Exactly One Year Today Quotes

May today there be peace within. May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.

I believe everything happens for a reason. Whether it is decided by the Mother, or the Cauldron, or some sort of tapestry of Fate, I don't know. I don't really care. But I am grateful for it, whatever it is. Grateful that it brought you all into my life. If it hadn't... I might have become as awful as that prick we're going to face today. If I had not met an Illyrian warrior-in-training," he said to Cassian, "I would not have known the true depths of strength, of resilience, of honor and loyalty." Cassian's eyes gleamed bright. Rhys said to Azriel, "If I had not met a shadowsinger, I would not have known that it is the family you make, not the one you are born into, that matters. I would not have known what it is to truly hope, even when the world tells you to despair." Azriel bowed his head in thanks. Mor was already crying when Rhys spoke to her. "If I had not met my cousin, I would neer have learned that light can be found in even the darkest of hells. That kidness can thrive even amongst cruelty." She wiped away her teas as she nodded. I waited for Amren to offer a retort. But she was only waiting. Rhys bowed his head to her. "If I had not met a tiny monster who hoards jewels more fiercely than a firedrake..." A quite laugh from all of us at that. Rhys smiled softly. "My own power would have consumed me long ago." Rhys squeezed my hand as he looked to me at last. "And if I had not met my mate..." His words failed him as silver lined his eyes. He said down the bond, I would have waited five hundred more years for you. A thousand years. And if this was all the time we were allowed to have... The wait was worth it. He wiped away the tears sliding down my face. "I believe that everything happened, exactly the way it had to... so I could find you." He kissed another tear away.

When I was sixteen, I had just two things on my mind - girls and cars. I wasn't very good with girls. So I thought about cars. I thought about girls, too, but I had more luck with cars. Let's say that when I turned sixteen, a genie had appeared to me. And that genie said, 'Warren, I'm going to give you the car of your choice. It'll be here tomorrow morning with a big bow tied on it. Brand-new. And it's all yours.' Having heard all the genie stories, I would say, 'What's the catch?' And the genie would answer, 'There's only one catch. This is the last car you're ever going to ge tin your life. So it's got to last a lifetime.' If that had happened, I would have picked out that car. But, can you imagine, knowing it had to last a lifetime, what I would do with it? I would read the manual about five times. I would always keep it garaged. If there was the least little dent or scratch, I'd have it fixed right away because I wouldn't want it rusting. I would baby that car, because it would have to last a lifetime. That's exactly the position you are in concerning your mind and body. You only get one mind and one body. And it's got to last a lifetime. Now, it's very easy to let them ride for many years. But if you don't take care of that mind and that body, they'll be a wreck forty years later, just life the car would be. It's what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate ten, twenty, and thirty years from now.

A man who seeks only the light, while shirking his responsibilities, will never find illumination. And one who keep his eyes fixed upon the sun ends up blind..." "It doesn't matter what others think -because that's what they will think, in any case. So, relax. Let the universe move about. Discover the joy of surprising yourself." "The master says: “Make use of every blessing that God gave you today. A blessing cannot be saved. There is no bank where we can deposit blessings received, to use them when we see fit. If you do not use them, they will be irretrievably lost. God knows that we are creative artists when it comes to our lives. On one day, he gives us clay for sculpting, on another, brushes and canvas, or a pen. But we can never use clay on our canvas, nor pens in sculpture. Each day has its own miracle. Accept the blessings, work, and create your minor works of art today. Tomorrow you will receive others.” “You are together because a forest is always stronger than a solitary tree,” the master answered. "The forest conserves humidity, resists the hurricane and helps the soil to be fertile. But what makes a tree strong is its roots. And the roots of a plant cannot help another plant to grow. To be joined together in the same purpose is to allow each person to grow in his own fashion, and that is the path of those who wish to commune with God.” “If you must cry, cry like a child. You were once a child, and one of the first things you learned in life was to cry, because crying is a part of life. Never forget that you are free, and that to show your emotions is not shameful. Scream, sob loudly, make as much noise as you like. Because that is how children cry, and they know the fastest way to put their hearts at ease. Have you ever noticed how children stop crying? They stop because something distracts them. Something calls them to the next adventure. Children stop crying very quickly. And that's how it will be for you. But only if you can cry as children do.” “If you are traveling the road of your dreams, be committed to it. Do not leave an open door to be used as an excuse such as, 'Well, this isn't exactly what I wanted. ' Therein are contained the seeds of defeat. “Walk your path. Even if your steps have to be uncertain, even if you know that you could be doing it better. If you accept your possibilities in the present, there is no doubt that you will improve in the future. But if you deny that you have limitations, you will never be rid of them. “Confront your path with courage, and don't be afraid of the criticism of others. And, above all, don't allow yourself to become paralyzed by self-criticism. “God will be with you on your sleepless nights, and will dry your tears with His love. God is for the valiant.” "Certain things in life simply have to be experienced -and never explained. Love is such a thing." "There is a moment in every day when it is difficult to see clearly: evening time. Light and darkness blend, and nothing is completely clear nor completely dark." "But it's not important what we think, or what we do or what we believe in: each of us will die one day. Better to do as the old Yaqui Indians did: regard death as an advisor. Always ask: 'Since I'm going to die, what should I be doing now?'” "When we follow our dreams, we may give the impression to others that we are miserable and unhappy. But what others think is not important. What is important is the joy in our heart.” “There is a work of art each of us was destined to create. That is the central point of our life, and -no matter how we try to deceive ourselves -we know how important it is to our happiness. Usually, that work of art is covered by years of fears, guilt and indecision. But, if we decide to remove those things that do not belong, if we have no doubt as to our capability, we are capable of going forward with the mission that is our destiny. That is the only way to live with honor.

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ...Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now. [Columbian Magazine interview]

Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be?

So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an American supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, after I realized that the straightforward question 'What should I eat?' could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: 'What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?' Not very long ago an eater didn't need a journalist to answer these questions. The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain.

Sometimes you wake up, and there's a little voice inside your head that tells you that today is a special day. For a lot of kids, it sometimes happens on their birthday, and always on Christmas morning. I remember exactly one of those Christmases, when I was little and my dad was still alive. I felt it again, eight or nine years later, the morning that Justin Demourn came to pick me up from the orphanage. I felt it one more time the morning Justin brought Elaine home from whatever orphanage she had been in. And now, the little voice was telling me to wake up. That it was a special day. My little voice is some kind of psycho.

Don't let it get to you, mom! The Western media also fights against us. That's where our reputation as fundamentalists and terrorists comes from." "You're right. Between one's fanaticism and the other's disdain, it's hard to know which side to choose. Personally, I hate Saddam and I have no sympathy for the Kuwaitism but I hate just as much the cynicism of the allies who call themselves "liberators" while they're there for the oil." "Exactly. Just look at Afghanistan! They fought there for ten years. There were 900,000 dead and today the country is still in chaos. No one lifted a finger! Because Afghanistan is poor! The worst is that the intervention in Kuwait is done in the name of the human rights! Which rights? Which humans?" At the time, this kind of analysis wasn't commonplace. After our own war, we were happy that Iraq got itself attacked and delighted that it wasn't happening in our country. We were finally able to sleep peacefully without fear of missiles... We no longed needed to line up with our food ration coupon...the rest mattered little. And then, there wasn't any more opposition. The protesters had been executed. Or had fled the country any way possible. The regime had absolute power...and most people , in search of a cloud of happiness, had forgotten their political conscience.

Over the years I have developed and employed a variety of such coping mechanisms, mostly focusing around a philosophy I call, “Live Because.” “Live Because” is in contrast to what I’ve termed “Live Despite,” which is the idea that people can live rich, full lives in spite of their physical or emotional barriers. “Live Because” takes this a step further by suggesting that in many cases, patients can live a more fulfilling life with their illness than they could ever have done without it. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome has transformed me from a frequently petty and self-absorbed person into the person I am today (still somewhat self-absorbed, but a lot less petty, and with a clearly defined purpose of alleviating whatever suffering I can). I am better because of my illness, and not just in spite of it. But this process was, and still is, a journey. Chronic illness is nearly always accompanied by depression, and the need to constantly remain one step ahead of my illness has left me fearful and exhausted. I could never go through this alone... A part of me will always be angry; such is the process of mourning the pieces of oneself that are lost to chronic disease. I have learned to accept the duality of being bitter and at peace; ignorant and enlightened... while still laying a foundation of hope for the possibility that I can still realize my personal dreams and ambitions, even if not in the exact ways I had expected.

After dinner, I went upstairs and found Ren standing on the veranda again, looking at the sunset. I approached him shyly and stood behind him. “Hello, Ren.” He turned and openly studied my appearance. His gaze drifted ever so slowly down my body. The longer he looked, the wider his smile got. Eventually, his eyes worked their way back up to my bright red face. He sighed and bowed deeply. “Sundari. I was standing here thinking nothing could be more beautiful than this sunset tonight, but I was mistaken. You standing here in the setting sun with your hair and skin aglow is almost more than a man can…fully appreciate.” I tried to change the subject. “What does sundari mean?” “It means ‘most beautiful.’” I blushed again, which made him laugh. He took my hand, tucked it under his arm, and led me to the patio chairs. Just then, the sun dipped below the trees leaving its tangerine glow in the sky for just a few more moments. We sat again, but this time he sat next to me on the swinging patio seat and kept my hand in his. I ventured shyly, “I hope you don’t mind, but I explored your house today, including your room.” “I don’t mind. I’m sure you found my room the least interesting.” “Actually, I was curious about the note I found. Did you write it?” “A note? Ah, yes. I just scribbled a few notes to help me remember what Phet had said. It just says seek Durga’s prophecy, the Cave of Kanheri, Kelsey is Durga’s favored one, that sort of thing.” “Oh. I…also noticed a ribbon. Is it mine?” “Yes. If you’d like it back, you can take it.” “Why would you want it?” He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “I wanted a memento, a token from the girl who saved my life.” “A token? Like a fair maiden giving her handkerchief to a knight in shining armor?” He grinned. “Exactly.” I jested wryly, “Too bad you didn’t wait for Cathleen to get a little older. She’s going to be very pretty.” He frowned. “Cathleen from the circus?” He shook his head. “You were the chosen one, Kelsey. And if I had the option of choosing the girl to save me, I still would have picked you.” “Why?” “A number of reasons. I liked you. You are interesting. I enjoyed listening to your voice. I felt like you saw through the tiger skin to the person underneath. When you spoke, it felt like you were saying exactly the things I needed to hear. You’re smart. You like poetry, and you’re very pretty.” I laughed at his statement. Me, pretty? He can’t be serious. I was average in so many ways. I didn’t really concern myself with current makeup, hairstyles, or fashionable, but uncomfortable, clothes like other teenagers. My complexion was pale, and my eyes were so brown that they were almost black. By far, my best feature was my smile, which my parents paid dearly for and so did I-with three years of metal braces. Still, I was flattered. “Okay, Prince Charming, you can keep your memento.” I hesitated, and then said softly, “I wear those ribbons in memory of my mom. She used to brush out my hair and braid ribbons through it while we talked.” Ren smiled understandingly. “Then it means even more to me.

Because that’s exactly where I’ll be. And if you don’t show up today, I’ll be there next year. And the next. Every November 9th I’ll wait for you, hoping one day you’ll be able to find enough forgiveness to love me again. But if that doesn’t happen and you never show, I’ll still be grateful to you until the day that I die. You

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there’s enough down there to support whales, there’s enough to support sharks that big. Just because we’ve never seen a hundred-foot white doesn’t mean they couldn’t exist. They’d have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn’t float to shore, because they don’t have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?It would be like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives.

I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do—so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 outof-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw. Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety. Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly-blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet—and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.

When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream. A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy. I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.

I've decided to take the day off. From myself. Today, I will not feel behind. I will not worry about being a better wife, mother, daughter, housekeeper, or writer. I'm not making a fancy dinner. I'll be having quite an ordinary day, but I'll be thinking and thanking-instead of fretting and fixing. We all need one day a year when we meet our own expectations and allow the world to be as it is instead of exactly how we would like it to be.

