became available. By this time, my father was beyond the age of compulsory military service and fortunately found employment as a cook in midtown Manhattan. My parents sold the burdensome delicatessen and bought a house at nearby 25 Nelson Avenue. For years thereafter, my father worked at the then-famous Lindy’s Restaurant on Broadway in New York City. Starting as a cook, he was soon elevated to Night Chef. Eventually he became the Sous Chef and later the Head Chef at the well-known restaurant. It was a long commute into the city by both bus and train, but his steady employment, gratefully, brought in a sustaining income. Fuel and food were rationed during the war years, so there were times when he brought home meaty bones, supposedly for our dog “Putzy,” which instead wound up in our soup pot, which of course we shared with our dog. Most people we knew were poor and struggling to make ends meet, but since everyone was in the same boat, we took our lifestyle in stride. Things were still difficult, but we had shelter and food. I guess you might say we were luckier than most.

When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say, “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.” During that early self-employment period, when I struggled every day, completely clueless about what to do and terrified of the results (or lack thereof), Mr. Packwood’s advice started beckoning me from the recesses of my mind. I heard it like a mantra: Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow. In

To put it in Quaker terms, my inner light flickered a lot, like the overhead fluorescent at a Motel 6, and sometimes, it burnt out altogether. The closest I came to consistent faith was during my senior year religion class, when we learned about the Central and South American liberation theology movements and I became briefly convinced that God was a left-wing superhero who led the global struggle against imperialism and corporate greed. Sort of a celestial Michael Moore.

In my experience, historical analogy is the analytic method of choice for senior foreign policy makers trying to get a handle on world events unfolding in real time. When trying to understand a new problem, they rarely use or even read analyses informed by social science methods such as game theory, statistical data, or randomized control trials. And logically, these analogies are made to historical cases with which the individuals are most familiar. I watched this play out dozens of times during my five years in government, and it was particularly striking during our struggles to understand the Arab Spring, and especially events in Egypt in the winter of 2011.

There was a small, strange moment during which I had this feeling that someone was filming me, which was ridiculous, but it was that specific—”there’s a camera on me”—and then some hard ancient pushed-down thing, a thing I’d felt or thought or feared a long time ago, something I’d since managed to sheathe in an imaginary scabbard inside myself, erupted through its casing like a bursting cyst. I had to really struggle to recover. Something was dislodging itself, as from a cavern inside my body or brain, and this situation seemed so divorced from waking reality that my own dimensions lost their power to persuade. I craned my great head and saw all that yellow-brown plastic catch the light, little pills glinting like ammunition, and then my brain went to work, juggling and generating several internal voices at once: someone’s filming this; this isn’t real; whoever Sean is, it’s not who I think he is; all the details I think I know about things are lies; somebody is trying to see what I’ll do when I run across these bottles; this is a test but there won’t be any grade later; the tape is rolling but I’m never going to see the tape. It is a terrible thing to feel trapped within a movie whose plot twists are senseless. This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen. I looked away; I looked away. Held myself steady for a second and then got back to the work of the cleaning, shaking free of the crazy feelings, and I felt the corners of my mouth, half smiling. Most people can clean their bathroom cabinets without waking up any traumatic memories. Not me, not yet, I guess. But as Dave the art therapist told me once when he found me sulking: it’s not so bad to be special. My journey, he said, was longer and slower. He looked me in the eyes, which impressed me, and told me that my good fortune was to learn what special really meant.

Very often, we really do want to help the people around us however we can, but we get so focused on finding a quick solution to the external behavior that we overlook the real problem. Here’s an example. If a friend struggles with anger, we find out what makes him angry, and then keep him away from the things that provoke his anger (e.g., don’t drive during rush hour, interact with your boss as little as possible, avoid talking politics). But changing the external situation doesn’t change his heart. In reality, his anger is rooted in his heart, and that anger will find a way to express itself even if his circumstances change. When Jesus’s disciples started eating without going through the necessary cleansing rituals, the Pharisees accused them of defiling themselves. But Jesus’s response calls us to look beyond the external to what is going on in the heart: “Whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. (Mark 7:18–23) Every struggle with sin that we could possibly encounter in our own lives or in the lives of the people around us are represented in the list Jesus offered here: evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. Jesus said that these things come from within. In other words, if we are trying to address these problems by regulating a person’s circumstances or behavior, then we are wasting our time. These things come “out of the heart of man.” Whatever help we can offer people who are struggling with sin has to be aimed at transforming hearts, not behavior. 5. Why do you think we tend to focus on the external circumstances and behavior when we try to help people change? 6. Using your own words, try to explain why it is essential to get to the heart of the problem rather than merely addressing the circumstances and behavior. Transformed by the Gospel So how do we change a person’s heart? It’s impossible. We might be able to restrain a person’s angry outbursts by tying him up and gagging him, but we are powerless to change a person’s heart. This is where God’s plan of redemption comes into play. The gospel is not merely about “getting us saved,” as if we simply pray a prayer and are immediately transported into heaven. God describes “salvation” and the transformation of the Christian life like this: I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezek. 36:26–27)

One of the most vivid examples of chaotic charismatic worship occurred during the Toronto Blessing of the mid-1990s. Sociology professor Margaret M. Poloma describes her firsthand experience at a worship service held at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship in 1995: The outbreaks of laughter continued to gather momentum. [Evangelist Byron] Mote proclaimed, “God is throwing one major party.” He then opened to the first chapter of Luke, seeming to begin a sermon about Mary, the mother of Jesus. As people continued laughing throughout the auditorium, Mote’s speech became slurred. . . . He sat down trying to gain composure, looking like a drunk struggling to keep from falling off the bar stool. Mote soon fell to the floor “drunk in the Spirit,” as people laughed and applauded. Jan Mote then sought to fill her husband’s place as the speaker for the meeting, by returning to a passage from Song of Solomon: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” Although Jan Mote, too, was struggling to retain her composure (having to sit down at one point because her “knees were weak”), she spoke about how laughter was opening people up to receive the love of God. Those in the congregation not spiritually drunk, laying on the floor, or laughing out of control then followed her in singing, “My Jesus I love you.

Do not fear the conflict, do not flee it. Where there is no struggle, there is no virtue; where faith and love are not tempted, it is not possible to be sure whether they are really present. They are proved and revealed in adversity, that is, in difficult and grievous circumstances, both outward and inward - during sickness, sorrow, or privations

Find a few smiles, capture a few laughs, touch a couple hearts, stimulate a mind or two, and for the love of all things holy, find a way to allow the things into your life that help you enjoy the trip because it ends the same for all of us anyway. Don't take things so seriously; things always find a way to work themselves out. Whatever you need, someone else needs to give, as I learned very clearly from all the beautiful homeless women who brightened my dim heart. We are all connected in this crazy, cosmic soup, and no matter how much it may feel like it sometimes, none of us are ever truly alone in our struggles, trials, challenges, and hard times, and the same applies to the good times. We're never alone in the victories, triumphs, epic moments, and peak experiences in our lives. When you have a little, give a little. When you need a little, accept a little because there are always people who need to share the good in their lives just as much as there are people who need that good stuff during the bad times.

Eventually I was ready to learn how to perform routine life tasks again. 'Enabling occupation'—that’s what the learning process was called when it was presented to me. Enabling occupation involved the mastery of skills that I didn’t even know could properly be called 'skills.' How to pick up and carry and manipulate a set of common objects: a handbag, a stoneware saucer, a mobile phone, a paperback book. I was told that my new limbs were capable of hefting an automobile, of bending an iron bar, but I couldn’t make them do any of these magical things—not anything remotely close. Instead, I spent my days trying to pick up a thumbtack from a hard surface using my feeble pincer grasp, to activate a light switch with a single articulated finger, and to fasten a long line of shirt buttons, each of which was around the size of a half-dollar coin. During this period, I worked to improve my gross motor skills in parallel. I relearned how to reach for distant objects without collapsing under my own weight, how to twist a standard brass doorknob, and how to pour liquid from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup without spilling everything everywhere or crushing the handle itself in my grip. Eventually I used these newfound skills to practice clothing myself in simple blouses with velcro fasteners and pants with elastic waistbands, struggling to take it all off again when it was time. At some point during this phase, a team of nameless staff members helped me stand upright in front of a full-length mirror so I could stare at my newly-made body, fully exposed, and with my sharpened vision I was able to see the true extent of my transformation, the exquisite atrocity I’d chosen to perpetrate.

For me, this was the first hint that the liturgy might be the cure for spiritual loneliness. Though I felt inadequate and alone during my prayer crisis, I was not alone. Much of American spiritual life trudges through the muck of solitary spirituality. Twenty years ago, Robert Bellah described this phenomenon in Habits of the Heart, with his now famous description of one woman: Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” This suggests the logical possibility of more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. “I believe in God,” Sheila says. “I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” “My little voice” guides many lonely people to and through New Age, wicca, Buddhism, labyrinths, Scientology, yoga, meditation, and various fads in Christianity—and then creates a new Sheilaism from the fragments that have not been discarded along the way. I love Sheila Larson precisely because she articulates nearly perfectly my lifelong struggle: “I believe in God. I am not a religious fanatic…. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilism. Just my own little voice.” The difference between Sheila and me is that she has the courage of her convictions: she knows her faith is very personal and so hasn’t bothered with the church. I like to pretend that my faith is grounded in community, but I struggle to believe in anything but Markism. Fortunately God loves us so much he has made it a “spiritual law” that Sheilism or Markism become boring after awhile. The gift of the liturgy—and it is precisely why I need the liturgy—is that it helps me hear not so much “my little voice” but instead the still, small voice (Psalm 46). It leads away from the self and points me toward the community of God.