Most of what's known about religious practices in pre-Hispanic Mexico has come to us through a Catholic parish priest named Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, one of the few who ever became fluent in the Nahuatl language. He spent the 1620s writing his "Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs that Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain". He'd originally meant it to be something of a "field guide to the heathens" to help priests recognize and exterminate indigenous religious rites and their practitioners. In the process of his documentation, though, it's clear from his writings that Father Ruiz de Alarcón grew sympathetic. He was particularly fascinated with how Nahuatl people celebrated the sacred in ordinary objects, and encouraged living and spirit realities to meet up in the here and now. He noted that the concept of "death" as an ending did not exactly exist for them. When Aztec people left their bodies, they were presumed to be on an exciting trip through the ether. It wasn't something to cry about, except that the living still wanted to visit with them. People's sadness was not for the departed, but for themselves, and could be addressed through ritual visiting called Xantolo, an ordinary communion between the dead and the living. Mexican tradition still holds that Xantolo is always present in certain places and activities, including marigold fields, the cultivation of corn, the preparation of tamales and pan de muerto. Interestingly, farmers' markets are said to be loaded with Xantolo.

A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.

Now she mocked and berated herself fiercely. She was mad. She, a woman of twenty, had behaved like a little twelve-year-old child. 'But I'm not a woman,' she thought. 'There are people who are ageless, and I'm one of them. I was an old woman at twelve, and even when I have white hair I'll be exactly the same in my heart as I am today. Why be ashamed of it?

I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley's like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger." "What are you talking about?" said Harry. "The diary," said Riddle. "My diary. Little Ginny's been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes- how her brothers tease her, how she had come to school with secondhand robes and books, how"- Riddle's eyes glinted- "how she didn't think famous, good, great Harry Potter would ever like her..." All the time he spoke, Riddle's eyes never left Harry's face. There was an almost hungry look in them. "It's very boring, having to listen to the silly little troubles of an eleven-year-old girl," he went on. "But I was patient. I wrote back. I was sympathetic, I was kind. Ginny simply loved me. No one's ever understood me like you, Tom... I'm so glad I've got this diary to confide in.... It's like having a friend I can carry around in my pocket...." Riddle laughed, a high, cold laugh that didn't suit him. It made the hairs stand up on the back of Harry's neck. "If I say it myself, Harry, I've always been able to charm the people I needed. So Ginny poured out her soul to me, and her soul happened to be exactly what I wanted.... I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets. I grew powerful, more powerful than little Miss Weasley. Powerful enough to start feeding Miss Weasley a few of my secrets, to start pouring a little of my soul into her..." "What d'you mean?" said Harry, whose mouth had gone dry. "Haven't you guessed yet, Harry Potter?" said Riddle softly. "Ginny Weasley opened the Chamber of Secrets. She strangled the school roosters and daubed threatening messages on the walls. She set the Serpent of Slytherin on four Mudbloods, and the Squib's cat." "No," Harry whispered. "Yes," said Riddle, calmly. "Of course, she didn't know what she was doing at first. It was very amusing. I wish you could have seen her new diary entries... far more interesting, they became... Dear Tom," he recited, watching Harry's horrified face, "I think I'm losing my memory. There are rooster feathers all over my robes and I don't know how they got there. Dear Tom, I can't remember what I did on the night of Halloween, but a cat was attacked and I've got paint all down my front. Dear Tom, Percy keeps telling me I'm pale and I'm not myself. I think he suspects me.... There was another attack today and I don't know where I was. Tom, what am I going to do? I think I'm going mad.... I think I'm the one attacking everyone, Tom!

One of my mom’s friends, a guy in his late fifties, recently told me he “hates” so many of today’s popular slang words (shade, lit, G.O.A.T.) because “they do nothing to improve the English language.” What’s funny is that I can almost promise, forty years ago, his parents were saying the exact same thing about cool, bummer, and freaking out, all phrases that have now taken a seat at the table of acceptable English terminology but started out as annoying teen slang.

The late Francis Schaeffer, one of the wisest and most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, warned of this exact trend just a few months before his death in 1984. In his book The Great Evangelical Disaster he included a section called “The Feminist Subversion,” in which he wrote: There is one final area that I would mention where evangelicals have, with tragic results, accommodated to the world spirit of this age. This has to do with the whole area of marriage, family, sexual morality, feminism, homosexuality, and divorce. . . . The key to understanding extreme feminism centers around the idea of total equality, or more properly the idea of equality without distinction. . . . the world spirit in our day would have us aspire to autonomous absolute freedom in the area of male and female relationships—to throw off all form and boundaries in these relationships and especially those boundaries taught in the Scriptures. . . . Some evangelical leaders, in fact, have changed their views about inerrancy as a direct consequence of trying to come to terms with feminism. There is no other word for this than accommodation. It is a direct and deliberate bending of the Bible to conform to the world spirit of our age at the point where the modern spirit conflicts with what the Bible teaches.2 My argument in the following pages demonstrates that what Schaeffer predicted so clearly twenty-two years ago is increasingly coming true in evangelicalism today. It is a deeply troubling trend.

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

Even without world wars, revolutions and emigration, siblings growing up in the same home almost never share the same environment. More accurately, brothers and sisters share some environments — usually the less important ones — but they rarely share the one single environment that has the most powerful impact on personality formation. They may live in the same house, eat the same kinds of food, partake in many of the same activities. These are environments of secondary importance. Of all environments, the one that most profoundly shapes the human personality is the invisible one: the emotional atmosphere in which the child lives during the critical early years of brain development. The invisible environment has little to do with parenting philosophies or parenting style. It is a matter of intangibles, foremost among them being the parents’ relationship with each other and their emotional balance as individuals. These, too, can vary significantly from the birth of one child to the arrival of another. Psychological tension in the parents’ lives during the child’s infancy is, I am convinced, a major and universal influence on the subsequent emergence of ADD. A hidden factor of great importance is a parent’s unconscious attitude toward a child: what, or whom, on the deepest level, the child represents for the parents; the degree to which the parents see themselves in the child; the needs parents may have that they subliminally hope the child will meet. For the infant there exists no abstract, “out-there” reality. The emotional milieu with which we surround the child is the world as he experiences it. In the words of the child psychiatrist and researcher Margaret Mahler, for the newborn, the parent is “the principal representative of the world.” To the infant and toddler, the world reveals itself in the image of the parent: in eye contact, intensity of glance, body language, tone of voice and, above all, in the day-today joy or emotional fatigue exhibited in the presence of the child. Whatever a parent’s intention, these are the means by which the child receives his or her most formative communications. Although they will be of paramount importance for development of the child’s personality, these subtle and often unconscious influences will be missed on psychological questionnaires or observations of parents in clinical settings. There is no way to measure a softening or an edge of anxiety in the voice, the warmth of a smile or the depth of furrows on a brow. We have no instruments to gauge the tension in a father’s body as he holds his infant or to record whether a mother’s gaze is clouded by worry or clear with calm anticipation. It may be said that no two children have exactly the same parents, in that the parenting they each receive may vary in highly significant ways. Whatever the hopes, wishes or intentions of the parent, the child does not experience the parent directly: the child experiences the parenting. I have known two siblings to disagree vehemently about their father’s personality during their childhood. Neither has to be wrong if we understand that they did not receive the same fathering, which is what formed their experience of the father. I have even seen subtly but significantly different mothering given to a pair of identical twins.

Five years from today. Where, exactly, do you want to be?" Her eyes lit up. Sadie loves that kind of question. "Ooh. Wow. Let me think. December, getting close to Christmas. I'll be twenty-one..." "Passed out under the tree with a fifth of Jack, half a 7-Eleven rotisserie chicken, and a cat who poops in your shoes." Frankie returned our startled glances with his lizard look. "Oh, wait. That's me. Sorry." I opted to ignore him. "Five years to the day,Sadie." She glanced quickly between Frankie and me. "Do we need a time-out here?" "Nope," I said. "Carry on." "Okay. Five years. I will be in New York visiting the pair of you because, while NYU is fab, I will be halfwau through my final year of classics at Cambridge, trying to decide whether I want to be a psychologist or a pastry chef. You," she said sternly to Frankie, "will be drinking appropriate amounds of champagne with your boyfriend, a six-three blond from Helsinki who happens to design for Tory Burch. Ah! Don't say anything. It's my future. You can choose a different designer when it's you go. I want the Tory freebies." She turned to me. "We will be sipping said champagne in the middle of the Gagosian Galley, because it is the opening night of your first solo exhibit. At which everything will sell." She punctuated the sentence by poking the air with a speared black olive. "I love you," I told her. Then, "But that wasn't really about you." "Oh,but it was," she disagreed, going back to her salad. "It's exactly where I want to be. Although" -she grinned over a tomato wedge- "I might have the next David Beckham in tow." "The next David Beckham is a five-foot-tall Welshman named Madog Cadwalader. He has extra teeth and bow legs." "Really?" Sadie asked. Frankie snorted. "No.Not really.

Most members of agricultural and industrial societies are domesticated animals. They are not equal to their masters, of course, but they are members all the same. Today, the society called New Zealand is composed of 4.5 million Sapiens and 50 million sheep. There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.

Campaign to destigmatize so-called "mental illness" often take a wrong turning here. They try to demonstrate how suffers of some condition have made amazing contributions to the science or the arts. Trying to destigmatize the diagnosis of autism, for example, we read how Einstein and Newton would have received that diagnosis today, and yet made fabulous discoveries in the field of physics. Even if they are acknowledged to have been "different", their worth is still reckoned in terms of how their work has impacted on the world of others. However well-intentioned, such perspectives are hardly judicious, as they make an implicit equation between value and social utility. Taking this step is dangerous, as the moment that human life is defined in terms of utility, the door to stigmatization and segregation is opened. If someone was found to be not useful, what value, then, would their life have? This was in fact exactly the argument of the early-twentieth-century eugenicists who complained for the extermination of the mentally ill. Although no one would admit such aspirations today, we cannot ignore the resurfacing in recent years of a remarkably similar discourse, with its emphasis on social utility, hereditary and genetic vulnerability.

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The

In the middle of my depression, somebody told me about a self-help group for people who wanted to persue personal visions, and I thought that might be just the thing for me, since I no longer had any. So I went to this Goals Meeting. It was in an Episcopal church in the leafy suburbs, and when I walked inside, a nice lady was explaing that her Goal was to get out of debt and buy a pony for her little daughter. Then this other fellow got up to share. He was a white boy in a dashiki. He said, "My name is Ira and I have a Goal. Right now I'm unemployed and in debt and I'm living with my parents, who don't understand me at all. But my faith in this program is so huge that I know that one year from today I'm going to be traveling across the United States with my Spirit Guide. My Spirit Guide is going to be a while malamute dog named Isis. I mean, I know this as clearly as I've known anything in my life. My Goal is for Isis to guide me to the homes of my favorite self-help authoers. Isis is going to take me to meet John Bradshaw and Louise Hay and M. Scott Peck, and I'm going to get them to mentor me!" He kind of bellowed this. And I wasn't sure whether Ira was exactly what John Bradshaw and Louise Hay and M. Scott Peck deserved or whether I hoped they kept shotguns in their homes. I was honestly torn.

*I know I said in my last letter that I didn't write this for your forgiveness. While that's the truth, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not praying on my knees for your forgiveness, hoping for a miracle. I'm not going to act like I won't be sitting at the restaurant for hours upon end, hoping you walk through those doors. Because that's exactly where I'll be. And if you don't show up today, I'll be there next year. And the next. Every November 9th I'll wait for you, hoping one day you'll be able to find enough forgiveness to love me again. Byt if that doesn't happen and you never show, I'll still be grateful to you until the day that I die.* -pg. 299

Even today, every night of the year, the Queen’s Keys are carried in great ceremony to lock up the gates of the Tower. The Chief Yeoman Warder at 9:53 meets his escort warders and they walk to the gates. They arrive at 10:00 p.m. exactly and are challenged by a sentry with a bayonet who cries loudly, “Who comes here?” The reply by the Chief is, “The Keys.” “Whose keys?” “Queen Elizabeth’s keys.” “Pass, Queen Elizabeth’s keys, and all is well.” The party passes through the Bloody Tower Archway into the fortress and halts at the Broadway Steps. At the top of the stairs, the Tower Guard presents arms and the Chief Warder raises his hat and proclaims, “God preserve Queen Elizabeth.” The sentry replies, “Amen!” Afterward, the keys are taken to the Queen’s House for safekeeping and the Last Post is sounded. This ancient ceremony was interrupted only once since the 14th century. During World War II there was an air raid on London. Bombs fell on the Victorian guardroom just as the party was coming through the Bloody Tower Archway. The noise knocked down the Chief Yeoman and one of the Warder escorts. In the Tower is a letter from the Officer of the Guard in which he apologizes to King George VI for the ceremony finishing late, as well as a reply from the King which states that the officer is not to be punished since the delay was due to enemy action.

Margarita squinted at the bright sun, thinking of last night’s dream and recalling how, exactly one year ago, to the day and the hour, she had sat on the same bench with him. And just as then, her black handbag lay on the bench next to her. Today he was not with her, but she spoke to him mentally: “Why don’t you let me hear from you? Have you stopped loving me? No, I somehow can’t believe it. That means you are dead. . . . But then, I beg you, release me, make me free at last to live, to breathe! . . .” Margarita Nikolayevna answered herself for him: “You are free . . . Am I keeping you?” Then she argued with him: “But no, this is no answer. No, get out of my memory, then I’ll be free. . .

I have been all day thinking of a legend," he said. "I don't remember whether I have read it somewhere or heard it, but it is a strange and almost grotesque legend. To begin with, it is somewhat obscure. A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black, wandered about the desert, somewhere in Syria or Arabia. . . . Some miles from where he was, some fisherman saw another black monk, who was moving slowly over the surface of a lake. This second monk was a mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does not recognise, and listen to the rest. From that mirage there was cast another mirage, then from that other a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to another. So that he was seen at one time in Africa, at another in Spain, then in Italy, then in the Far North. . . . Then he passed out of the atmosphere of the earth, and now he is wandering all over the universe, still never coming into conditions in which he might disappear. Possibly he may be seen now in Mars or in some star of the Southern Cross. But, my dear, the real point on which the whole legend hangs lies in the fact that, exactly a thousand years from the day when the monk walked in the desert, the mirage will return to the atmosphere of the earth again and will appear to men. And it seems that the thousand years is almost up . . . . According to the legend, we may look out for the black monk to-day or to-morrow.

Snowbound up here with you. Without books or business to occupy my time, I wonder what I’ll do,” he added with a leer. She blushed gorgeously, but her voice was serious as she studied his face. “If things hadn’t gone so well for you-if you hadn’t accumulated so much wealth-you could have been happy up here, couldn’t you?” “With you?” “Of course.” His smile was as somber as hers. “Absolutely.” “Although,” he added, linking her hands behind her back and drawing her a little closer, “you may not want to remain up here when you learn your emeralds are back in their cases at Montmayne.” Her head snapped up, and her eyes shone with love and relief. “I’m so glad. When I realized Robert’s story had been fabrication, it hurt beyond belief to realize I’d sold them.” “It’s going to hurt more,” he teased outrageously, “when you realize your bank draft to cover their cost was a little bit short. It cost me $45,000 to buy back the pieces that had already been sold, and $5,000 to buy the rest back from the jeweler you sold them to.” “That-that unconscionable thief!” she burst out. “He only gave me $5,000 for all of them!” She shook her head in despair at Ian’s lack of bargaining prowess. “He took dreadful advantage of you.” “I wasn’t concerned, however,” Ian continued teasing, enjoying himself hugely, “because I knew I’d get it all back out of your allowance. With interest, of course. According to my figures,” he said, pausing to calculate in his mind what it would have taken Elizabeth several minutes to figure out on paper, “as of today, you now owe me roughly $151,126.” “One hundred and- what?” she cried, half laughing and half irate. “There’s the little matter of the cost of Havenhurst. I added that in to the figure.” Tears of joy clouded her magnificent eyes. “You bought it back from that horrid Mr. Demarcus?” “Yes. And he is ‘horrid.’ He and your uncle ought to be partners. They both possess the instincts of camel traders. I paid $100,000 for it.” Her mouth fell open, and admiration lit her face. “$100,000! Oh, Ian-“ “I love it when you say my name.” She smiled at that, but her mind was still on the splendid bargain he’d gotten. “I could not have done a bit better!” she generously admitted. “That’s exactly what he paid for it, and he told me after the papers were signed that he was certain he could get $150,000 if he waited a year or so.” “He probably could have.” “But not from you!” she announced proudly. “Not from me,” he agreed, grinning. “Did he try?” “He tried for $200,000 as soon as he realized how important it was to me to buy it back for you.” “You must have been very clever and skillful to make him agree to accept so much less.” Trying desperately not to laugh, Ian put his forehead against hers and nodded. “Very skillful,” he agreed in a suffocated voice. “Still, I wonder why he was so agreeable?” Swallowing a surge of laughter, Ian said, “I imagine it was because I showed him that I had something he needed more than he needed an exorbitant profit.” “Really?” she said, fascinated and impressed. “What did you have?” “His throat.

Suppose you lived for a thousand years, or ten thousand years; would you have any more life than you have now? When you finally died, would you lose any more life than you’d lose if you died today? This present moment is all the life we ever have. The longest life and the shortest converge on this same point. No matter how many years stretch behind or in front of us, the present moment remains the same. The person who lives shortest owns the exact same amount of life as the one who lives longest. For the present is all we have and all we can lose. When we die, we don’t “lose” the past or future—we never owned them. Eternity revolves like a wheel, with its circumference touching a still point—the present moment. Whether you stay at that point for hundred years, a thousand, or infinitely, you’ll only see the same cycles repeating themselves.

Like any overt school of mysticism, a movement seeking to achieve a vicious goal has to invoke the higher mysteries of an incomprehensible authority. An unread and unreadable book serves this purpose. It does not count on men’s intelligence, but on their weaknesses, pretensions and fears. It is not a tool of enlightenment, but of intellectual intimidation. It is not aimed at the reader’s understanding, but at his inferiority complex. An intelligent man will reject such a book with contemptuous indignation, refusing to waste his time on untangling what he perceives to be gibberish—which is part of the book’s technique: the man able to refute its arguments will not (unless he has the endurance of an elephant and the patience of a martyr). A young man of average intelligence—particularly a student of philosophy or of political science—under a barrage of authoritative pronouncements acclaiming the book as “scholarly,” “significant,” “profound,” will take the blame for his failure to understand. More often than not, he will assume that the book’s theory has been scientifically proved and that he alone is unable to grasp it; anxious, above all, to hide his inability, he will profess agreement, and the less his understanding, the louder his agreement—while the rest of the class are going through the same mental process. Most of them will accept the book’s doctrine, reluctantly and uneasily, and lose their intellectual integrity, condemning themselves to a chronic fog of approximation, uncertainty, self doubt. Some will give up the intellect (particularly philosophy) and turn belligerently into “pragmatic,” anti-intellectual Babbitts. A few will see through the game and scramble eagerly for the driver’s seat on the bandwagon, grasping the possibilities of a road to the mentally unearned. Within a few years of the book’s publication, commentators will begin to fill libraries with works analyzing, “clarifying” and interpreting its mysteries. Their notions will spread all over the academic map, ranging from the appeasers, who will try to soften the book’s meaning—to the glamorizers, who will ascribe to it nothing worse than their own pet inanities—to the compromisers, who will try to reconcile its theory with its exact opposite—to the avant-garde, who will spell out and demand the acceptance of its logical consequences. The contradictory, antithetical nature of such interpretations will be ascribed to the book’s profundity—particularly by those who function on the motto: “If I don’t understand it, it’s deep.” The students will believe that the professors know the proof of the book’s theory, the professors will believe that the commentators know it, the commentators will believe that the author knows it—and the author will be alone to know that no proof exists and that none was offered. Within a generation, the number of commentaries will have grown to such proportions that the original book will be accepted as a subject of philosophical specialization, requiring a lifetime of study—and any refutation of the book’s theory will be ignored or rejected, if unaccompanied by a full discussion of the theories of all the commentators, a task which no one will be able to undertake. This is the process by which Kant and Hegel acquired their dominance. Many professors of philosophy today have no idea of what Kant actually said. And no one has ever read Hegel (even though many have looked at every word on his every page).

The only thing secretive about secret societies is the fear that the arrogant inside these groups have of sharing the little they know, because they often don't even understand their own books and struggle with little. Their real fear is that someone may come along, understand everything better and faster than they do and before they can, and then, by default, lead them to exclusion by ignorance. On the other hand, their fear blinds them from knowing more and identifying those who can take them to a higher level, the same individuals that they clame to be waiting for and that only appear every couple of hundred years or thousand. This paradox is what leads their groups to extinction by self-imposed destructive behavior or to practices that are in complete contradiction towards what their founder or founders intended. As a matter of fact, the more this reality manifests before our eyes, the easier it is to find quotes in books written by founders of such groups in complete contradiction with what you hear everyone inside these groups speaking. What I’m really saying here is that Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Scientology, and many other groups out there, have long lost their entitlement to ownership of their own name, and as much as Christianity is today more in tune to an evil God than a benevolent one. Their real intention, even if manifested mostly at a subconscious level, is to keep away anyone that contradicts what they want to see, rather than what they should be seeing. Ironically, they are doing exactly what was done unto them by the Inquisition, the Nazis, the Egyptians, and any other group that once opposed them. They are their own enemy. And when their Jesus comes, they neglect him, ridicule him, ignore him and even conspire against him. They are the greatest shame of their own ancestors. They are the poison they fear. They are the real enemy of their own group.

You saved me," he said, his voice cracking a little. Haven smiled, completely overwhelmed y his perfection of the moment. "We saved each other." Dare heaved a deep, shaky breath. "You're pretty fucking awesome. You know that?" he asked. Her smile slipped into a grin. "I really a." He gave a little coughing laugh and groaned at the same time. "Can't...laugh," he gasped. "I'm sorry." She stroked his hair off his face. "Don't ever be sorry for making me happy, Haven. Because you do. Happier than I've ever been in my life. I didn't realize how little I'd been living all these years until you came along. So, yeah, we saved each other. And I just can't let you go. Not today. Not ever." Which was exactly what Haven wanted to hear. "That's all I need, Dare. You're all I need. We'll figure the rest out." His fingers toyed clumsily with a long strand of her hair. "Yeah, we fucking will," he said, strength filtering into his voice. "One day, one night, one ride at a time.

SYNCHRONICITY 'The earth is alive, and it feels with you. It follows your footsteps, your search, with equal anxiety, because it will be transfigured in your triumph. The end of Kaliyuga and the entry into a new Golden Age depend on the results of your war. The earth by itself cannot finish the work that Nature leaves incomplete. Today the earth has joined forces with man in his destructive passion. The great catastrophe will occur in the first years of the Age of Aquarius. But if you can find the entrance to the Invisible Double of this earth, fulfilling the mystery of 'loveless A-Mor', the volcanoes will become calm, the earthquake will cease and the catastrophe will be avoided. 'There is an essential 'synchronicity' between the soul and the landscape. What you achieve in yourself will have repercussions in even the remotest corner of the universe, like the ringing of a bell which announces a triumph or a defeat, producing irreversible effects in a secret centre where Destiny acts. The Archetype is indivisible and, if you once confront it in an essential manner, the effects are universal and valid for all eternity. The old Chinese saying expresses it well: 'If a man, sitting in his room, thinks the right thoughts, he will be heard thousands of leagues away.' And the alchemical saying, too: 'It doesn't matter how alone you are. If you do true work, unknown friends will come to your aid.' 'What I have called "synchronicity', Nietzsche called 'lucky occurrences filled with meaning'. It becomes a poetic dialogue, a concerto for two violins, between the man-magician and Nature. The world presents you with a 'lucky occurrence filled with meaning', it hands you a subtle, almost secret message, something which happens without apparent reason, a-causal, but which you feel is full of meaning. This being exactly what the world is looking for, that you should extract that meaning from it, which you alone are capable of seeing, because it 'synchronises', it fully coincides with your immediate state of mind, with an event in your life, so that it is able to transform itself, with your assistance, into legend and destiny. A lucky occurrence which transformed itself into Destiny. And once you have achieved this, everything will appear to become the same as before, as if nothing had happened. Nevertheless, everything has changed fundamentally and for all time, although the only ones to know it will be you and the earth — which is now your earth, your world, since it has given itself up to you so that you can make it fruitful. 'The earth has made itself invisible inside you', as Rilke would say, it has become an individualised universe inside you. And although perhaps nothing may have changed, 'it might seem as if it were so, it might seem as if it were so', to use your own words. And you will be a creative God of the world; because you have conceived a Non-Existent Flower. You have given a meaning to your flower.