Here.” He held out his hand. “I’ll carry you on my back, but we have to move. There might be a highway within reach. You could hitch a ride into Belize and get to the coast, maybe to an airport.” “Why am I the only one hitching a ride?” When he ran his fingers through his hair, she said, “What? Tell me.” “The moon is full this eve.” “Oh.” Of course she’d noticed, but she hadn’t thought the ramifications could be this dire until she’d seen his expression just now. Oh, hell. “I’ve been debating the best way to get you out of my reach. If I run from you, I leave you vulnerable. If I stay with you . . .” He trailed off. “You look like the apocalypse has arrived. Is it really so dangerous?” Instead of reassuring her, he nodded. “Aye. I lose control over myself, and the difference between us in strength is just too vast. If given free leave to take you, I’d rend you in two.” She swallowed. “What exactly do you turn into, MacRieve? Describe it to me.” He answered, “The Lykae call it saorachadh ainmhidh bho a cliabhan—letting the beast out of its cage. My face will change, becoming a cross between lupine and human. My body grows larger, taller. My strength increases exponentially.” “I’ve seen the fangs and claws.” “Sharper and longer. And flickering over me will be an image of the beast inside me. It is . . . harrowing to those not of my kind.” “What would you do to me?” He looked away. “I’d take you in the dirt like an animal. I’d mark your body with my fangs, and even after the bite healed, Lykae could still see it forever and know you’d been claimed.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth, as if imagining it even then. “What does your gut feeling tell you to do with me?” he asked, facing her again. “Take away everything else—what do you sense?” She thought for a moment, trying to digest what he’d just told her. She’d known Lykae bit and scratched each other during sex. But she’d never imagined that Bowen would want to sink his fangs in her skin, marking her forever—or that he’d lose control over himself so totally. “Honestly, I have no idea. But I could ask the mirror what to do.” He clenched his jaw, clearly struggling with the idea. “What can it tell you?” he finally said. “I usually only get cursory answers. Classic oracular.” He hesitated for long moments, the conflict within him clear on his face. “Ask it, then. Would it be more dangerous to escape me—or to remain within my reach?

The lunch menu consisted of a seafood appetizer, creamy chicken in a pastry shell, and a green salad--none of which was really kids’ food. Patrick and Caroline toyed silently with their seafood and managed a few obligatory bites. I noticed Diana’s eyes twinkling with amusement as she watched them. I had to admit “Patrick and Caroline aren’t especially fond of shellfish.” When the chicken was served, Caroline didn’t know how to serve herself and cast an imploring look at me that said, “Oh, help! What do I do, Mom?” Before I could react, Diana, so attuned to children, jumped up and came over to serve Caroline and cut up her chicken. I was speechless at her rapid, sympathetic response. Caroline thanked her, then gazed at her in adoration for the rest of the meal. She was in heaven! Dessert was tricky and delicious--ice cream in a slippery chocolate shell. This time two people served all of us, so my children would not have to struggle for themselves. During lunch, Diana made a point of asking Patrick and Caroline about their travels, their schools, and their hobbies. Patrick’s responses were very polite, but tended to be rather subdued and brief. I wanted him to sound a bit more animated. I resisted the urge to give him a sharp kick under the table. Caroline was more talkative. Diana seemed to enjoy my lively, spunky daughter. My children behaved themselves beautifully amidst the unaccustomed formality and luxury. My years of daily training paid off. They answered questions politely, sat up straight in their chairs, and even chewed with their mouths closed. I thought of my mother-in-law’s claim, “You can take those children anywhere.” Their lunch with the Princess of Wales certainly proved her point. I was very proud of them.

As Mother Teresa told her during her visit to Rome this year: “To heal other people you have to suffer yourself.” Diana nodded vigorously in agreement. While she struggles to find an acceptable equilibrium in her life, she acknowledges the progress she has made. She says: “I’ve opened up. My life is changing. This is only the beginning.

Yes, I found happiness. And no, it didn’t take years of struggles, hours of meditation or tons of self-help books and yoga lessons. It just happened. Here, it follows me wherever I go. During the day, it joins me, like a willing ally, through the usual cycle of grasping and craving, and, at night, it lets me fall asleep, my mind quiet, no rambling thoughts filling it.

In another study, which I found during my own research, giving autonomy to middle school teachers in a struggling school district not only increased the rate at which the teachers were promoted, but also, to the surprise of the researchers, reversed the downward performance trend of their students.2

From the Bridge” The Importance of History Not all that many years ago the Importance of history would have been a “no brainer!” People understood that there was very little new under the sun, and history was a good barometer to the future. “Those that fail to heed history are doomed to repeat it, “was an adage frequently heard. It gave us a perspective by which to stabilize our bearings and allowed us to find one of the few ways by which we could understand who we are. The myth that George Washington, not being able to lie, admitted to chopping down his father’s favorite cherry tree helped us create a moral compass. Abraham Lincoln’s moniker “Honest Abe,” took root when he worked as a young store clerk in New Salem, IL. The name stuck before he became a lawyer or a politician. His writings show that he valued honesty and in 1859 when he ran for the presidency the nickname became his campaign slogan. However, apparently ”Honest Abe” did lie about whether he was negotiating with the South to end the war and also knowingly concealed some of the most lethal weapons ever devised during the Civil War." These however, were very minor infractions when compared to what we are now expected to believe from our politicians. Since World War II the pace of life has moved faster than ever and may actually have overrun our ability to understand the significance and value of our own honesty. We no longer turn to our past for guidance regarding the future; rather we look into our future in terms of what we want and how we will get it. We have developed to the point that we are much smarter than our ancestors and no longer need their morality and guidance. What we don’t know we frequently fabricate and in most cases, no one picks up on it and if they do, it really doesn’t seem to matter. In short the past has become outdated, obsolete and therefore has become largely irrelevant to us. Being less informed about our past is not the result of a lack of information or education, but of ambivalence and indifference. Perhaps history belongs to the ages but not to us. To a great extent we as a people really do not believe that history matters very much, if at all. My quote “History is not owned solely by historians. It is part of everyone’s heritage,” was written for the opening page of my award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba.” Not only is it the anchor holding our Ship of State firmly secure, it is the root of our very being. Yes, history is important. In centuries past this statement would have been self-evident. Our predecessors devoted much time and effort in teaching their children history and it helped provide the foundation to understanding who they were. It provided them a reference whereby they could set their own life’s goals. However society has, to a great extent, turned its back on the past. We now live in an era where the present is most important and our future is being built on shifting sand. We, as a people are presently engaged in a struggle for economic survival and choose to think of ourselves in terms of where wind and tide is taking us, rather than where we came from. We can no longer identify with our ancestors, thus they are no longer relevant. Their lives were so different from our own that they no longer can shed any light on our experience or existence. Therefore, in the minds of many of us, the past no longer has the value it once had nor do we give it the credence it deserves. As in war, the truth is the first victim; however this casualty threatens the very fabric of our being. When fact and fiction are interchanged to satisfy the moment, the bedrock of history in undermined. When we depend on the truth to structure our future, it is vital that it be based on truthful history and the honesty of those who write it. It is a crime without penalty when our politicians tell us lies. In fact they are often shamefully rewarded; encouraging them to become even more blatant in the lies they tell.

Statements that someone with a dismissive attachment style might make: My autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency are very important to me. I am generally comfortable without close relationships and do well on my own. I want to be in relationships and have some closeness with people, but I can only tolerate closeness to a limit and then I need space. I prefer not to share my feelings or show a partner how I feel deep down. I frequently don’t know what I’m feeling or needing and/or I can miss cues from others about what they are feeling or needing. I feel uncomfortable relying on partners and having partners depend or rely on me. I either struggle with making relationship commitments or if I do commit, I may secretly have one foot out the door (or at least have the back door unlocked). I am very sensitive to any signs that my partner is trying to control me or interfere with my freedom in any way (and I don’t like the word “sensitive”). I see myself or others as weak for having needs or wanting comfort, help or reassurance. During disagreements or in conflict I tend to withdraw, shut down, shut out or stonewall. I do well with the transition from being together with people to then being alone again, but once I’ve been alone for a while I can be slow to warm up to others or struggle with the transition from being alone to entering back into connection with someone.

During my own training and performance in BUD/S as a boat crew leader,” I told them, “I can remember many times when my boat crew struggled. It was easy to make excuses for our team’s performance and why it wasn’t what it should have been. But I learned that good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done and win.

Johnson himself experienced that. During the time he was an active member of the Communist Party, he was not atheist. He explained to the congressional committee, “I hid my religion. I committed the grievous sin of hiding it. I outwardly accepted the atheistic anti-religious program of the Communists, but secretly in my heart I retained my religious convictions. Of course, that was an awful struggle, an internal struggle, a struggle between two different and opposing philosophies, the philosophy of charity and the philosophy of hate. Sometimes I wonder how I did that tightrope walking.” In fact, added Johnson, now that he had left the party, he had joined a Baptist Church in New Jersey and attended church services in New York regularly.

In order to get Otis and Bob up to speed about what had happened in my dimension, we traveled on foot for the first fifteen minutes of our journey toward the swamp.  Baby Zeke told them all about how he was pulled into another dimension during the blending and what we all had to do – and sacrifice – in order to stop the blending, save the Rainbow Creeper, and put a stop to Entity 303’s evil plan. “Yeah, that blending nonsense was crazy,” said Otis. “I thought you and Harold were dead for sure. I mean, one minute Bob and I are riding next to you and Harold, and the next minute you are missing and there is a giant pool of lava right in front of me. And, I was engulfed in a strange flash of yellow light!” “Yeah, I’m just glad I appeared near Jimmy and could contribute to the struggle against Entity 303 and the preservation of the Rainbow Creeper.” “This Rainbow Creeper thing sounds bizarre,” said Bob. “Is it really the shape of a creeper with a bunch of colors on its skin?” “It sure is,” said Baby Zeke. Otis looked at me and asked, “And your friend Claire was joined with the Rainbow Creeper when she grabbed the creation stone?” I took a deep breath and sighed. “Yes, she was.” I paused and wiped a tear from my eye. “But, at least she’s alive … hurrr ... in some manner. That’s why we need to save my friend Emma. I can’t lose another friend.” Otis thumped his chest. “A good friend is hard to find. I vow on my life that we will save your friend Emma. Saving people is what I do, even if I have to kill a thousand others to achieve it.” Weird flex, but ... okay. I guess the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many in Otis’ worldview. I must say, Baby Zeke had really captured Otis

The number one thing a good logline must have, the single most important element, is: irony. My good friend and former writing partner, the funny and fast-typing Colby Carr, pointed this out to me one time and he’s 100% correct. And that goes for whether it’s a comedy or a drama. A cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists – Die Hard A businessman falls in love with a hooker he hires to be his date for the weekend – Pretty Woman I don’t know about you, but I think both of these loglines, one from a drama, one from a romantic comedy, fairly reek of irony. And irony gets my attention. It’s what we who struggle with loglines like to call the hook, because that’s what it does. It hooks your interest. What is intriguing about each of the spec sales I’ve cited above is that they, too, have that same ironic touch. A holiday season of supposed family joy is turned on its cynical head in the 4 Christmases example. What could be more unexpected (another way to say “ironic”) for a new employee, instead of being welcomed to a company, to be faced with a threat on his life during The Retreat? What Colby identified is the fact that a good logline must be emotionally intriguing, like an itch you have to scratch. A logline is like the cover of a book; a good one makes you want to open it, right now, to find out what’s inside. In identifying the ironic elements of your story and putting them into a logline, you may discover that you don’t have that. Well, if you don’t, then there may not only be something wrong with your logline — maybe your story’s off, too. And maybe it’s time to go back and rethink it. Insisting on irony in your logline is a good place to find out what’s missing. Maybe you don’t have a good movie yet.