It has been noted in various quarters that the half-illiterate Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari never recorded the exact plans or dimensions for how to make one of his famous instruments. This might have been a commercial decision (during the earliest years of the 1700s, Stradivari’s violins were in high demand and open to being copied by other luthiers). But it might also have been because, well, Stradivari didn’t know exactly how to record its dimensions, its weight, and its balance. I mean, he knew how to create a violin with his hands and his fingers but maybe not in figures he kept in his head. Today, those violins, named after the Latinized form of his name, Stradivarius, are considered priceless. It is believed there are only around five hundred of them still in existence, some of which have been submitted to the most intense scientific examination in an attempt to reproduce their extraordinary sound quality. But no one has been able to replicate Stradivari’s craftsmanship. They’ve worked out that he used spruce for the top, willow for the internal blocks and linings, and maple for the back, ribs, and neck. They’ve figured out that he also treated the wood with several types of minerals, including potassium borate, sodium and potassium silicate, as well as a handmade varnish that appears to have been composed of gum arabic, honey, and egg white. But they still can’t replicate a Stradivarius. The genius craftsman never once recorded his technique for posterity. Instead, he passed on his knowledge to a number of his apprentices through what the philosopher Michael Polyani called “elbow learning.” This is the process where a protégé is trained in a new art or skill by sitting at the elbow of a master and by learning the craft through doing it, copying it, not simply by reading about it. The apprentices of the great Stradivari didn’t learn their craft from books or manuals but by sitting at his elbow and feeling the wood as he felt it to assess its length, its balance, and its timbre right there in their fingertips. All the learning happened at his elbow, and all the knowledge was contained in his fingers. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polyani wrote, “Practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”1 By that he meant that we learn as Stradivari’s protégés did, by feeling the weight of a piece of wood, not by reading the prescribed measurements in a manual. Polyani continues, To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.

That pain of wanting, the burning desire to possess what you lack, is one of the greatest allies you have. It is a force you can harness to create whatever you want in your life. When you took an honest look at your life back in the previous chapter and rated yourself as being either on the up curve or the down curve in seven different areas, you were painting a picture of where you are now. This diagram shows that as point A. Where you could be tomorrow, your vision of what’s possible for you in your life, is point B. And to the extent that there is a “wanting” gap between points A and B, there is a natural tension between those two poles. It’s like holding a magnet near a piece of iron: you can feel the pull of that magnet tugging at the iron. Wanting is exactly like that; it’s magnetic. You can palpably feel your dreams (B) tugging at your present circumstances (A). Tension is uncomfortable. That’s why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable to hear about how things could be. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech made such a huge impact on the world and carved such a vivid place in our cultural memory is that it made the world of August 1963 very uncomfortable. John Lennon painted his vision of a more harmonious world in the song Imagine. Within the decade, he was shot to death. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates … our world can be harsh on people who talk about an improved reality. Visions and visionaries make people uncomfortable. These are especially dramatic examples, of course, but the same principle applies to the personal dreams and goals of people we’ve never heard of. The same principle applies to everyone, including you and me. Let’s say you have a brother, or sister, or old friend with whom you had a falling out years ago. You wish you had a better relationship, that you talked more often, that you shared more personal experiences and conversations together. Between where you are today and where you can imagine being, there is a gap. Can you feel it?

But I feel the exact opposite. I feel like it’s taken decades to get here. “You told me I was supposed to be the greatest player in the history of tennis. You said it since the day I was born! You told me it was all I was ever meant to be! And then one day I wasn’t anymore. You weren’t even sure that I could beat her!” I say. “Are we talking about Stepanova?” he says. “I asked you if you thought I could get the number one ranking over her, and you said, ‘I don’t know.’ ” “And you’ve never forgiven me for it,” he says. “I’m paying that price even today.” “You should pay it for the rest of your life!” I say. “For making me believe in myself like that and then pulling the rug out from under me. For giving up on me when things were at their hardest. I never gave up on this. Ever. And you did!” “Carrie, you asked me if I thought you could take number one from Paulina. And I said I didn’t know. Because I didn’t. I don’t know what the future holds. And I can’t promise the world is going to always turn out the way you want it to. “I owed you that honesty, I thought. So you could assess better—how to grow, how to widen your perspective. It felt like it was time for that. But you didn’t want to do that then, and you don’t want to do that now. “I’ve messed up a lot as your father, and I take responsibility for that. But this one, I’m sorry, only you can solve it. You have to make peace with not being a perfect player,” he said. “That is giving up. I won’t do it,” I said. My father shakes his head. “You have to find a way to be right with who you actually are, to face what life is really like. I expected you to figure that out by now. But you haven’t. And if you don’t, I can’t see how you ever get past this…this moment. You have accomplished so much, but you are instead so focused on keeping it, rather than going out and finding something else in the world.” He walks toward the door. “Everything we achieve is ephemeral. We have it, and then the next second it’s gone. You had that record, and you may lose that record. Or you may defend it now and lose it in two years all over again. I wish you’d accept that.” I shake my head and try to look at him. “I can’t.” “Well,” he says. “It kills me that I cannot fix that for you, hija. But I can’t. Nobody else can.” And then, as if the door were the lightest thing in the world, he opens it and walks right through, leaving me there alone.

The truth is that for two centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus sometime in the early 30s CE, Christianity is hard to pin down. It started as a radical Jewish sect, but how and when it became clearly separated from Judaism is impossible to say. It is not even certain when ‘Christians’ started regularly to use that name for themselves; it may originally have been a nickname applied by outsiders. They were for many years small in number. The best estimate is that by 200 CE there were around 200,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, of between 50 and 60 million people, though they may have been more visible than that figure suggests, as they were overwhelmingly concentrated in towns; the word ‘pagan’ was their term for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it implied anything from ‘outsider’ to ‘rustic’. And they held a whole variety of views and beliefs about the nature of god and of Jesus and about the basic tenets of Christian faith that were gradually, and with great difficulty, pared down to the range of Christian orthodoxies (still not a single one) that we know today. Was Jesus married with children? What exactly happened at the crucifixion? Did he die or not?, many wondered, not unreasonably.

You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!

And then I saw him speak. Years later, after writing dozens upon dozens of presidential speeches, it would become impossible to listen to rhetoric without editing it in my head. On that historic Iowa evening, Obama began with a proclamation: “They said this day would never come.” Rereading those words today, I have questions. Who were “they,” exactly? Did they really say “never”? Because if they thought an antiwar candidate with a robust fund-raising operation could never win a divided three-way Democratic caucus, particularly with John Edwards eating into Hillary Clinton’s natural base of support among working-class whites, then they didn’t know what they were talking about. All this analysis would come later, though, along with stress-induced insomnia and an account at the Navy Mess. At the time, I was spellbound. The senator continued: “At this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said you couldn’t do.” He spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed. Barack Obama spoke for the next twelve minutes, and except for a brief moment when the landing gear popped out and I thought we were going to die, I was riveted. He told us we were one people. I nodded knowingly at the gentleman in the middle seat. He told us he would expand health care by bringing Democrats and Republicans together. I was certain it would happen as he described. He looked out at a sea of organizers and volunteers. “You did this,” he told them, “because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.

The only traveler with real soul I've ever met was an office boy who worked in a company where I was at one time employed. This young lad collected brochures on different cities, countries and travel companies; he had maps, some torn out of newspapers, others begged from one place or another; he cut out pictures of landscapes, engravings of exotic costumes, paintings of boats and ships from various journals and magazines. He would visit travel agencies on behalf of some real or hypothetical company, possibly the actual one in which he worked, and ask for brochures on Italy or India, brochures giving details of sailings between Portugal and Australia. He was not only the greatest traveler I've ever known (because he was truest), he was also one of the happiest people I have had the good fortune to meet. I'm sorry not to know what has become of him, though, to be honest, I'm not really sorry, I only feel that I should be. I'm not really sorry because today, ten or more years on from that brief period in which i knew him, he must be a grown man, stolidly, reliably fulfilling his duties, married perhaps, someone's breadwinner - in other words, one of the living dead. By now he may even have traveled in his body, he who knew so well how to travel in his soul. A sudden memory assails me: he knew exactly which trains one had to catch to ho from Paris to Bucharest; which trains one took to cross England; and in his garbled pronunciation of the strange names hung the bright certainty of the greatness of his soul. Now he probably lives like a dead man, but perhaps one day, when he's old, he'll remember that to dream of Bordeaux is not only better, but truer, than actually to arrive in Bordeaux

bring some curiosity to each moment you have with the people in your life, especially those you know well and perhaps take for granted. This takes practice, but it’s not hard to get better at it. “How was your day?”—“Fine” needn’t be the end of a conversation. It is your sincere interest that will motivate folks to respond. You might follow up with something a little more playful like, “What was the most fun thing that happened today?” Or, “Did anything surprising happen today?” And when someone makes a casual reply you can dig deeper: “Can I ask you more about that… I’m so curious and not sure I really understand it fully…” Try to put yourself in this person’s place and imagine what they have experienced. Engaging conversations often come from this perspective-taking alone, and curiosity can be contagious. You might find that the more interested you are in others, the more interested they become in you, and you might also be surprised how fun this process can be. Life is always at risk of slipping by unnoticed. If the days and months and years feel as if they are moving too quickly, focused attention might be one remedy. Giving something your undivided attention is a way of bringing it to life and assuring that you don’t float through time on automatic pilot. Noticing someone is a way of respecting them, paying tribute to the person they are in that exact moment. And noticing yourself, checking in about how you move through the world, about where you are now and where you would like to be, can help you identify which people and pursuits most need your attention. Attention is your most precious asset, and deciding how to invest it is one of the most important decisions you can make. The good news is you can make that decision now, in this moment, and in each moment of your life.

Suppose you live in a place that has a constant chance of being struck by lightning at any time throughout the year. Suppose that the strikes are random: every day the chance of a strike is the same, and the rate works out to one strike a month. Your house is hit by lightning today, Monday. What is the most likely day for the next bolt to strike your house? The answer is “tomorrow,” Tuesday. That probability, to be sure, is not very high; let’s approximate it at 0.03 (about once a month). Now think about the chance that the next strike will be the day after tomorrow, Wednesday. For that to happen, two things have to take place. First lightning has to strike on Wednesday, a probability of 0.03. Second, lightning can’t have struck on Tuesday, or else Tuesday would have been the day of the next strike, not Wednesday. To calculate that probability, you have to multiply the chance that lightning will not strike on Tuesday (0.97, or 1 minus 0.03) by the chance that lightning will strike on Wednesday (0.03), which is 0.0291, a bit lower than Tuesday’s chances. What about Thursday? For that to be the day, lightning can’t have struck on Tuesday (0.97) or on Wednesday either (0.97 again) but it must strike on Thursday, so the chances are 0.97 × 0.97 × 0.03, which is 0.0282. What about Friday? It’s 0.97 × 0.97 × 0.97 × 0.03, or 0.274. With each day, the odds go down (0.0300 . . . 0.0291 . . . 0.0282 . . . 0.0274), because for a given day to be the next day that lightning strikes, all the previous days have to have been strike-free, and the more of these days there are, the lower the chances are that the streak will continue. To be exact, the probability goes down exponentially, accelerating at an accelerating rate. The chance that the next strike will be thirty days from today is 0.9729 × 0.03, barely more than 1 percent.