I'm a bartender. How can I stop when surrounded by smoke and smokers at every turn?" I recall attempts where I hoped smoking friends would be supportive in not smoking around me, and not leave their packs lying around to tempt me. While most tried, it usually wasn't long before they forgot. I recall thinking them insensitive and uncaring. I recall grinding disappointment and intense brain chatter, that more than once seized upon frustrated support expectations as this addict's excuse for relapse. Instead of expecting them to change their world for me, the smart move would have been for me to want to extinguish my brain's subconscious feeding cues related to being around them and their addiction. The smart move would have been to take back my world, or as much of it as I wanted. As I sit here typing in this room, around me are a number of packs of cigarettes: Camel, Salem, Marlboro Lights and Virginia Slims. I use them during presentations and have had cigarettes within arms reach for years. Don't misconstrue this. It is not a smart move for someone struggling in early recovery to keep cigarettes on hand. But if a family member or best friend smokes or uses tobacco, or our place of employment sells tobacco or allows smoking around us, we have no choice but to work toward extinguishing tobacco product, smoke and smoker cues almost immediately. And we can do it! Millions of comfortable ex-users handle and sell tobacco products as part of their job. You may find this difficult to believe, but I've never craved or wanted to smoke any of the cigarettes that surround me, even when holding packs or handling individual cigarettes during presentations. Worldwide, millions of ex-smokers successfully navigated recovery while working in smoke filled nightclubs, restaurants, bowling alleys, casinos, convenience stores and other businesses historically linked to smoking. And millions broke free while their spouse, partner or best friend smoked like a chimney. Instead of fighting or hiding from the world, take it back. Why allow our circumstances to wear us down? Small steps, just one moment at a time, embrace challenge. Extinguish use cues and claim your prize once you do, another slice of a nicotine-free life. Recovery is about taking back life. Why fear it? Instead, savor and relish reclaiming it. Maybe I'll have a crave tomorrow. But it's been so many years (since 2001) that I'm not sure I'd recognize it. Why fear our circumstances when we can embrace them? They cannot

Vietnam was originally a matriarchy and, in 111 B.C. China tried to integrate it into the Han Empire, the first resistance leaders were women. A female military commander who managed, for a time, to successfully oppose the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, famously exhorted her troops: 'I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man.' Such heroines became iconic symbols of Vietnamese patriotism. The Chinese ruled Vietnam for one thousand five hundred years, imposing Confucian principles of male superiority. This provoked a deep divide between the north of the country, strongly influenced by China, and the south which kept alive the more relaxed culture of feminine sensuality. The nation's struggle for independence, finally won in 1428, was shaped by women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy. The whore was a distinct image of South Vietnam during two decades of the Vietnam War until the communist North's victory in 1975. Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — the 'Paris of the East' was dominated by corrupt politicians, army officers and gangsters who enjoyed and profited from prostitution rackets. After Communists seized power, a decade of severe repression followed, then an increasingly flagrant resurrection from prostitution in the late 1980s in reaction to poverty and austerity and austerity under communism.

pleaded with my mom to straighten my hair. I didn’t want the aggressive nature of my natural kinks to intimidate my peers and teachers. I repressed parts of my personality. No longer would I be a fiery Jamaican. I noticed quickly that classmates and teachers were afraid of me for no reason. Once during coloring time in art class a girl wanted to ask me for a crayon, but she struggled to muster up the words and the courage to ask. It wasn’t that I was hoarding all the crayons,

World History 101 - The Actual History History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative - or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything. Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan - fast forward to present time - during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch - Spanish is not even a Native American language. Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon "La Isabela" in the 1500s. Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home - many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers - their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything - just like the Portuguese did in Brazil. The Spaniards would've done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name - the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain. Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal "glory" of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is. That's why José Martí is so important, that's why Kwanzaa is so important, that's why Darna is so important - in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors. No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don't know the answer - do you? Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won't suffice to undo the damage - but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented - what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other's past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write "human history", not the "conquerors' history" - so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species - as one humankind.

Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to a see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discreet, inaccessible rooms, even the ways there are concealed, with their own lifts and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what practical purpose this procedure might serve.

I retched as I turned and walked a few paces away, only to then imagine dozens of headless cockroaches inching closer, still alive – cracking, breaking.

Cool and serene, I thought... like a pale Japanese watercolour. After a few months in the province and many field trips, I still couldn't believe the delicate beauty of the Vietnamese countryside.

Better to be a small man and stay with people you like near the girl you love than a transferred giant, yes?

Prayer Works Lessons from a prayerful Mother In the darkest hour of the night During the hardest time of life When unsure if things will be alright You should pray! When your mind lacks peace And your heart is too broken to beat When you struggle to stand on your feet You ought to pray! When some things do not make sense And everyone close becomes distant When your faith is shaken in an instant You must pray! When the sun is about to set And your noontime is filled with tears When midnight is covered with fear Wake up and pray! When on the battlefield And you seem to have lost your shield When there is no sign you could win Look upon the hills and pray! When the race becomes too long And you cannot keep going on When everything seems over Kneel and pray! For prayer will: Put you back together Set you in a good place forever Keep you going no matter what Give you something to smile about Remove the weight off your shoulders Relieve you of discomfort Heal even a gaping wound Help you follow the right way Take you through another day Each and every day Remember to pray Because prayer works!

1516, Luther explained just how busy he was during this time: I could almost occupy two scribes or secretaries. All day long I do nothing but write letters. . . . I preach at the monastery, I am a lector during meal-times, I am asked daily to preach in the city church, I have to supervise the program of study, and I am vicar, i.e., prior of eleven cloisters. Plus: I am warden of the fish-pond at Leitzkau, and at Torgau. I am involved in a dispute with the Herzbergers. . . . I lecture on Paul and I am still collecting material on the Psalms. . . . I have little uninterrupted time for the daily [monastic] hours or for celebrating mass. Besides, I have my own struggles with the flesh, the world, and the devil. See what a lazy man I am!4

What caused me most pain during the course of their nocturnal confessions was the indestructible love for Russia that these revelations inspired in me. My intellect, struggling with the bite of the vodka, rebelled: ‘This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering and self-mutilation are the favourite pastimes of its inhabitants. And yet I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logic can penetrate . . .’ This love was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if in order to love it, one had to tear out one’s eyes, plug one’s ears, stop oneself thinking.

Time in the valley will teach you to be a man, Nathan," she had said. "It's where your character will form. I hope you go through the valley so that you'll learn so that you'll learn how to love and feel and understand. And when life wounds you, I hope it is because you loved people, not because you mistreated them." It was a blessing of sorts, a blessing that forges love in the darkest places. There have been times, especially during those early years without her, that I thought time in the valley was anything but a blessing, but now I know otherwise. As I grew, I began to understand what my mother meant: It is those times of struggle and pain that teach us how to live. It's not really living until you've thrown your heart and soul on the line, rising failure and suffering loss. And I have come to realize that we're never alone; everyone has been through their own valley or is walking through it now... There were times when the grief in my life made it impossible to believe that God was alive and working, or the doubts were so great it seemed hopeless to believe anything at all, but as I look at the faces in the seats before me I now once again that we're all hear for a reason, a purpose that is often beyond us. -The Christmas Blessing by Donna VanLeire

The thing you have to understand about memories associated with childhood trauma is that the brain processes these differently than normal ones, sometimes burying them so deeply a person doesn’t even realize that the reason they’re struggling as an adult is because of something that happened to them when they were a child.” What I don’t tell him is that I don’t want to remember those days, and never did, which no doubt was a big factor in my therapists’ collective failure. If whatever happened during that time was so disturbing that my brain felt the need to erase it, I don’t want to know.

Step 4: Engage your child to problem-solve with you. Offer “leading” ideas, but allow your child to experience the aha moment of brainstorming a coping mechanism. Resist the urge to explain the fear away or solve the problem on your own. Phrases like “I wonder” and “I’m thinking about” help engage your child in problem-solving. It might sound like this: “Hmm . . . I’m wondering if we can go to the basement and start going down the stairs one at a time . . . let me know when the scary feeling starts and when it feels like it’s getting bigger.” As you inquire about the fear in this way, you infuse your parental presence into the moment, and as your child feels less alone in her fear, it won’t hold such a strong grip. Next, maybe say, “I wonder what you could say to yourself as you go down one of the stairs . . .” Or maybe you suggest a solution like, “I’m thinking about practicing going down one stair now, then in a few days maybe another stair, and the next day a few more . . . hmm . . .” Step 5: Create a mantra. For kids who struggle with anxiety, mantras can be very helpful in the moment. Whether spoken out loud or recited internally, a mantra focuses their attention on the calming words rather than the source of distress. Examples of mantras include, “It’s okay to be nervous. I can get through this,” “I can feel scared and brave at the same time,” and “I’m safe, my parents are near.” Work with your child to develop a mantra that feels good to them and encourage them to repeat it during scary moments. Step 6: Share a “slowly coping with a fear” story. Yours might sound like: “This reminds me of when I was about your age, and I was scared of dogs. I still remember how bad those moments felt in my body.” Do not offer a quick fix like, “But then I realized that I was safe and it was okay.” Instead offer a story of slow coping, something like: “I remember talking to my dad about it, and realizing it was okay to feel scared. I remember that my dad and I would read a lot about dogs, then I’d start to walk closer to dogs with him. And then one day, my dad helped me touch a dog. Little by little, dogs felt less scary. It was such hard work to be brave when I was feeling scared!