Four Years Since Today I remember the day but to be honest it is everyday That day then, the moment then, when you left us all here More than just a father I call, a gem I treasure, that day I lost We four girls, my mom’s other half, my brothers best bud, our first love, we lost Holding the key to the future called You, I stand still facing the gate of the past Why I keep on asking the same question? Why you? Why out of all those people? Why too soon? Why? It has been years, 4 years exact, it seems like yesterday yes You were taken too soon, words aren’t enough to express It’s not fair, but who I am to blame, who Am I to question? My eyes express longing you cannot fathom From my open mouth my broken heart pours Words that try to capture that image so faint He is the picture I could not ever paint Yet our memories is in the solid bowl being kept Spare me even just 5 or 10 minutes of your presence To build up this longing I feel, I am asking I want to hear your nag; I want to hear your laugh In my dreams please see me there I won’t get afraid nor get frightened Like a waterfalls my tears keeps on flowing Like a bubble your voice keeps on vanishing He, his shadow, he himself starts from fading I don’t want to forget you please stop time from ticking I don’t want to open my eyes don’t wake me from dreaming You are the art of my painting, the muse of my poem My strength, my inspiration why I’m still holding on My king, my superman, name them all, you are my only one I miss the old golden days when you used to carry us one by one Look papa, how I am now, hoping always, you’ll be proud It pains me to know this inevitable truth, yes That I can’t see you for now yes it’s the truth, but My father’s love undeniable not easily obtained Something that few, many people rather don’t have But I’m blessed and proud I have mine claimed.

Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire. It took its first bite out of the Oceanic World at the same time, during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and soon after that completed its conquest. The Andean World collapsed in 1532, when Spanish conquistadors crushed the Inca Empire. The first European landed on the Australian continent in 1606, and that pristine world came to an end when British colonisation began in earnest in 1788. Fifteen years later the Britons established their first settlement in Tasmania, thus bringing the last autonomous human world into the Afro-Asian sphere of influence. It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed, but the process was irreversible. Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognised states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis). The single global culture is not homogeneous. Just as a single organic body contains many different kinds of organs and cells, so our single global culture contains many different types of lifestyles and people, from New York stockbrokers to Afghan shepherds. Yet they are all closely connected and they influence one another in myriad ways. They still argue and fight, but they argue using the same concepts and fight using the same weapons. A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.

You whom I could not save, Listen to me. Can we agree Kevlar backpacks shouldn’t be needed for children walking to school? Those same children also shouldn’t require a suit of armor when standing on their front lawns, or snipers to watch their backs as they eat at McDonalds. They shouldn’t have to stop to consider the speed of a bullet or how it might reshape their bodies. But one winter, back in Detroit, I had one student who opened a door and died. It was the front door to his house, but it could have been any door, and the bullet could have written any name. The shooter was thirteen years old and was aiming at someone else. But a bullet doesn’t care about “aim,” it doesn’t distinguish between the innocent and the innocent, and how was the bullet supposed to know this child would open the door at the exact wrong moment because his friend was outside and screaming for help. Did I say I had “one” student who opened a door and died? That’s wrong. There were many. The classroom of grief had far more seats than the classroom for math though every student in the classroom for math could count the names of the dead. A kid opens a door. The bullet couldn’t possibly know, nor could the gun, because “guns don’t kill people,” they don’t have minds to decide such things, they don’t choose or have a conscience, and when a man doesn’t have a conscience, we call him a psychopath. This is how we know what type of assault rifle a man can be, and how we discover the hell that thrums inside each of them. Today, there’s another shooting with dead kids everywhere. It was a school, a movie theater, a parking lot. The world is full of doors. And you, whom I cannot save, you may open a door and enter a meadow, or a eulogy. And if the latter, you will be mourned, then buried in rhetoric. There will be monuments of legislation, little flowers made from red tape. What should we do? we’ll ask again. The earth will close like a door above you. What should we do? And that click you hear? That’s just our voices, the deadbolt of discourse sliding into place.

All the women, white or black or brown, who woke up like this, who came before me in this town. Think of them. Heads up, eyes on the target. Running. Full speed. Gravity be damned. Toward that thick layer of glass that is the ceiling. Running, full speed, and crashing. Crashing into that ceiling and falling back. Crashing into it and falling back. Into it and falling back. Woman after woman. Each one running and each one crashing. And everyone falling. How many women had to hit that glass before the first crack appeared? How many cuts did they get, how many bruises? How hard did they have to hit the ceiling? How many women had to hit that glass to ripple it, to send out a thousand hairline fractures? How many women had to hit that glass before the pressure of their effort caused it to evolve from a thick pane of glass into just a thin sheet of splintered ice? So that when it was my turn to run, it didn’t even look like a ceiling anymore. I mean, the wind was already whistling through—I could always feel it on my face. And there were all these holes giving me a perfect view to the other side. I didn’t even notice the gravity, I think it had already worn itself away. So I didn’t have to fight as hard. I had time to study the cracks. I had time to decide where the air felt the rarest, where the wind was the coolest, where the view was the most soaring. I picked my spot in the glass and I called it my target. And I ran. And when I finally hit that ceiling, it just exploded into dust. Like that. My sisters who went before me had already handled it. No cuts. No bruises. No bleeding. Making it through the glass ceiling to the other side was simply a matter of running on a path created by every other woman’s footprints. I just hit at exactly the right time in exactly the right spot. So I’m breaking my family’s rule today. This is a trophy for participation. And I am beyond honored and proud to receive it. Because this? Was a group effort. Thank you to all the women in this room. Thank you to all the women who never made it into this room. And thank you to all the women who will hopefully fill a room one hundred times this size when we are all gone. You are all an inspiration.

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today’s unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries. Around the same time that The Limits to Growth was published, peak oil production was passed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive. The balance of geopolitical power shifted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases. Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries as well, China’s coal imports have already increased 60-fold over the past decade—and will double again by 2015. The burning of coal in much of the rest of the developing world has also continued to increase significantly. According to the International Energy Agency, developing and emerging markets will account for all of the net global increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades. The prediction of global peak oil is fraught with

In Western culture today, you decide to get married because you feel an attraction to the other person. You think he or she is wonderful. But a year or two later—or, just as often, a month or two—three things usually happen. First, you begin to find out how selfish this wonderful person is. Second, you discover that the wonderful person has been going through a similar experience and he or she begins to tell you how selfish you are. And third, though you acknowledge it in part, you conclude that your spouse’s selfishness is more problematic than your own. This is especially true if you feel that you’ve had a hard life and have experienced a lot of hurt. You say silently, “OK, I shouldn’t do that—but you don’t understand me.” The woundedness makes us minimize our own selfishness. And that’s the point at which many married couples arrive after a relatively brief period of time. So what do you do then? There are at least two paths to take. First, you could decide that your woundedness is more fundamental than your self-centeredness and determine that unless your spouse sees the problems you have and takes care of you, it’s not going to work out. Of course, your spouse will probably not do this—especially if he or she is thinking almost the exact same thing about you! And so what follows is the development of emotional distance and, perhaps, a slowly negotiated kind of détente or ceasefire. There is an unspoken agreement not to talk about some things. There are some things your spouse does that you hate, but you stop talking about them as long as he or she stops bothering you about certain other things. No one changes for the other; there is only tit-for-tat bargaining. Couples who settle for this kind of relationship may look happily married after forty years, but when it’s time for the anniversary photo op, the kiss will be forced. The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it. So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up.” You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it’s revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing. If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage. It Only Takes One to Begin

In 1933 things were still being taught in the higher educational establishments which had been proven by science to be false as long ago as 1899. The young man who wishes to keep abreast of the times, therefore, had to accept a double load on his unfortunate brain. In a hundred years' time, the number of people wearing spectacles, and the size of the human brain, will both have increased considerably; but the people will be none the more intelligent. What they will look like, with their enormous, bulging heads, it is better not to try to imagine; they will probably be quite content with their own appearance, but if things continue in the manner predicted by the scientists, I think we can count ourselves lucky that we shall not live to see them! When I was a schoolboy, I did all I could to get out into the open air as much as possible—my school reports bear witness to that ! In spite of this, I grew up into a reasonably intelligent young man, I developed along very normal lines, and I learnt a lot of things of which my schoolfellows learnt nothing. In short, our system of education is the exact opposite of that practised in the gymnasia of ancient days. The Greek of the golden age sought a harmonious education; we succeed only in producing intellectual monsters. Without the introduction of conscription, we should have fallen into complete decadence, and it is thanks to this universal military service that the fatal process has been arrested. This I regard as one of the greatest events in history. When I recall my masters at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal; and the greater the distance from which I look back on them, the stronger is my conviction that I am quite right. The primary task of education is to train the brain of the young. It is quite impossible to recognise the potential aspirations of a child of ten. In old days teachers strove always to seek out each pupil's weak point, and by exposing and dwelling on it, they successfully killed the child's self-confidence. Had they, on the contrary, striven to find the direction in which each pupil's talents lay, and then concentrated on the development of those talents, they would have furthered education in its true sense. Instead, they sought mass-production by means of endless generalisations. A child who could not solve a mathematical equation, they said, would do no good in life. It is a wonder that they did not prophesy that he would come to a bad and shameful end! Have things changed much to-day, I wonder? I am not sure, and many of the things I see around me incline me to the opinion that they have not.

It is very important to note, however, that the only segment of the population from whom changing our social and economic conditions in the ways that prevent violence would exact a higher cost would be the extremely wealthy upper, or ruling, class — the wealthiest one per cent of the population (which in the United States today controls some 39 per cent of the total wealth of the nation, and 48 per cent of the financial wealth, as shown by Wolff in Top Heavy (1996). The other 99 per cent of the population — namely, the middle class and the lower class — would benefit, not only form decreased rates of violence (which primarily victimize the very poor), but also from a more equitable distribution of the collective wealth and income of our unprecedentedly wealthy societies. Even on a worldwide scale, it would require a remarkably small sacrifice from the wealthiest individuals and nations to raise everyone on earth, including the populations of the poorest nations, above the subsistence level, as the United Nations Human Development Report 1998, has shown. I emphasize the wealthiest individuals as well as nations because, as the U.N. report documents, a tiny number of the wealthiest individuals actually possess wealth on a scale that is larger than the annual income of most of the nations of the earth. For example, the three richest individuals on earth have assets that exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product of the fortyeight poorest countries! The assets of the 84 richest individuals exceed the Gross Domestic Product of the most populous nation on earth, China, with 1.2 billion inhabitants. The 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, which is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the world's population, or 2.5 billion people. By comparison, it is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. This is less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world. It has been shown throughout the world, both internationally and intranationally, that reducing economic inequities not only improves physical health and reduces the rate of death from natural causes far more effectively than doctors, medicines, and hospitals; it also decreases the rate of death from both criminal and political violence far more effectively than any system of police forces, prisons, or military interventions ever invented.

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead. Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical attribute—who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem. And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy. It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.