Writing teachers always tell students “Write what you know.” What do I know? I know myself—my struggles, my doubts, my moments of glory and victory, my times of defeat. I know what it means to feel out of place. I know what dreams are made of, and how they can die, or change, or be fulfilled in ways beyond imagining. I know love—not just the heady giddiness of romance, but commitment and friendship and the sometimes difficult interactions with those we call family. I know the love and infinite patience of God, and the thousands of ways God’s grace sneaks up on me when I’m not looking. I know that life doesn’t always work out the way we want it to. And I know that God brings hope, even during times of darkness and despair. (As quoted on p. 282 of Behind the Stories, by Diane Eble.)

Ilost my left eye during blades training at assassin school. My twin brother did the deed using a clever feint and a quick crosswise cut that caught me by surprise. “Well, Carmen, that’ll leave a scar,” Corwin had said. Then he’d laughed that snorty, snotty laugh that had grated on my nerves a thousand times since childhood. My vision had been too blurry to aim a cutting blow at him, and I wasn’t certain if I even wanted to. He was the only family I had. And despite his laughter, he may not have known how deep the wound was. He often made a silly joke when he’d done something stupid. But when I stumbled and fell toward the floor, Corwin dropped his blade and caught me. “Aw, sorry, sis,” he said, holding me against his chest. Then the healers rushed in with their bandages and salves and led me to the healing room. Maestru Alesius—my master—soon followed them, bringing the bad news: “You will lose that eye, Carmen.” I was thirteen. I’d been ahead of my brother on the honor roll—the top of the class. I often wondered if a bout of jealousy inspired my blinding. The blades were sharp, but we students weren’t supposed to cut each other—the idea was to keep the mind sharp as well. And I’d love to know where he’d learned the move. I’d never seen it before, and I was better with the sword than him. Did he have a secret teacher? Everything was harder with only one eye—the sword fights, the dagger throws, learning to avoid traps; even the poisons and potions were more difficult to pour. A half-blind assassin was a joke. I was pretty certain my fellow students had chuckled and celebrated as my position on the honor roll slipped. I had the knowledge and the skill. But the patch over my eye meant I had a weakness, and the school trained assassins to exploit weaknesses. I’d have quit, perhaps to be a scullery maid or to work in the massive wheat fields of the Akkad Empire, if only to get away from the other apprentice assassins who had once been beneath me and who now scorned me. I especially wanted to flee from the kinder ones who looked at me with pity. But Maestru Alesius had insisted I stay. “Adversity will toughen your mental bones,” he’d promised. His support and my perseverance had kept me in school. Three years had passed since the incident. Three years of struggling to keep my spot. I was finally sixteen, in my final week of classes. Corwin would graduate at the top of the honor roll. He was the best with bladed weapons, the best at hiding in shadows, the best assassin the school had seen in many years. He may even be better than the legendary Banderius. All the kings, queens, and archons would seek to hire Corwin. Maybe even Emperor Rima himself. I’d be lucky to get hired at all.

began to sense a great spaciousness during my meditations, as if my consciousness was temporarily released from the confines of my physical body. I could observe my own thoughts and emotions from a detached place of newfound objectivity. I was no longer anxious about potential struggles, no longer offended by perceived insults, no longer easily irritated by daily inconveniences. As my spiritual awareness grew more expansive, the physical me diminished in importance. I became calmer, filled with peacefulness, profound contentment.

I believed strongly in being an engaged citizen and had a certain level of social and political awareness, but my understanding that the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement and its accomplishments shifted during the course of the Obama administration and especially in 2013 when I witnessed the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the attack on voting rights in the state of North Carolina. (Interview with aaihs)

I’ve learnt something from this. And to share it to you, my friends, our lives are all about bouncing back. None of us will stay at the top forever. At one moment of time, all of us will fall and have our bad moments. But it’s our attitude during these bad moments that matter in life.

or organizations that could be helpful at some point. I might seek them out to ask for their advice on how to approach learning a topic, or to use them as a resource if I struggle during my attempts to study the subject.

Daily study of the scriptures is [an] important family activity. I remember when my son was seven years old. He was taking a shower one night during a storm when we lost the power in our home. My wife called to him and told him to hurry to finish his shower and to then take a candle and come slowly downstairs for our family prayer. She warned him to be careful to not drop the candle on the carpet because it could start a fire and the house could burn down. Several minutes later he came down the stairs struggling to hold the candle in one hand, and with his other arm he was carrying his scriptures. His mother asked him why he was bringing his scriptures. His answer to her was 'Mom, if the house burns down, I must save my scriptures!' We knew that our efforts to help him to love the scriptures had been planted in his heart forever.

To keep sales increasing during the mid-1970s, we relied on new ideas implemented in existing stores. This was my favorite form of growth. I don’t think that any given store ever fully realizes its potential. During those four years of no expansion in terms of number of stores, our dollar sales kept right on growing while the CEO of Trader Joe’s struggled with trying to reconcile good business practice with the Whole Earth Catalog. Whole Earth Harry indeed! In my private life, I had become an organic gardener. Few things have so enriched my life so much as my own personal conversion to organic gardening, something that I still practice except when the ants start raising colonies of aphids in my blood orange trees, and it’s Grant’s Ant Control to the rescue. In any event, the schizoid marriage of the party store with the health food store was a great success for Trader Joe’s, if not for the biosphere.

He was convinced that if the attack on Omando had caused such interest in the world it was not so much because of the victim’s importance, but because fear, resentment and repeated disillusion in the age of slavery and radiation death had in the end branded the hearts of millions of human beings with an edge of misanthropy, which made them follow with sympathy, and perhaps some feeling of personal re- venge, the story of '‘the man who had changed species.” He turned toward Laurent with sympathy. It was difficult not to like that generous, slightly sing-song voice, not to like that black giant who spoke so frankly about himself when he thought he was speaking only of the African fauna. inclined to a gentle skepticism which usually sufficed to protect him both against excessive illusions about human nature and against excessive doubt of it a sort of Saint Francis of Assisi, only more energetic, more dashing, more muscular he had the greatest respect for humor, because it was one of the best weapons ever forged by man for the struggle against himself. devoured by some ravenous dream of hygiene and universal health who desperately pursue a certain ideal of human decency, call it tolerance, justice or liberty The idea, too, that people who have suffered too much aren’t any longer capable of ... of complicity with you, for that’s what it amounts to. That they aren’t any longer capable of playing ball with us. The idea that they’ve somehow been spoiled once for all. It was partly on account of this idea that the German theorists of racialism preached the extermination of the Jews; they had been made to suffer too much, and therefore they could not be anything after that but enemies of the human race. A man can’t spend his life in Africa without acquiring something pretty close to a great affection for the elephants. Those great herds are, after all, the last symbol of liberty left among us. It s something that’s fast disappearing, from more points of view than one. Every time you come upon them in the open, moving their trunks and their great ears, an irresistible smile rises to your lips. I defy anyone to look upon elephants without a sense of wonder. Their very enormity, their, clumsiness, their giant stature, represent a mass of liberty that sets you dreaming. They’re . . . yes, they’re the last individuals. a trace of superiority, of condescension toward me, as though to point out to me that this was obviously something I could not understand, a private and secret world which I was not permitted to enter. Yes, there are some among us who are fighting for the independence of Africa. But why? To protect the elephants. To take the protection of African fauna into their own hands. Perhaps for them elephants are only an image of their own liberty. That suits me: liberty always suits me. Personally, I have no patience with nationalism: the new or the old, the white or the black, the red or the yellow. They aim between the eyes, just because it’s big, free and beautiful. That’s what they call a fine shot. A trophy. people have been seized by such a need for friendship and company that the dogs can’t manage it. We’ve been asking too much of them. The job has broken them down— they’ve had it. Just think how long they’ve been doing their damnedest for us, wagging their tails and holding out their paws— they’ve had enough . . .’ It’s natural: they’ve seen too much. And the people feel lonely and deserted, and they need something bigger that can really take the strain. Dogs aren’t enough any more; men need elephants. ‘Look here, my friend, for three years I was a bus conductor in Paris. I recommend it during rush hours; it gave me what you might call a knowledge of human nature— a good, solid knowledge which prompted me to change sides and go over to the elephants. there was around him an air of authenticity impossible to disregard: the authenticity of sheer physical nobility

This is no mere lifeless abstraction. People struggle in a deadly fashion with such ideas. Women wrestle with them when they consider having a baby, inquiring of themselves: “Should I really bring an infant into a world like this? Is that an ethical decision?” The followers of the philosophical school of antinatalism, of whom the South African philosopher David Benatar is perhaps the leading advocate, would decisively answer no to both of those questions. I debated his views with him a few years back. It was not as if I failed to understand his position. There is no doubt that the world is steeped in suffering. A few years later, I debated another philosopher, Slavoj Žižek—known much more widely for his Marxist predilections than his religious convictions. He said something during our discussion that might be theologically debatable, but that I found of great interest. In the Christian tradition, even God Himself, in the form of Christ, despairs of the meaning of life and the goodness of His Father in the agony of His Crucifixion. At the peak of his suffering, just before death, He utters the words “Eli Eli lama sabachthani”—“My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). This appears to strongly imply, in its narrative way, that the burden of life can become so great that even God Himself can lose faith when confronted with the unbearable reality of injustice, betrayal, suffering, and death.

I was just so, so hungry. My headache had turned into an undeniable sensation that my skull was just empty. I was so lightheaded that I had struggled to stay awake during all of my classes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My husband, for all the backrubs he gives me, the double-chocolate muffins he bakes, for the kisses, the gentle teasing, the pep talks, and the patience he displays whenever I am stressed, irritated, angry, or grumpy about uncooperative characters and plots. Thank you for listening to my theories about true crime shows and for being a magnificent DM for our D&D group. My brave, funny, fierce daughter, whose persistence and strength in the face of multiple challenges, including spina bifida and clubfoot, inspires me every day, and my sweet, sensitive, story-loving son, who has worked so hard to learn coping strategies for his sensory processing disorder. “Allo” you both with all my heart, babies. Thank you for inspiring me, for keeping me laughing, for asking for so many kisses and hugs every single day, and for having absolutely zero interest in my stories because they don’t feature any trains. D, for helping with my children during a pandemic when no one else is available, and for reading a thousand books to them and “playing Star Wars” with them so enthusiastically. My family, for helping so much with my children and supporting my career’s success however you can. Love you guys. Dani Crabtree, for being the most understanding and flexible editor in existence. If this book has errors, they’re mine. (I like to add extra things after she’s seen the book.) My dear, lovely, generous readers—thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading and loving my books. I couldn’t do it without you. The stories only come alive with your imaginations, so with you all to imagine them, our beloved characters would only live in my head. I’m thrilled to share them with you. Thank you for all the notes you write me and the emails you send. Your words make a difference, especially when I’m struggling to remember what I love about this job (usually during a particularly stubborn first draft.) I love you all!

English class, I had memorized a William Cullen Bryant stanza from “To a Waterfowl.” He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright. Mr. Bryant had written those words during his own struggle to determine his professional direction. Like him, I not only knew the divine “He” of the poem, but “He

In the early 1980s, historian Jon Halliday asked Genaro Carnero Checa, a radical Peruvian writer and frequent traveler to the DPRK who published a book on the country in 1977 entitled Korea: Rice and Steel, his honest opinion of North Korea. Checa replied, “They fought the North Americans; they have done incredible things in the economy; it’s the only Third World country where everyone has good health, good education and good housing.” Halliday then asked Checa about his view of North Korea as a poet. Checa said, “It is the saddest, most miserable country I’ve ever been in in my life. As a poet, it strikes bleakness into my heart.” Checa’s statements reflect what many in the Third World thought of North Korea during the Cold War era. On one hand, this small nation overcame Japanese imperialism, brought the mighty U.S. military to a standstill in a three-year war, and rapidly rebuilt itself into a modern socialist state. For many struggling peoples in the Third World that recently overcame decades of Western colonialism and imperialism, North Korea’s economic recovery and military prowess were justifiably admirable. On the other hand, the oppressiveness and brutality of the North Korean political system undermined the appeal of the DPRK’s developmental model to the Third World. The growing inefficiencies of North Korea’s economic system also became too obvious to ignore. In fact, Kim Il Sung’s Third World diplomacy may have furthered the DPRK’s domestic economic troubles. A former member of the North Korean elite, Kang Myong- do, said after his defection to South Korea that “excessive aid to Third World countries had caused an actual worsening of North Korea’s already serious economic problems.

Where would my suspected hypoxic organ damage come from? High altitude astronomy. I was working in the hypoxic environment of the summit of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii from 2001 to 2006 at the Mauna Kea Observatories. Blood oxygen SpO2 is typically in the low 80’s, which is well below the 88% SpO2 threshold where the medical profession believes hypoxic organ damage starts occurring in the human adult body. I was sleeping at the Hale Pohaku dormitory for a week at a time at 9,200 feet where the medical profession believes central sleep apnea occurs, causing hypoxia during sleep. Sleeping tablets worsen the hypoxia, which I was using and most night shift workers use. I first started to see daily chronic fatigue in this position, but was able to struggle to work to do my week long night shift.

Page 25: …Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist. Towards the end of the [Guide to the Perplexed], in a crucial chapter (book III, chapter 51) he discusses how various sections of humanity can attain the supreme religious value, the true worship of God. Among those who are incapable of even approaching this are: Some of the Turks [i.e., the Mongol race] and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does. Now, what does one do with such a passage in a most important and necessary work of Judaism? Face the truth and its consequences? God forbid! Admit (as so many Christian scholars, for example, have done in similar circumstances) that a very important Jewish authority held also rabid anti-Black views, and by this admission make an attempt at self-education in real humanity? Perish the thought. I can almost imagine Jewish scholars in the USA consulting among themselves, ‘What is to be done?’ – for the book had to be translated, due to the decline in the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews. Whether by consultation or by individual inspiration, a happy ‘solution’ was found: in the popular American translation of the Guide by one Friedlander, first published as far back as 1925 and since then reprinted in many editions, including several in paperback, the Hebrew word Kushim, which means Blacks, was simply transliterated and appears as ‘Kushites’, a word which means nothing to those who have no knowledge of Hebrew, or to whom an obliging rabbi will not give an oral explanation. During all these years, not a word has been said to point out the initial deception or the social facts underlying its continuation – and this throughout the excitement of Martin Luther King’s campaigns, which were supported by so many rabbis, not to mention other Jewish figures, some of whom must have been aware of the anti-Black racist attitude which forms part of their Jewish heritage. Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle – and back – and back again.

Like countless others, I was captivated by the thrilling realm of cryptocurrency trading and investment. The prospect of substantial returns was simply irresistible. In my enthusiasm, I plunged into the market without conducting adequate research. This hasty decision led me to invest a staggering £95,700 in Bitcoin with a company that, unbeknownst to me, was nothing more than a sophisticated scam. At first, everything seemed to be unfolding perfectly. My account balance skyrocketed to an impressive £314,575 within a matter of weeks, and I was elated. However, my excitement quickly morphed into despair when I attempted to withdraw my profits. To my utter dismay, my account was abruptly frozen without any explanation. A wave of panic washed over me as I desperately tried to reach customer support, only to find my efforts futile. I felt trapped in a disheartening nightmare. Determined to recover my funds, I embarked on an extensive search for solutions online. During my quest, I stumbled upon a cryptocurrency forum where numerous victims recounted their harrowing experiences. Many of them spoke highly of a service called HACKATHON TECH SOLUTIONS, which had successfully aided them in reclaiming their misappropriated crypto assets. Although I was initially skeptical, a flicker of hope ignited within me, prompting me to reach out to them.To my immense relief, HACKATHON TECH SOLUTIONS surpassed my expectations. Their team was not only professional and knowledgeable but also genuinely committed to helping me recover my lost investment. Within a mere two weeks, they managed to retrieve my entire investment, leaving me overwhelmed with gratitude. The experience felt nothing short of miraculous, and I cannot adequately express my appreciation for their expertise and unwavering support during such a tumultuous time. If you find yourself ensnared in a crypto scam, a fraudulent investment platform, binary options fraud, or any form of online theft, I wholeheartedly recommend HACKATHON TECH SOLUTIONS They transformed my distressing ordeal into a second chance, and I firmly believe they can do the same for you. Do not lose hope; viable solutions exist, and with the right assistance, you can reclaim what is rightfully yours. Remember, you are not alone in this struggle, and there is HACKATHON TECH SOLUTIONS ready to guide you through cryptocurrency recovery. Their contact details are listed below. Whatsapp:‪‪‪ → +3, 1, 6, 4, 7, 9, 9, 9, 2, 5, 6 Telegram: → @ hackathon tech solutions Email: → hackathon tech service @ mail . com

My son’s birth was supposed to be the happiest moment of my life, but it quickly turned into one of the most challenging times I’d ever faced. Soon after his birth, I found myself unexpectedly going through a divorce, which left me emotionally shattered and financially struggling. With a newborn in my arms, I couldn’t return to work right away, and I had to rely on the alimony I was awarded to support both my son and myself. However, the alimony wasn’t enough to cover our living expenses. It barely covered the essentials, and I found myself constantly looking for ways to make the money stretch. That’s when I came across an investment scheme that promised massive returns anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000, or even up to $500,000 on a $5,000 investment. Desperate to secure a better future for my son, I decided to take a risk, believing that this could be the breakthrough I so desperately needed.I invested the $5,000, hoping that the promised returns would help me pay my bills, buy necessities for my child, and alleviate some of the weight of my situation. But, as it turned out, the entire scheme was a scam. The money I invested disappeared, and I had no way of recovering it. I was crushed. What started as a simple hope for a better future turned into a nightmare. My financial situation went from bad to worse, and I found myself drowning in despair. I was completely helpless, and I felt like I had failed my son. It was then that my family stepped in to support me, offering both emotional and practical help during this incredibly tough time. They helped me connect with a company called Rapid Digital Recovery, a firm that specializes in recovering lost or hidden assets. I was skeptical at first, but I was willing to try anything to get back what I had lost. The team at Rapid Digital Recovery worked tirelessly on my case, and after some time, they successfully recovered 99% of my investment. Although I didn’t recover everything, the 99% recovery was a huge relief. The support from my family, combined with the efforts of Rapid Digital Recovery, gave me hope once again. I learned a hard lesson about trusting too easily but also discovered the importance of seeking help when things feel hopeless. My son and I are still rebuilding, but I’m determined to keep moving forward, no matter the challenges that lie ahead. Rapid Digital Recovery Details Below What sapp : +1 4.1 4 8.0 7 1.4 8.5 Web site : https: // rapid digital recovery. org Em ail : rapid digital recovery (@) execs. com

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Well, well, if it isn’t the little spitfire herself.” Lily glanced up with a start and found Jimmy Neil standing two steps above her. A slow grin spread across his face, and the black gaps where he was missing parts of his top teeth seemed to stare at her. He’d leered at her several times that past week during the meals he’d taken in the dining room. But she’d made a point of ignoring him. And that’s exactly what she planned to do this time too. He moved one step closer, and the stench of the alcohol on his breath filled the space between them. He’d likely already been out at the taverns long enough to drink too much but would continue with the drinking as long as he was conscious. So why was he back at the hotel? “Ran out of money,” he said too softly, as if he’d seen the direction of her thoughts. “The night’s still young, and I aim to get my fill of women.” His eyes glistened with brittle lust. A man like Jimmy Neil didn’t deserve a response, not even the briefest acknowledgment that she’d heard his lurid words. She turned her head and pushed past him in the narrow stairwell. But before she could get by, his arm shot out and blocked her path. “Where you goin’ so fast?” “Get out of my way.” She shoved his arm, but it didn’t budge. She tried to duck under it, but he stuck out his knee. He leaned into her. The sickly heat and sourness of his breath fanned her neck. “Maybe I don’t need to go back out, not when I can have a little spitfire right here, right now.” She stifled a shudder and the shiver of fear that accompanied it. She might have broken free of him last time, but he was drunk now, and there was no telling what he was capable of doing. Better for her to play it safe. She spun and tried to retreat the way she’d come, but his other hand slapped against the wall, trapping her into an awkward prison within the confines of his arms. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere except up to my room with me.” He pushed himself against her in such a carnal way that she couldn’t keep from crying out in alarm. His hand cut off her cry, covering her mouth and smothering any chance she had at calling for help. A rush of fear turned her blood to ice. For an instant Daisy’s sweet face flitted into her mind. Was this the way men treated her sister? How could she possibly withstand such abuse day after day? As if seeing the fright in Lily’s eyes, his gap-toothed smile widened. “It’s always more fun when there’s some scratchin’ and clawin’.” His hand against her mouth and nose was beginning to suffocate her. She swung her head, struggling to break free and jerked up her knee, trying to connect it with his tender spot. But he was pressed too close, and he only strengthened his grip. She tried to scream and then bite him. But she was quickly losing strength in the dizzying wave that rushed over her. Suddenly his smile froze and fear flitted across his face. “Let go of her. Now. Or I’ll shove this knife in all the way.” Connell’s voice was low and menacing. Slowly Jimmy’s grip loosened. She caught a glimpse of Connell, one step down, his face a mask of calm fury.