If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle. … Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself; (p. 6) In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin. ... …; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth. (p. 8) At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (p. 10) It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets. (p. 12) Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see (p. 17) That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism. (p. 31) Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. (p. 32) The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism. (p. 38) The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. (p. 42) Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. (p. 42) According to its basic principles, the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations. (p. 43) It is exactly the weakness of contemporary society that it offers no ideals, that it demands no faith, that it has no vision—except that of more of the same. (p. 49) Socialism must be radical. To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man. (p. 49)

Today I had a lively discussion with a merchant in Fez with a view to finding out what the Moors think of European civilization.... He was a fine man, about forty years old, with an honest and serious face, who had made business visits to the most important cities in Western Europe and had lived for a long time in Tangier, where he learnt Spanish.... I asked him therefore what kind of impression the large cities of Europe had made on him.... He looked hard at me and answered coldly: “Large streets, fine shops, beautiful palaces, good workshops, everything clean.” He gave the impression that with these words, he had mentioned everything in our countries that was worthy of praise. “Have you not found anything else in Europe that is beautiful and good?” I asked. He looked at me questioningly. “Is it possible,” I went on, “that an intelligent man like you, who has visited several countries so marvelously superior to your own can speak about them without astonishment, or at least without the emotion of a country boy who has seen the pasha’s palace? What can you possibly admire in the world? What sort of people are you? Who can possibly understand you?” “Perdone Usted”, he answered coldly, “it is for me to say that I cannot understand you. I have told you all the things which I consider to be better in Europe. What more can I say? Have I to say something that I do not believe to be true? I repeat that your streets are larger than ours, your shops finer, that you have workshops such as we do not have, and also rich palaces. That is all. I can only add one more thing: that you know more than we do, because you have many books, and read more.” I became impatient. “Do not lose patience, Caballero,” he said, “let us speak together calmly. Is not a man’s first duty honesty? Is it not honesty more than anything else that makes a man worthy of respect, and one country superior to another? Very well, then. As far as honesty is concerned, your countries are certainly not better than ours. That much I can say right away.” “Gently, gently!” I said, “Tell me first what you mean by honesty!” “Honesty in business, Caballero. The Moors, for example, sometimes cheat the Europeans in trade, but you Europeans cheat the Moors much more often.” “There must be a few cases,” I replied, in order to say something. “Casos raros?” he exclaimed angrily. “It happens every day! Proof: I go to Marseilles. I buy cotton. I choose a particular thread, give the exact reference number and brand-name, as well as the amount required. I ask for it to be sent, I pay, and I return home. Back in Morocco, I receive the cotton. I open the consignment, and take a look. I find the same number, the same brand-name, and a thread that is of one third the thickness! This is anything but good, and I lose thousands of francs! I rush to the consulate, but in vain. Another case: A merchant from Fez places an order in Europe for blue cloth, so many pieces, of such and such a length and breadth. He pays for it when the bargain is made. In due course he receives the cloth, opens the package, and checks the measurements. The first pieces are all right, those underneath are shorter, and those lowest down are half a meter too short! The cloth cannot be used for cloaks, and the merchant is ruined. . . . And so on and so on!

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.

I put my hand on his forearm, I don't know why I do this, and it's not exactly natural, although it's not unnatural, except that I really want to touch his skin. It's smooth and tan just a little bit and feels like summer, like something familiar and warm and good, like my skin did on the first days aboard 'Fishful Thinking' before it salted and burned and peeled. 'We broke up three years after that.' I sit back in my chair and give a sly smile. Relationships are complex and sometimes you can't really explain them to an outside party. 'I can't believe I just told you that' 'YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!' A third time. I am not imagining it. 'There you are.' This time my heart does skip a beat. I look down at his arm, and we are still touching, and he has made no attempt to retract his arm or retreat. All my surroundings, the red formica table top, the pink yogurt, the blue sky, the green vegetables in the market, they all come alive in vibrant technicolor as the sun peers from behind a cloud. I am living my full life. 'Honesty in all things,' Byron adds, lifting his cup of yogurt for a toast of sorts. I pull my hand away from him and the instant my hand is back by his side, I miss the warmth of his arm, the warmth of him. Honesty in all things. I should put my hand back, that's where it wants to be, that's Lily's lesson to me. Be present in the moment, give spontaneous affection. I'm suddenly aware I haven't spoken in a bit. 'Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?' As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I realize I sound like that kid from 'Jerry McGuire.' 'Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?' I hope my question comes off almost a fraction as endearing. 'No,' Byron says with a glint in his eye that reads as curiosity, at least I hope that it does, but even if it doesn't I'm too into the inertia of the trivia to stop it. 'It's true, one heart called the systemic heart that functions much like the left side of the human heart, distributing blood throughout the heart, then two smaller branchial heart with gills that act like the right side of our hearts to pump the blood back.' 'What made you think of that?' I smile. It may be entirely inappropriate first date conversation, but at least it doesn't bore me in the telling. I look up at the winsome August sky, marred only by the contrails of a passing jet, and a vaguely dachshund shaped cloud above the horizon. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in love at first site. I don't believe in angels. I don't believe in heaven and that our loved ones are looking down on us, but the sun is so warm and the breeze is so cool and the company is so perfect and the whole afternoon so intoxicating, ti's hard not to hear Lily's voice dancing in the gentle wind, 'one! month! is Long! Enough TO! BE! SAD!' ... 'I recently lost someone close to me....I don't know, I feel her here today with us, you, me, her, three hearts, like an octopus,' I shrug. If I were him, I would run. What a ridiculously creepy thing to say. I would run and I would not stop until I was home in my bed with a gallon of ice cream deleting my profile from every dating site I belonged to. Maybe it's because it's not rehearsed, maybe it's because it's as weird a thing to say as it is genuine, maybe it's because this is finally the man for me. Byron stands and offers me his hand, 'Let's take a walk and you can tell me about her.' The gentle untying of a shoe lace. It takes me a minute to decide if I can do this, and I decide that I can, and I throw our yogurt dishes away, and I put my hand in his, and it's soft and warm, and instead of awkward fumbling, our hands clasp together like magnets and metal, like we've been hand-in-hand all along, and we are touching again. ...

… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!

Who will have their strength renewed? “Those who wait upon the Lord”. Waiting could signify passivity: being still. Waiting could also indicate action: serving. Waiting — either kind — can be nearly impossible while we are being run by our emotions. In learning to balance your emotions with wisdom, learning to wait upon the Lord in both senses of the word, you will find that your strength is renewed every day in every situation. On the other hand, operating out of emotions can be exhausting. In your Christian walk, the ability to discern seasons is vital. There are times in your life where immediate action is not only unnecessary, it can be damaging. There are situations in which your best course of action is to “be still and know that He is God” (Psalm 46:10). Allowing Him to speak to you in the midst of your storm, finding your peace in Christ when your life seems upside down may be exactly what is needed. There are times when patience is the order of the day, and waiting on the Lord to move or instruct you in the way you are to move is exactly what is needed. Sometimes the most difficult course to take is to wait and allow the Lord to direct your heart “into the love of God and the patience of Christ” (2 Thessalonians3:5). However difficult it may be, practicing waiting will serve you well. “Waiting” can also signify an action. A waitress will wait on you in your favorite restaurant. You may wait on, or serve, your family. In being able to discern the seasons of waiting passively, we must also be able to discern the seasons of waiting actively. Even in times when you might feel unsure of the next step, there are continually ways for you to serve the Lord: prayer, study, service to others being a few examples. In times when everything is going along smoothly, waiting actively on the Lord is always in order. Paul encourages young Timothy to “be diligent to show yourself approved” (2 Timothy 2:15). In learning to wait actively on the Lord, it is good advice for us as well. Applying ourselves to faithful service to the Lord (active waiting) will sustain us through times when the waiting requires patience and stillness. In our Christian walk, both kinds of “waiting” are needed: an active waiting on or serving the Lord, and likewise a passive waiting for the Lord to move on your behalf. As everything in our relationship with the Lord is a partnership or covenant, this waiting is a “two way street”. As we serve the Lord, He is moved to action on our behalf. Psalm 37:3-7 speaks to both kinds of waiting (parentheses mine): “Trust in the LORD (passive), and do good (active); Dwell in the land (passive), and feed on His faithfulness (active). Delight yourself also in the LORD, And He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD (active), Trust also in Him (passive), And He shall bring it to pass (the Lord’s action). He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, And your justice as the noonday (the Lord’s action). Rest in the LORD (passive), and wait patiently for Him (passive)”. Tremendous and amazing results can come from this kind of waiting. Of course, the Lord in His generous and kind manner will send you opportunities to practice if you want to learn to wait! In His providence, those opportunities are already provided — it is for you to take advantage of them. Will you? Unfortunately, patience is not one of Ahasuerus’ virtues. He is motivated by his emotions, and seems to rush right into whatever comes into his mind without much forethought. Let’s return to Persia, and find out what Ahasuerus is rushing into today. After these things, when the wrath of King Ahasuerus subsided, he remembered... Esther 2:1 “After these things”…. By the beginning of chapter two, four years have passed since King Ahasuerus dethroned Queen Vashti. God was working through this Persian chronicler as he wrote this history

264. The longest passenger rail service currently running directly between two cities runs from Moscow, Russia to Pyongyang, North Korea, a distance of 6,380 mi (10,267 km). The trip takes 206 hours (8.5 days). 265. There is a popular myth that bats always turn left when exiting a cave but this is not true. In fact, some bats can fly in any direction, and some bats don’t live in caves. 266. The Assyrian New Year is celebrated on the 1st of April. However, this day is better known as April Fools’ Day. 267. A person who looked very like you or even exactly like you once lived or will live on the planet. There’s even a small chance this person lives today and that you will meet one day.

The only thing secretive about secret societies is the fear that the arrogant inside these groups have of sharing the little they know, because they often don't even understand their own books and struggle with little. Their real fear is that someone may come along, understand everything better and faster than they do and before they can, and then, by default, lead them to exclusion by ignorance. On the other hand, their fear blinds them from knowing more and identifying those who can take them to a higher level, the same individuals that they claim to be waiting for and that only appear in every thousand of years cycles. This paradox is what leads their groups to extinction by self-imposed destructive behavior, or to practices that are in complete contradiction towards what their founder or founders intended. As a matter of fact, the more this reality manifests before our eyes, the easier it is to find quotes in books written by founders of such groups in complete contradiction to what you hear everyone inside these groups speaking. What I’m really saying here is that Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Scientology, and many other groups out there, have for long lost their entitlement to ownership of their own name, and as much as Christianity is today more in tune to an evil God than a benevolent one. Their real intention, even if manifested mostly at a subconscious level, is to keep away anyone that contradicts what they want to see, rather than accepting what they should be seeing. Ironically, they are doing exactly what was done unto them by the Inquisition, the Nazis, the Egyptians, and any other group that once opposed them. They are their own enemy. And when their prophet comes, they neglect him, ridicule him, ignore him and even conspire against him. They are the greatest shame of their own ancestors. They are the poison they fear. They are the real enemy of their own group.

We all agree that the main concept of ​​a metasearch engine is to compare and find the best rates, right? Well, we may be wrong. Up until only 10 years ago, there were dozens of OTAs, each one specialized in a niche market. But, over the years, these OTAs have been acquired, integrated or simply merged under Booking and Expedia's brands. Today, digital distribution is, de facto, a duopoly. And with only two OTAs sharing almost 100% of online transactions, what exactly a metasearch engine should do?

Squaring the Circle was devised upon disbelief in Adam's heritage (which were granted to him by God) by the ancients to replace his tradition with that of the "Christ" whom was proclaimed anew in each age. The Egyptian Royal Cubit (according to Michell) equals to 1.728 feet; it was used in Squaring the Circle of the New Jerusalem which was based on the Great Pyramid's model. The Great Pyramid's base diagonal equals to one complete circular rotation of a Royal Cubit pace (622/360=1.728), and its structure is raised in an angle into the skies to project the Moon's rotation (622=51.85*12). We can link the meter as a unit of measurement to ancient Egypt -even though it was only recently devised- because it harmonizes with its decanic calendar which is still in use today by the Judeo-Christian heirs of Pharaoh's religion. The Royal Cubit angularly articulates the Primal Creation on yearly, monthly (0.5236*180/pi) and weekly (pi/6) basis and that is exactly why it was utilized; it served as a good tool for Squaring the Circle.

Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87

Even to-day, […] there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years’ time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.

That night, they sat around the hotel room with a bottle of tequila and some salt and limes and talked about names for the new real estate company. A few ideas sprang up right away but got rejected just as fast. A half bottle of tequila later, the name "Real Estate Maximums Incorporated" was tossed around as a possibility. Nobody spoke for a moment because everyone liked it. Maximums meant that everyone would get the most out of the relationship-real estate agents and customers alike. The name did a good job of communicating the everybody wins principle at the heart of the endeavor. But after a few more minutes, they realized it didn't quite work. It wasn't snappy enough for a good brand name, and it was too long to fit on a real estate sign. More tequila got poured. No one could come up with another name that felt as on-target as Real Estate Maximums. Someone suggested shortening it to R. E. Max. That made it snappier and appealing in a brand name sense; but when you wrote it out, it looked too much like a real person's name. You could imagine junk mail arriving at the office in care of Mr. and Mrs. R. E. Max. Collins pointed out that Exxon had formed only a few years before, and the X with a slash through it looked very smart. So Liniger took out the dots and tried a slash through the middle of the word and then capitalized all the letters. They looked at the pad of paper and saw: RE/MAX. A silence came over them, followed by a few backslaps and cheers. Everything about the word looked exactly right, as though they were talking about an established global company. Now, what about colors? They were on a roll. Now was no time to stop. A few more shots of tequila went around while they debated the right look for the new RE/MAX. It didn't take long to figure it out: Everyone in the room was a Vietnam vet and patriotic to the core. The colors, of course, had to be red, white, and blue. When they considered the whole package, they knew they had it. And that's how the idea for the distinctive RE/MAX brand was hatched. Considering the time and resources that get poured into brand development today, their methods might seem unorthodox if admirably effective. No money was spent on advertising agencies, market research, or trademark protection. The only investment was a decent bottle of tequila; the only focus group, a bunch of guys sitting around a room having a good laugh.

Well, it's true that the anarchist vision in just about all its varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power―and personally I share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals: my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe attack. And I don't think there's any contradiction there―none at all, really. For example, take the so-called "welfare state." What's called the "welfare state" is essentially a recognition that every child has a right to have food, and to have health care and so on―and as I've been saying, those programs were set up in the nation-state system after a century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level. I think those children should be saved. And in today's world, that's going to have to involve working through the state system; it's not the only case. So despite the anarchist "vision," I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended―in fact, defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that's being made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society. There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people's lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives. I don't think those things can simply be forgotten because they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained, they're important―but dismantling the state system is a goal that's a lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what's at hand and nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system, with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the general population which other existing institutions, such as corporations, don't have. In fact, that's exactly why the far right wants to weaken governmental structures―because if you can make sure that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General Electric and Raytheon, then you don't have to worry anymore about the threat of popular involvement in policy-making.

An early incarnation of the metaverse can already be seen in gaming, one of the most (if not the most) immersive digital industries in the world, so if you're into video games, the whole concept may not be entirely new to you. Fitness is another industry where both VR and AR have been used quite heavily in recent years, so it would not be surprising that the foundations of the metaverse could emerge from these industries. Moreover, applications of VR/AR have been massively democratized recently. But let's not kid ourselves: this journey will go on for decades. First of all, the metaverse needs some infrastructures that not only do not exist today, but the whole Internet landscape has not been originally created to support such a revolutionary platform. Moreover, we will need standards and protocols (possibly from day one) exactly as we have for the Internet today, and -because of the complexity of the metaverse- this could take years. Not to mention the privacy and regulation concerns that building the metaverse can trigger. At this stage, therefore, any prediction on how the metaverse will look won't be much more than pure speculation, and the risk that the "hype" turns into "a bubble" is quite tangible.

Definite Pessimism A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.

And I accepted the job without consulting Shelley. Yeah, I’m a slow learner! Fast-forward to today. It’s been an incredible ride. It took the better part of five years to feel like we were stabilized. It took seven years for Shelley to say she actually respected me. It took eight years for her to say that if we had to go through it all over again, she would still choose me. It took nine years for her to say that my sexual addiction was one of the best things that ever happened to her. My jaw hit the floor when she said that. Today, as I write this, it’s a little over ten years since the mocha hit the fan. We have seen God’s amazing redemption play out, and our marriage is special. We’re still trying to figure out intimacy, still working through painful memories of the past, still leaning into conflict. And trust, well, trust has been and is still being restored. It’s an ongoing thing, which is exactly what prompted my penning this book. This book is in so many ways a “don’t do what I did” manuscript. It is the culmination of a decade of trial and error. My hope is that it will give you the courage you need to lean into the trials and make fewer errors than I did.

Evolutionary analyses suggest that stress is not what it used to be. For most of human history our ancestors lived in physical and social environment that were very different from what most of us experience today. Life in those environments imposed a set of selection pressures that shaped our species’ genome and behavior, leading to the evolution of anatomically modern humans. Although it is not entirely clear where exactly one should draw the line between them and more archaic forms, paleoanthropologists agree that by at least 50,000 years ago our ancestors were fully human.

I need a word with you, Miss Vega.” He pointed back into the room as the girls disappeared into the men’s locker room across the hall. I backed up with my heart pounding madly against my chest and as the door swung closed, he whipped me around to crowd me in against it and cast a silencing bubble around us. “Nervous?” he asked with a smirk and I nodded. He pressed his mouth to mine, kissing me deeply and making my heart pound for a whole different reason. He released me, resting one hand above me on the door which made his bicep flex. “You’ll do great. You’ve been killing it in your practise sessions. You’re the best Pit Keeper we’ve had in years.” “Are you just saying that to get into my pants, Coach?” I teased and he chuckled darkly. “No, Blue. I’m saying it because it’s true.” He smiled and my heart started to slow as I drew comfort from his confidence in me. “Thanks. So are you wearing a cheer ribbon for me today?” I taunted and he leaned in closer with mischief in his eyes. “Yes, but I had to wear it somewhere no one would see. So it’s tied in a very special place.” I burst out laughing, gripping his waistband. “Are you telling me it’s tied to your-” “You can find out exactly where it’s tied after the game, but only if you do well.” He plucked my hand off of him with a stern stare that sent a shiver through me. “Okay, sir,” I said breathily. “Let’s go beat Aurora then.” I pushed away from the door and he disbanded the silencing bubble with a chuckle before we exited and headed across the hall into the men’s locker room. (Darcy)

*I know I said in my last letter that I didn't write this for your forgiveness. While that's the truth, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not praying on my knees for your forgiveness, hoping for a miracle. I'm not going to act like I won't be sitting at the restaurant for hours upon end, hoping you walk through those doors. Because that's exactly where I'll be. And if you don't show up today, I'll be there next year. And the next. Every November 9th I'll wait for you, hoping one day you'll be able to find enough forgiveness to love me again. Byt if that doesn't happen and you never show, I'll still be grateful to you until the day that I die.*

*I know I said in my last letter that I didn't write this for your forgiveness. While that's the truth, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not praying on my knees for your forgiveness, hoping for a miracle. I'm not going to act like I won't be sitting at the restaurant for hours upon end, hoping you walk through those doors. Because that's exactly where I'll be. And if you don't show up today, I'll be there next year. And the next. Every November 9th I'll wait for you, hoping one day you'll be able to find enough forgiveness to love me again. But if that doesn't happen and you never show, I'll still be grateful to you until the day that I die.* -pg. 299

Mind without heart The leaf had fallen, The branch still stood there intact, It was a gradual event and not at all sudden, The fallen leaf, the still existing branch was an undeniable fact, But why did the branch still hang on, waiting for something? As the leaf from the floor looked at it while time consumed it, Maybe the branch wanted to see the leaf on the floor dying, And with its shadow touch it, and feel it; and whisper to it, “There where you grew you shall grow again next season, I will wait for you here throughout the winter, And to do so, I need no motivation because I have my reason, I have loved you and I do not wish to be a quitter,” And finally there was nothing left of the leaf, the fallen and dead leaf, There was only its trace, a faint impression on the soil, This added to the branch’s anguish and grief, For time had robbed her of its every moment of toil, People passed by and trampled the leaf’s almost fossilised impression, Until there was nothing left of the leaf neither on the branch nor on the soil, The branch chided the fate’s paucity and time’s baseless aggression, For they even erased the leaf’s last impression that was as thin as silver foil, By the time winter entered its prime, The branch stood there waiting for it to pass, Not because it wanted to feel the joys of summer time, But it wanted the leaf to re-appear and re-grow so that it could undo time’s act so crass, Time passed by, spring arrived, the branch was filled with leaves, But that leaf never grew again, the same leaf, the fallen one, So the branch misses him and it continuously grieves, But she shows it to no one, because no leaf compares to her dear leaf, the fallen one, Maybe that is why it is beginning to bend, Though it is converted in thousands of fresh leaves, The branch has been unable to cope with the dear leaf’s premature end, So she keeps peeping into time’s graves, To find the grave of the leaf that she lost prematurely, And lie there beside him, and finally fall, Then be together with him timelessly, And say, “For you I too had to fall afterall!” Today the sun has risen but the branch has fallen forever, Exactly where the leaf had fallen, It is a love of different kind, and the branch is a special lover, Who would never let go of what time from her had stolen, After a year the branch too disappeared from the floor, Now there is neither the branch nor the leaf, Time knows it, fate planned it, but I witnessed it; and this I cannot ignore, But knowing they are somewhere together now, even if that be the graveyard of time, is a relief, Time and fate are never obsequious, Because they neither love nor hate, But they are masquerading and pretentious, And they never know how it feels when the branch lies naked in a leafless state, That is time’s and fate’s irony of which they may never know, But you and I who have minds and hearts, Yet become part of a fake and grotesque show, Where either mind thinks without the heart or the heart from mind’s innocence departs!

Rhys looked them each in the eye, even my sisters, his hand brushing the back of my own. “Do you want the inspiring talk or the bleak one?” he asked. “We want the real one,” Amren said. Rhys pushed his shoulders back, elegantly folding his wings behind him. “I believe everything happens for a reason. Whether it is decided by the Mother, or the Cauldron, or some sort of tapestry of Fate, I don’t know. I don’t really care. But I am grateful for it, whatever it is. Grateful that it brought you all into my life. If it hadn’t … I might have become as awful as that prick we’re going to face today. If I had not met an Illyrian warrior-in-training,” he said to Cassian, “I would not have known the true depths of strength, of resilience, of honor and loyalty.” Cassian’s eyes gleamed bright. Rhys said to Azriel, “If I had not met a shadowsinger, I would not have known that it is the family you make, not the one you are born into, that matters. I would not have known what it is to truly hope, even when the world tells you to despair.” Azriel bowed his head in thanks. Mor was already crying when Rhys spoke to her. “If I had not met my cousin, I would never have learned that light can be found in even the darkest of hells. That kindness can thrive even amongst cruelty.” She wiped away her tears as she nodded. I waited for Amren to offer a retort. But she was only waiting. Rhys bowed his head to her. “If I had not met a tiny monster who hoards jewels more fiercely than a firedrake …” A quiet laugh from all of us at that. Rhys smiled softly. “My own power would have consumed me long ago.” Rhys squeezed my hand as he looked to me at last. “And if I had not met my mate …” His words failed him as silver lined his eyes. He said down the bond, I would have waited five hundred more years for you. A thousand years. And if this was all the time we were allowed to have … The wait was worth it. He wiped away the tears sliding down my face. “I believe that everything happened, exactly the way it had to … so I could find you.” He kissed another tear away. And then he said to my sisters, “We have not known each other for long. But I have to believe that you were brought here, into our family, for a reason, too. And maybe today we’ll find out why.

Ever have that feeling that time is flying? Yesterday evening, it hit me – 20 years from now, we’d give anything to be: this exact age, exactly this healthy & back in this exact moment. Don't Blink! Every Second is a Race Against Inevitable Regret... When we know this truth that one day we’ll all look back wishing we were exactly where we are today.. why don't you set a stage you’ll be proud to look back on! Darling listen – make today count! While you’re strong, capable & still in control, do the best you can with what you have & continue to evolve, fight & be proud of that. Sweetheart, start thinking, speaking & doing things with your future self in mind. Wishing you a day filled with purpose & progress! Blessings!

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table. Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree. Today, there is a veritable boom of thinking about inequality: since 2011, ‘global inequality

six reasons why email is the best: My company AppSumo generates $65 million a year in total transactions. And you know what? Nearly 50 percent of that comes from email. This percentage has been consistent for more than ten years. Don’t believe me? I have 120,000 Twitter followers, 750,000 YouTube subscribers, and 150,000 TikTok fans—and I would give them all up for my 100,000 email subscribers. Why? Every time I send an email, 40,000 people open it and consume my content. I’m not hoping the platform gods will allow me to reach them. On the other platforms, anywhere between 100 and 1 million people pay attention to my content, but it’s not consistent or in my control. I know what you’re saying: “C’mon, Noah, email is dead.” Now ask yourself, when was the last time you checked your email? Exactly. Email is used obsessively by over 4 billion people! It’s the largest way of communicating at scale that exists today. Eighty-nine percent of people check it EVERY DAY! Social media decides who and how many people you’re seen by. One tweak to the algorithm, and you’re toast. Remember the digital publisher LittleThings? Yeah, no one else does, either. They closed after they lost 75 percent of their 20,000,000 monthly visitors when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018. CEO Joe Speiser says it killed his business and he lost $100 million. You own your email list. Forever. If AppSumo shuts down tomorrow, my insurance policy, my sweet sweet baby, my beloved, my email list comes with me and makes anything I do after so much easier. Because it’s mine. It also doesn’t cost you significant money to grow your list or to communicate with your list, whereas Facebook or Google ads consistently cost money.