During the Lucasfilm years, I definitely had my periods of feeling overwhelmed as a manager, periods when I wondered about my own abilities and asked myself if I should try to adopt a more forceful, alpha male management style. I’d put my version of hierarchy in place by delegating to other managers, but I was also part of a chain of command in the greater Lucasfilm empire. I remember going home at night, exhausted, feeling like I was balancing on the backs of a herd of horses—only some of the horses were thoroughbreds, some were completely wild, and some were ponies who were struggling to keep up. I found it hard enough to hold on, let alone steer.

Later that day, after we talked more and things were starting to settle down, Dad said, “I’m going to put you on house arrest. You cannot leave this house for three months. You’re going to study the Bible with me, and you’re going to duck hunt every single day.” “All right, Dad. I think I can do that.” During the months I spent at Mom and Dad’s, I hunted, fished, and studied the Bible every day with Dad. I began to realize that all this time, I had been living off of my dad’s faith. I’d never had my own relationship with God. For the first time, I started to find my own faith. As I looked at God’s Word with fresh eyes, I realized that repenting and turning to God meant I was saved and forgiven. Jesus’ blood covered my sins and redeemed me from the path of destruction I was on. I couldn’t ever have been good enough on my own. Back when I was in the middle of that crazy time of drugging and drinking, I remember feeling guilty once in a while and knowing I needed God. But then the thoughts would come. I’m not good enough. Or I’m just not quite ready. I think that’s the number one excuse because you’ll never be perfect, and you’ll never be ready. Getting right with God and getting rid of the bad stuff in your life takes him. You have to take it one step at a time. It’s not easy, I’m not perfect, and I still struggle.

By all appearances, he appeared to be struggling with words. He had the audacity to kick a pebble during his deliberations. Finally, “I’d like to call a truce.” “A truce? You cannot be serious. A truce.” “Entirely serious.” “You promised reporters you’d reveal my identity. You threatened me on national television.” He shrugged. “I won’t.” “You told America you were going to beat me up.” Another shrug. “I won’t do that either.” I sniffed. “Couldn’t if you wanted.

#3: TO FEEL SUPPORTED, SUPPORT YOURSELF. During my lectures and workshops I often hear people complain that they’re not feeling supported by others. They might be upset with their work colleagues, families, or friends, but whatever the circumstances, they’ve all slipped into victim mode by resenting others for their lack of support. Rather than commiserate with these folks, I flash the universal mirror at them and ask, “Are you supporting yourself?” Typically they respond with a weepy reply of “No, I’m not.” You see, the way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us. If our thoughts and energy are not supportive, then our life won’t be supported. Therefore, we must take responsibility by consciously supporting ourselves in every given moment. Whenever you’re in a time of need and feel unsupported or alone, immediately ask yourself, “How can I support myself more?” Then take action. Simple right actions toward self-support can greatly change your attitude and experience. Say something kind to yourself, consciously think an empowering thought about yourself, or ask someone for help. We often think that people should be able to read our minds and simply “know” when we need support, but they can’t. The people in our lives have their own struggles and challenges, and they may not see ours, especially if we appear to be holding it together. Ultimately, asking for help is a radical act of self-support. One of the biggest ways we don’t support ourselves is by not asking for support. Asking can take courage, but the reward is immense. Not only will you receive the support you need, you’ll deepen your relationship with whomever you’re asking. These small right actions can greatly enhance your life in an instant. Making the simple shift from a powerless victim to a strong person who can care for yourself can change your life forever. Miracle Message #3: If I want to feel supported, I must support myself. #MiraclesNow

The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible.

What can explain this difference? On the surface, much appears to hinge on Richard’s programming feat, his software shim. Otherwise, his effort with Konqueror seems much like my struggles with Mozilla. Perhaps he was just a better programmer than me, and without his coding cleverness, there would be no story. That explanation is too simple. Richard made his shim only after determining he needed one last link in a chain of inspiration, intuition, reasoning, and estimation. His shim was a consequence of his overall plan. To show what I mean, here’s an accounting of what Richard did in his first couple of days at Apple. He began by quizzing us on the browser analysis we had done before his arrival, and after hearing it, he quickly discarded our effort with Mozilla as unlikely to bear fruit. By doing so, he demonstrated the self-confidence to skip any ingratiating display of deference to his new manager, a person who had years of experience in the technical field he was newly entering. Next, Richard resolved to produce a result on the shortest possible schedule. He downloaded an open source project that held genuine promise, the Konqueror code from KDE, a browser that might well serve as the basis for our long-term effort. In getting this code running on a Mac, he decided to make the closest possible approximation of a real browser that was feasible on his short schedule. He identified three features—loading web pages, clicking links, and going back to previous pages. He reasoned these alone would be sufficiently compelling proofs of concept. He then made his shortcuts, and these simplifying choices defined a set of nongoals: Perfect font rendering would be cast aside, as would full integration with the Mac’s native graphics system, same for using only the minimum source code from KDE. He reasoned that these shortcuts, while significant, would not substantially detract from the impact of seeing a browser surf web pages. He resolved to draw together these strands into a single demo that would show the potential of Konqueror. Then, finally, he worked through the technical details, which led him to develop his software shim, since that was the only thing standing between him and the realization of his plan. His thought process amplified his technical acumen. In contrast, Don and I were hoping Mozilla would pan out somehow. I was trying to get the open source behemoth to build on the Mac, with little thought beyond that. I had no comparable plan, goals, nongoals, tight schedule, or technical shortcuts.

they told me that I should clean up my code. Over months, as I struggled, I had scattered special-case insertion point functions throughout my project. They told me that was a mistake, but their specific software prescription—to gather the code back together into a single C++ class, which they proposed we call VisiblePosition—was about more than tidiness. It represented an important technical insight: When software behavior is mysterious, get more organized. My insertion point code needed to be as businesslike as a baker looking at a properly filled out order form to determine the correct words to write on a cake.

I remember once in the Arctic, when we were attempting to cross the frozen North Atlantic in a small, open rigid inflatable boat (RIB), that I heard that voice very clearly. We had been caught out in a monster, sub-zero, gale-force 8 storm, 400 miles off the coast of Greenland - and we were struggling. We were reduced to a crawl as we battled up and down huge, freezing waves and crashing white water. It felt like only a matter of time before we would be capsized to our deaths in the black and icy sea during this longest of nights. Each time one of us handed over the control of the little boat to another crew member to do their shift at the wheel, we had an especially frightening few minutes as the new helmsman fought to become accustomed to the pitch and character of those freak waves. If ever we were going to be capsized, it was during these change-over times. We got lucky once. We were all thrown off our seats after the RIB had been tossed up and landed on the side of her tubes, only to topple back, by luck, the right way up. We then got lucky a second time in a similar incident. Instinct told me we wouldn’t get so lucky a third time. ‘No more mistakes. Helm this yourself,’ I felt the voice saying to me. As I prepared to hand over to Mick, my old buddy, something deep inside me kept repeating, ‘Just keep helming for a bit longer - see this team through the storm yourself.’ But we had a rota and I also knew we should stick to it. That was the rule. Yet the voice persisted. Eventually I shouted over the wind and spray to Mick that I was going to keep helming. ‘Trust me,’ I told him. Mick then helped me all through that night, pouring Red Bull down my throat as we got thrown left and right, fighting to cling on to the wheel and our seats. By dawn, the seas were easing and by the next evening we could see the distant coast of Iceland ahead. Finally. Afterwards, two of the crew said to me quietly that they had been so terrified to helm that they were praying someone else would do it. I had been exhausted, and logic had said to hand over, but instinct had told me I should keep steering. Deep down I knew that I had been beginning to master how to control the small boat in the chaos of the waves and ice - and that voice told me we might not get a third lucky escape. It was the right call - not an easy one, but a right one. Instinct doesn’t always tell us to choose the easier path, but it will guide you towards the right one.

At this time, our personal dosimeters—accumulators that registered doses of contamination a person got during his working time—were checked. Usually, these small badges were fastened to the outer part of our clothes, on our chests. Periodically, the dosimeters were examined in the laboratory, where they were burned in a special way, doses were measured, and then the badges were returned to their owners. With this procedure, the dosimeter “forgot” its previous history and was ready to register doses again. We fought against dosimeters constantly and secretly. The point was that a person having received a dose of 25 roentgen (25 R/h) should, according to the medical terms, leave Chernobyl immediately. With this, he got five months’ salary. Good money in this time. Why 25 R/h was the limit, it is difficult for me to say. I am not a specialist. I just remembered for myself that if you got more than 100 R/h, you got radiation sickness. When the authorities came to this decision, those working at the station became diametrically opposed to it. One pole—not very numerous—consisted of those who wanted to leave the Zone as soon as possible and with the five-month salary. These people, who aspired later to the reputation of Chernobyl heroes, usually tried to “forget” their accumulators and other types of dosimeters in dangerous, high-radiation places, and then would return secretly to get them. During the checking, the desired dose of 25 R/h was discovered; and if everything was done well and there was no evidence of swindle, the “hero” went back to his motherland with money and respect. There he started his struggle for privileges with more energy than a person who had actually gotten such a high dose could possibly have. The major part of the Kurchatovers—and it did them credit—took the opposite pole. People who did research in areas with doses of hundreds and thousands roentgen per hour tried to leave their dosimeters in safe places, or to shield the instruments so that they couldn't register that fatal 25 R/h. Then they could stay in Chernobyl. This was the secret war with our accumulators. The authorities knew everything about it, but did nothing. They needed specialists like air.

In their beaver-like work to enforce the Reich's emigration policies on the Jewish community, the SS had hitherto tried hard to keep a low profile, and to avoid any kind of spectacular outrage to international opinion. Göring thus found himself on the side of the SS, in alliance against the radical Goebbels, and on January 24 he formally instructed the ministry of the interior to set up a central emigration office under Heydrich to regulate and organize the deportation of the Jews. Hitler's personal part in this anti-Jewish programme was one of passive observation. Talking with Colonel Jósef Beck, the Polish foreign minister, on January 5 he rather speciously regretted that the western powers had not entertained Germany's colonial demands: ‘If they had, I might have helped solve the Jewish problem by making a territory available in Africa for resettlement of not only the German but the Polish Jews as well.’ On the twenty-first, he uttered to the Czech foreign minister Chvalkovský these ominous words: ‘The Jews here are going to be destroyed.’ The Czech replied sympathetically, and Hitler continued: ‘Help can only come from the others, like Britain and the United States, who have unlimited areas that they could make available for the Jews.’ And in a major speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler uttered an unmistakable threat to any Jews who did choose to remain behind in his Germany: I have very often been a prophet in my lifetime and I have usually been laughed at for it. During my struggle for power, it was primarily the Jewish people who just laughed when they heard me prophesy that one day I would become head of state and thereby assume the leadership of the entire people, and that I would then among other things subject the Jewish problem to a solution. I expect that the howls of laughter that rose then from the throats of German Jewry have by now died to a croak. Today I'm going to turn prophet yet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging our peoples into a world war, then the outcome will not be a Bolshevization of the world and therewith the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe!

Another time, while on patrol with a small four-man team from my SAS squadron, out in the deserts of North Africa, we were waiting for a delayed helicopter pick-up. A 48-hour delay when you are almost out of water, in the roasting desert, can be life-threatening. We were all severely dehydrated and getting weaker fast. Every hour we would sip another small capful from the one remaining water bottle we each carried. Rationed carefully, methodically. To make matters worse, I had diarrhea, which was causing me to dehydrate even faster. We finally got the call-up that our extraction would be at dawn the next day, some 20 miles away. We saddled up during the night and started to move across the desert, weighed down by kit and fatigue. I was soon struggling. Every footstep was a monumental effort of will as we shuffled across the mountains. My sergeant, an incredible bear of a man called Chris Carter (who was tragically killed in Afghanistan; a hero to all who had served with him), could see this. He stopped the patrol, came to me, and insisted I drink the last remaining capful from his own bottle. No fuss, no show, he just made me drink it. It was the kindness, not the actual water itself, that gave me the strength to keep going when I had nothing left inside me. Kindness inspires us, it motivates us, and creates a strong, tight team: honest, supporting, empowering. No ego. No bravado or show. Simple goodness. It is the very heart of a great man, and I have never forgotten that single act that night in the desert. The thing about kindness is that it costs the giver very little but can mean the world to the receiver. So don’t underestimate the power you have to change lives and encourage others to be better. It doesn’t take much but it requires us to value kindness as a quality to aspire to above almost everything else. You want to be a great adventurer and expedition member in life and in the mountains? It is simple: be kind.

Cards on the table, girls? Karl has served a sentence at Exeter prison for assault; Antony for theft. Karl was merely sticking up for a friend, you understand, and – hand on heart – would do the same again. His friend was being picked on in a bar and he hates bullying. Me, I am struggling with the paradox – bullying versus assault, and do we really lock people up for minor altercations? – but the girls seem fascinated, and in their sweet and liberal naivety are saying that loyalty is a good thing and they had a bloke from prison who came into their school once and told them how he had completely turned his life around after serving time over drugs. Covered in tattoos, he was. Covered. ‘Wow. Jail. So what was that really like?’ It is at this point I consider my role. Privately I am picturing Anna’s mother toasting her bottom by her Aga, worrying with her husband if their little girl will be all right, and he is telling her not to fuss so. They are growing up fast. Sensible girls. They will be fine, love. And I am thinking that they are not fine at all. For Karl is now thinking that the safest thing for the girls would be to have someone who knows London well chaperoning them during their visit. Karl and Antony are going to stay with friends in Vauxhall and fancy a big night to celebrate their release. How about they meet the girls after the theatre and try the club together? This is when I decide that I need to phone the girls’ parents. They have named their hamlet. Anna lives on a farm. It’s not rocket science. I can phone the post office or local pub; how many farms can there be? But now Anna isn’t sure at all. No. They should probably have an early night so they can hit the shops tomorrow morning. They have this plan, see, to go to Liberty’s first thing because Sarah is determined to try on something by Stella McCartney and get a picture on her phone. Good girl, I am thinking. Sensible girl. Spare me the intervention, Anna. But there is a complication, for Sarah seems suddenly to have taken a shine to Antony. There is a second trip to the buffet and they swap seats on their return – Anna now sitting with Karl and Sarah with Antony, who is telling her about his regrets at stuffing up his life. He only turned to crime out of desperation, he says, because he couldn’t get a job. Couldn’t support his son. Son? It sweeps over me, then. The shadow from the thatched canopy of my chocolate-box life –

In the fringes of our yard, daffodils await their triumphant chorus. The golden bells have just opened on our forsythia, and clusters of hyacinth flowers await flourish in purple blooms. By aesthetic standards, any of these blossoms would have outshone the fistful of yellow spikes my little boy offered. In the coming months, dozens of its cousins, cast away as weeds, will meet an untimely end beneath the blades of a lawnmower. Their brazen head will be lopped off, their awkward petals demolished and scattered. They will be declared a nuisance, expendable. Yet when gripped within Pip's fingers, how perfect, how precious became this paltry bloom. He had put aside the torrent of irritability and overwhelm that trouble him hourly, and found grace in a spiral of petals. Through a humble weed, love had broken through. God works this way. He does great things with the meager, and beautiful things with the misshapen. He chooses the smallest, the humblest, the most broken as his servants. (1 Sam 16:10-12, Numbers 12:3, 1 Tim 1:15) He works for good through the greatest calamity. (Gen 50:20) With his most beloved broken and crushed, he reaches through the firmament, and in love makes things new. (Rev 21:5) Where we see weakness, he offers grace. (2 Cor 12:9) He shatters pride, so new blossoms can burst forth. I've spent the past few months wrestling with God. After Pip's evaluation, as we clumsily felt out life with special needs, the questions of why wrapped around my heart, infusing me with daily bitterness. Resentment broiled to the surface. I'd left medicine to follow God's call, but a large part of me, in shocking arrogance, wanted to comply on my terms. Over the past two years, God has compelled me to confront my idols. I thrived on productivity. But now I inevitably find grime in corners I have just cleaned. I prized efficiency. But it now takes 30 minutes of wrangling over potty... I'm an introvert, who needs alone time to rejuvenate. But is anyone less alone than a mom with young kids? A "save the world" mentality drives me. But my daily life fodder is now the mundane. I relish instant gratification. But this business of shepherding hearts is long, with few immediate rewards. I relished accolades... I consider God's graciousness to us, and in the stillness of a springtime morning, I struggle for breath. His mercy toward us in this season -- in the face of my arrogance, despite the brokenness to which I've so stalwartly clung -- is stunning. During all the years of my training and career, homeschooling was never the plan. God inexplicably placed the idea in my heart, like a shadow that deepened daily. But now, I see how perfect were his methods. I shudder to think of how our family would struggle if I was still barreling ahead at the hospital, subsumed with my own self importance, while Pip fought daily to deal with every crowd... Homeschooling was never the plan. . . but oh, what a plan! That he called us this way, was mercy manifest. That he has equipped us to continue, is the greatest gift. Even on the hard days, I count it all joy. On the days when Pip, after a week of handling things so well, has a meltdown in the grocery store, complete with screaming and a blow to my chin -- there is joy there. God can work even with our ugliness. Through Christ, God redeems even the most corrupt. He assembles the stray petals, the unseemly stems, and makes things new. He strips away the idolatry of a surgeon desperate to prove her own worth, and points her toward the fount of all worth -- Christ Jesus. There is a deep well of peace in serving God where he has placed you. There is a refining grace, in realizing his work even in the hard moments. There is a profound beauty in redemption -- in the love that breaks forth through brokenness -- if we can only put away our preoccupations, and embrace his will. "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." -- 2 Cor 12:9

I believe most leaders in this industry tend to skip over the war stories of their career because they’re afraid you’ll run away screaming if you actually knew what they went through to achieve success. Looking back, I wish that my upline mentors would have shared their stories of struggle with me. If they had, it would have made the challenges I faced along my journey that much easier to swallow. In many ways, we are all part of a very special brotherhood, united by the battle scars we earn during this amazing process of growth.

Prayer Works Lessons from a prayerful Mother In the darkest hour of the night During the hardest time of life When unsure if things will be all right You should pray! When your mind lacks peace And your heart is too broken to beat When you struggle to stand on your feet You ought to pray! When some things do not make sense And everyone close becomes distant When your faith is shaken in an instant You must pray! When the sun is about to set And your noontime is filled with tears When the midnight is covered with fear Wake up and pray! When in the battlefield And you have misplaced your shield When there is no sign you could win Look upon the hills and pray! When the race becomes too long And you cannot keep going on When everything seems over Kneel and pray! For prayer will: Put you back together Set you in a good place forever Keep you going no matter what Give you something to smile about Remove the weight off your shoulders Relieve you from discomfort Heal even a gaping wound Help you follow the right way Take you through another day Each and everyday Remember to pray Because prayer works!

What if my whol life has really been wrong?" It occured to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occured to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what the highly placed people considered good - those scarcely noticable impulses, which he had immediately suppressed - might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family and all his social and official interests, might have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend. "But if that is so?" he said to himself "and i am leaving this life with the consciousness that i have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it - what then?" He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor - their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself - all that for which he had lived - and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned and tossed about and pushed at his clothing which chocked and stifled him. And he hated them on that account.

Matthew’s Gospel reflects the difficulty that Jews had in understanding their distinctiveness in God’s program along with the inclusion of Gentiles. Jesus’ ministry to Jews throughout his ministry was a fulfillment of the promises to Israel of messianic blessings (see comments on 10:5–15, 23). But throughout his ministry Jesus had increasingly revealed that now was the time to include Gentiles as well (see comments on 8:5–13; 10:16–22). This concluding commission of Jesus’ earthly ministry coheres with Jesus’ intention to include Gentiles, which is soon reemphasized in the book of Acts in his charge to the disciples before his ascension: “you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). During his earthly ministry Jesus’ followers struggled to comprehend how Israel could retain its distinctiveness in God’s program, yet include Gentiles in the kingdom that Jesus was establishing. And that difficulty remained in the early church. A significant breakthrough came with the vision from the Lord to Peter to go to the Gentile centurion Cornelius with the gospel (Acts 10:1–48). The early church continued to struggle with the inclusion of Gentiles (Acts 11:1–18; 15:1–6) until Peter and the other leaders of the church finally acknowledged that God’s intention was that the church was to be made up of disciples of all the nations, Jews and Gentiles alike (Acts 15:7–29).

During the past fifteen years I have been involved with my own growth and that of many men throughout this country. At no time did I feel my masculinity was being challenged. I did feel chaUenged on a personal level—challenged to open up, to break down emotional barriers, to surmount unnecessary limitations, to get on with my life. Some of the healthiest men I know and some of my most respected mentors have been men who have struggled with much trouble in their lives and won the battles. These men did not fear the label of co-dependency or any other condition. What they feared most was what would happen to them if they did not embrace change. All of these men overcame their limitations. And they never stopped being men.

Running through the streets around Noavek manor reminded me of the Sojourn Festival. My hand wrapped around Akos’s, my face itching from blue paint. Chasing him with water cupped in my hands, though it was raining down from above. And the quiet of afterward, when I stripped my blue-stained clothes in my bathroom and realized there was something calm and still inside me that hadn’t been that way since before my mother died. Since he had kissed me in the transport vessel galley, I had thought about what the exact moment was that I fell for him. Now, dragging air into struggling lungs as I ducked around corners and under low ceilings in the tunnels of Noavek manor, I wondered whether I had fallen for him while he was lying to me, making a show of being kind so that I would reveal how to get out of the manor. And if it had been during that time, did that mean I loved someone who didn’t exist? A pretend Akos, like one of the Storyteller’s smoke pictures?

Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one.

REMEMBERING COMPASSION TAKES time, and sometimes the most profound learnings are not a part of a curriculum but are come upon by chance or even grace, the way that Glory found the pinecone. She brought it with her to the afternoon class; a large cone, split down the middle and attached to a Y-shaped branch. I stared at it in fascination, resting there in her lap, and hoped that she would say something about it. If you squinted your eyes, it was exactly the size and shape of a human heart. Glory is a young family practitioner who practices in a small rural town. Her patients range from the newborn to the very old, and her practice has afforded her a profound window on life. I met her at one of the physicians’ retreats I teach on detoxifying death. During the first evening’s discussion, she had said that she would find her own death a relief; in fact, life being as it is, she couldn’t imagine why anyone would struggle to live if there was a way to leave with honor. She had felt this way for as long as she could remember. It was an unusual thing for a physician to say, and the group who listened were surprised. She did not seem suicidal or even depressed, merely matter-of-fact. As she spoke, I found myself wondering what lay behind her words. I had some ideas, but, as it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. When she began to talk about the pinecone, all this became clearer. In a voice that we could barely hear, she told us that she had found it on the path as she was coming in to lunch and had known instantly that it was hers. She looked at it lying there in her lap. “It’s my heart,” she told us. “It’s broken. Split in half.” She began to tell us about a vast sadness that she had experienced all her life, a personal sense of the suffering in the world that goes on and on. She had felt this suffering even as a child. It had broken her heart, made her unwilling to live any longer than she had to. Yet brokenhearted though she was,

My family looked very much different than my family today. As the years passed my family and friends warped into what I see before me today. Originally we were tight. Perhaps the reason was the Great depression or the war. It could have been that we all depended on each other to succeed. In time however I got married and with two sons formed my own nucleus. Although not always perfect, and what is? Ursula and I have been together for over 60 years. Our two sons are both now older than I was when I retired. Life now has become difficult in a different way and perhaps because of this reason I find that everyone is too busy to carry on the ties that I had in the past. Everyone has grown apart and has to struggle with the results of divorce or burdens placed on their shoulders by others, although some of these burdens are self-inflicted wounds. Fortunately we do still see each other for events such as my 85th birthday. Sometimes we celebrate birthdays with tons of gifts and cookie cakes and other times we celebrate a birthday with a simple card. There are also times that our successes are recognized and other times that they are forgotten. Yes things have changed but no one is to blame, since this is the world we live in. Like all families we have gone our own ways politically. Some of us are open in our political or religious beliefs and others disguise them, but for the greatest part of my life we were all for American first. Unfortunately and perhaps for extra-national reasons we no longer have the country we had during my earlier years, nor do we have a president I and others, can be proud of. Our values have dissipated as I never envisioned, separating small children from their parents and locking them into cages, or fearing that children would be shot to death in their classrooms as it has happened all too frequently. I still can’t believe that it happened in Newton, CT, a feeder community to the school where I taught for 25 years. I never would have believed that not one of the 8 victims of a recent shooting, recovering in a hospital, would see the president of the United States.

In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes. We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music. We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)

During a belated New Year’s cleaning, I come across my grad-school coursework on the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. Scanning my notes, I begin to remember his story. Frankl was born in 1905, and as a boy, he became intensely interested in psychology. By high school, he began an active correspondence with Freud. He went on to study medicine and lecture on the intersection of psychology and philosophy, or what he called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, or “meaning.” Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives. He was in his thirties when World War II broke out, putting him, a Jew, in jeopardy. Offered immigration to the United States, he turned it down so as not to abandon his parents, and a year later, the Nazis forced Frankl and his wife to have her pregnancy terminated. In a matter of months, he and other family members were deported to concentration camps, and when Frankl was finally freed, three years later, he learned that the Nazis had killed his wife, his brother, and both of his parents. Freedom under these circumstances might have led to despair. After all, the hope of what awaited Frankl and his fellow prisoners upon their release was now gone—the people they cared about were dead, their families and friends wiped out. But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he shares his theory of logotherapy as it relates not just to the horrors of concentration camps but also to more mundane struggles. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Indeed, Frankl remarried, had a daughter, published prolifically, and spoke around the world until his death at age ninety-two. Rereading these notes, I thought of my conversations with Wendell. Scribbled in my grad-school spiral were the words Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death. The same was true of John’s loss of his mother and son, Julie’s illness, Rita’s regrettable past, and Charlotte’s upbringing. I couldn’t think of a single patient to whom Frankl’s ideas didn’t apply, whether it was about extreme trauma or an interaction with a difficult family member. More than sixty years later, Wendell was saying I could choose too—that the jail cell was open on both sides. I particularly liked this line from Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

I chose to be me. With all my flaws, my rough edges, my fancy shoes, and my poverty stricken past. I would honor the choices I made during times of great struggle and the choices I made because I was too blind to see the truth, and I would put forth my authentic self. I’d speak from a core place of my own personal power to whoever would listen, telling my stories and the stories of those around me with the passion and enthusiasm they deserved.

I began a practice at Exodus that is a major part of my life to this day. During the five and a half years that I’d been sober, I never got into prayer or meditation. I wasn’t clear on what it was to cultivate a conscious contact with a power greater than myself. At Exodus, someone who worked there suggested that I start each morning with a prayer. Now, to anyone in recovery that’s Get Well 101, that’s where you begin your program. I had never thought that it was what I had to do. But one morning I looked in the mirror and thought, “You’re throwing your life away here, so maybe you’re gonna have to try something that’s not your idea, but an idea from someone who’s actually doing well in life.” I started praying every morning. Once I opened my mind to the concept of a greater power, I never struggled with it. Everywhere I went, I felt and saw the existence of a creative intelligence in this universe, of a loving power larger than myself in nature, in people, everywhere. My prayers and meditations would gain steam and momentum over the years and become an important part of my recovery and daily experience.

Insulting your intelligence. Not making you feel special and appreciated . All the times I continued to do things when you asked me to stop. Using the silent treatment to get what I wanted. Choosing to ignore you until you said you were sorry when we had a fight . Expecting sex whenever I wanted it but not giving it when you did . Not meeting your emotional needs and driving you to get them from another man . Not recognizing just how strong of a person you are . Making you wear a bathing suit when you were pregnant so I could make fun of you. All of the times that I didn't do things around the house because I knew you would do them eventually. Not doing more upkeep on our house. Having so many hobbies and interest and not simply appreciating you, the kids, our home, and our life. Always finding something to criticize about you. Not nurturing you . Not building you up but always tearing you down. Not complimenting you more. Taking you for granted. Not taking care of my body more to give you something pleasing to look at. Not letting go . All the emails. Expecting my needs to be the first priority of the family because I was the head of the household . Not knowing the true meaning of being the head of the household . Not reading more with you . Getting mad at you about something 3 or 4 times a week, maybe more . Not learning to enjoy your hobbies with you . Not working in the yard with you more . Interrupting you when you talk . Always acting like the victim . Limiting your spending money by giving you an allowance . Being unhappy so many days of my life . Ingraining in you and the kids "Is dad mad?". Getting mad and not staying overnight at the marriage seminar a few years ago . All the 1000's of more times I’m not remembering of "being mad because ______”. Yelling at you 1000's of times. Not providing the means for you to fix up the house the way you wanted to. Destroying your dreams. Always having to struggle for money . Not going to kids events with you . Defending myself whenever you'd point out something I was doing to upset you or the kids. You being married to a man who was still a child in his emotional development. Not recognizing how hurt you were . Being verbally abusive . Taking my misery out on you and the kids . My ego and my pride . Putting you first instead of God . Making you feel as if you never measured up . Crushing the tender flower in you . Not building the children up spiritually . Always thinking your issues were no big deal . All the tax problems . Not paying all our bills . Being lazy . Thinking I always had all the answers . Never apologizing . Never backing down. Telling you why you shouldn't feel the way you felt about things . Not learning the true meaning of a godly man and godly marriage. Having to make you suffer because of my fear of abandonment . Asking you to do things during sex that you didn’t like or were not comfortable doing . Any event(s) that are strong in your mind that I have failed to recognize in this list that was ever hurtful, disrespectful or disappointing to you. Making you have to divorce me. There was no other way for me to wake up and realize exactly the person I have been and how I was in our marriage. I am waking up.

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