I’ve told you before, Alera--Andrius lives on in you. I see him in you every day.” I smiled, tipping my head in acceptance of the compliment. “And in you--” she said, once more turning to Narian, tapping a finger against her lips in thought “--I see Cannan.” She was lightly cajoling him, exactly as a parent would do. I couldn’t imagine what was going on in his mind, but he was no longer eager to leave, his eyes never once flicking toward me or the door. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Cannan is strong and decisive. He seems unemotional, untouchable, but underneath he has more heart than most men taken together. And he could so easily have buried that compassion. In some ways, he would have hurt less throughout the years had he done so, but he would be half the man he is today.” I was remembering things Baelic had told me, vague things about Cannan and their father. I had never considered that my mother would have knowledge on the subject, although I should have surmised it. She had grown up in the nobility with the men of her generation, and Cannan had been one of Crown Prince Andrius’s best friends. Seeing the curiosity on Narian’s face, she went on, “It was no secret that Baron Burvaul--Cannan’s father--was a tyrant. In their family, everyone wore smiles for fear of what Burvaul might do if they did not, and everything stayed behind closed doors--except for bruises and broken bones, the vast majority of which were bestowed on Cannan. At that time, of course, Cannan could not fight his father, and so he fought the world instead. “But when he was eighteen and was sent into the field of war, he changed. He gained perspective. And when Andrius died and Cannan was called back to become Sergeant at Arms, and later Captain of the Guard, he was more powerful than his father, in position and character. He never abused that power, but his victory lay in the fact that Burvaul could not bear the reversal of control. He lived the rest of his life in fear of his own son, who never punished him. “I see that personality in you, Narian. Just like Cannan, you will never become the man who controlled you.” “He didn’t control me,” Narian abruptly said. “He didn’t in the end, did he?” she agreed, taking a sip of her tea. “Of course, the real question is about your mother. What was she like?” “You know my mother,” Narian replied, his expression strange. I’d never seen him this way before--he seemed younger, less defensive. He was hesitant, but not guarded like he had been upon entering the room. It was almost as if he wanted to open up to her. “I mean the woman who raised you. Your Cokyrian mother.” Narian was shaking his head, despite the change I had detected in him. “I didn’t have a mother in Cokyri.” “You’re far too well-mannered not to have had a mother growing up.” Her blue eyes were twinkling, unthreatening. Again, she was teasing him, and although I expected him to simply sidestep her a third time, he did not. “To the extent I had a mother, she was the High Priestess.” I looked incredulously back and forth between the two of them, for in half an hour, my mother had enticed Narian to divulge as much to her as I had gleaned in two years. Though I was now bursting to speak, I refrained, and she pressed him further.

I’ve always said I didn’t want an ordinary life. Nothing average or mundane for me. But as I stared at the rather ample naked derriere wiggling two inches from my face today, I realized I should have been more specific with my goals. Definitely not ordinary, but not exactly what I had in mind. The Texas-flag tattoo emblazoned across the left cheek waved at me as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. The flag was distorted and stretched, as was the large yellow rose on the right cheek, both tattoos dotted with dimples and pock marks. An uneven script scrawled out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” across the top of her rump. Her entire bridal party—her closest friends and relatives, mind you—had left her high and dry. They’d stormed off the elevator as I tried to enter it, a flurry of daffodil-yellow silk, spouting and sputtering about their dear loved one, Tonya the bride. “That’s it! We’re done!” They sounded off in a chorus of clucking hens. “We ain’t goin’ back in there. She can get ready on her own!” “Yeah, she can get ready on her own!” “Known her since third grade and she’s gonna talk to me like that?” “Third grade? She’s my first cousin. I’ve known her since the day she was born. She’s always been that way. I don’t know why y’all acting all surprised.” I felt more than a little uneasy about what all this meant for our schedule. The ceremony was supposed to start in fifteen minutes. The bride should have already been downstairs and loaded in the carriage to make her way to the hotel’s beach. My unease grew to panic when I knocked on Tonya’s door and she opened it clad only in a skimpy little satin robe. “Honey, you’re supposed to be dressed and downstairs already.” I tried to say it as sweetly as possible, but I’m sure my panic came through. My Southern accent kicked in thick, which usually only happens when I’m panicked or frustrated. Or pissed. Or drunk. “Do you think I don’t know that?” she asked, arching a perfectly drawn-on eyebrow. “Do you think somehow when I booked this wedding and had invitations printed and planned the entire damned event, I somehow didn’t realize what time the ceremony started? And just who the hell are you anyway?” Well, alrighty then. Obviously this was going to be a fun day. “Um, I’m Tyler Warren. I’m assisting Lillian with your wedding today.” “Fine. Those bitches left me with my nails wet.” She held up both hands to show me the glossy, fresh manicure. “How the hell am I supposed to get dressed with wet nails?” she asked, arching both eyebrows now and glaring at me like I was somehow responsible for this. “Oh.” My mind spun with the limited time frame I had available, the amount of clothing she still needed to put on, and the amount of time it would take to get her in the carriage and to the ceremony. “Give me just a second to let Lillian know we’ll be down shortly.” I smiled what I hoped was my sweetest smile and stepped backward into the hallway. She slammed the door as I frantically dialed Lillian’s cell. “You’d better be calling to tell me she is in the carriage and on her way,” Lillian said. “It is hotter than Hades out here. I have several people looking like they’re about to faint, and I may possibly dunk a cranky, tuxedoed five-year-old

You’ll Meet an Old Lady One Day You are going to meet an old lady someday. Down the road 10, 20, 30 years—she’s waiting for you. You will catch up to her. What kind of old lady are you going to meet? She may be a seasoned, soft, and gracious lady. A lady who has gown old gracefully, surrounded by a host of friends—friends who call her blessed because of what her life has meant to them. Or she may be a bitter, disillusioned, dried-up, cynical old buzzard without a good word for anyone or anything—soured, friendless, and alone. The kind of old lady you will meet will depend entirely upon you. She will be exactly what you make of her, nothing more, nothing less. It’s up to you. You will have no one else to credit or blame. Every day, in every way, you are becoming more and more like that old lady. You are getting to look more like her, think more like her, and talk more like her. You are becoming her. If you live only in terms of what you are getting out of life, the old lady gets smaller, drier, harder, crabbier, more self-centered. Open your life to others. Think in terms of what you can give and your contribution to life, and the old lady grows larger, softer, kinder, greater. These little things, seemingly so unimportant now—attitudes, goals, ambitions, desires—are adding up inside where you cannot see them, crystallizing in your heart and mind. The point is, these things don’t always show up immediately. But they will—sooner than you think. Someday they will harden into that old lady; nothing will be able to soften or change them then. The time to take care of that old lady is right now. Today. Examine your motives, attitudes, goals. Check up on her. Work her over now while she is still pliable, still in a formative condition. Then you will be much more likely to meet a lovely, gracious old lady at the proper time.2

The question remains for us as it was for Freud: Can we progress toward a higher civilization, a higher morality without exacting a greater price from the human ego than it can pay? If we understand that neurosis need not be the price for moral achievement, that human drives can be controlled without imperiling the human psyche, then, hopefully, our growing knowledge of human psychology may lead the way to a new achievement in civilization. It may lead also to the further evolution of the moral side of man, a progress which is momentarily in jeopardy because of the degree of human suffering and loss of vitality that has accompanied our limping pace from the Stone Age to the Second World War. But we are speaking of children and child-rearing here. Our aims are very modest ones. We are speaking about a single child in whom the hopes of his parents and our culture are embodied. Our knowledge of the child has expanded most hopefully in the past fifty years. We do not know and we cannot say how this knowledge will serve the moral evolution of man in the centuries to come. Our problem is to find out how a child who is to be reared in our culture today can achieve the necessary harmony between his drives and his conscience and between his ego and his society, serving the best interests of his society without succumbing to illness. But, in fact, we do not yet know all the necessary answers to such vital questions. The problems of child-rearing which we will deal with in these pages can only be dealt with on the level of our present knowledge, a psychology of the child which is large but incomplete in vital areas. If we are willing to accept the limitations of a young science and to proceed with very modest aims and expectations in applying this knowledge to child-rearing, we can justify the existence of such a book as this one. We will try to bring together some of the more important discoveries in child development and child psychology to see in what way our present knowledge can promote the mental health of children.

Have you been crying?” She glanced away. “I’m sorry. I had one of those days.” He put his thumb and forefinger on her chin and pulled her eyes back to his. “What’s up?” he asked softly. “Need to talk about it?” “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I know you don’t want to—” “It’s okay. What made you cry? Homesick? Lonesome?” She took a deep breath. “It was a year ago today. Snuck up on me, I guess.” “Ah,” he said. He put his big arms around her. “That would make some tears, I guess. I’m sorry, Marcie. I’m sure it still hurts sometimes.” “That’s just it—it doesn’t exactly hurt. It’s just that I feel so useless.” She leaned against him. “Sometimes I feel all alone. I have lots of people in my life and can still feel so alone without Bobby.” She laughed softly. “And God knows, he wasn’t much company.” He tightened his embrace. “I think I understand.” Yeah, she thought, he might. Here was a guy who was around people regularly, yet completely unconnected to them. She pulled away and asked, “Why did you do this?” “I thought I could clean up a little and take you somewhere.” “Wait. You didn’t think I needed you to do this for me, did you? Because of Erin?” He laughed, and she could actually see the emotion on his face, given the absence of wild beard. “Actually, if you’d asked me to, I probably wouldn’t have. You really think you can match me for stubborn? Probably not. I kept the beard because of the scar,” he said, leaning his left cheek toward her. “That, and maybe a bit of attitude of who cares?” She gently fingered the beard apart to reveal a barely noticeable scar. “It’s hardly there at all. Ian, it’s only a thin line. You don’t have to cover it. You’re not disfigured.” She smiled at him. “You’re handsome.” “Memories from the scar, probably. Anyway, tonight is the truckers’ Christmas parade. A bunch of eighteen-wheelers in the area dress up their rigs and parade down the freeway. I see it every year—fantastic. You think you’re up to it? With it being that anniversary?” “Maybe it’s a good idea,” she said. “Getting out, changing the mood.” “We’ll eat out and—” “What’s all this?” she asked, looking at the bags and boxes. “Snow’s forecast. It’s just what you do up here. Be ready. But this time I got some different things, in case you’re sick of stew. And I never do this—but you’re a girl, so I bought some fresh greens. And fresh eggs. Just enough to last a couple of days. No fridge; and they’ll freeze if we leave ’em in the shed.” “Ian, what about the bathroom? What will we do about the bathroom if there’s a heavy snow?” He laughed at her. “No problem. We’ll tromp out there fine—but I’ll shovel a path. And I’ll plow out to the road, but it’s slow going and if the snow keeps coming, it’s going to be even slower.” “Wow. Is it safe to leave tonight? For the parade? Will we get back in?” “We don’t have blizzards, Marcie. Snow falls slow, but steady. Now, I’m thinking bath day. How about you?” She put her hands on her hips and looked up at him with a glare. “All right, be very careful here. I’ve had my bath. And a hair wash. I’m wearing makeup, Ian. Jesus. You wanna try to clean me up?” His eyes grew large for a moment. Then he said. “Bath day for me, I meant. I knew. You look great.” His thumb ran along her cheek under one eye. “Just a couple of tear marks, but you can take care of that. Let me put this stuff away and get my water ready. You have something to read? Or are you looking for the thrill of your life?” “I have something to read,” she said. And, she thought, at the end of the day, they all turn out to be just men. *

Just as we were passing the school, Blake slid his hand down my arm and intertwined our fingers. “Rachel, why did you finally agree to go out with me?” When I looked up, I was surprised at his somber expression. I would have expected something a little more taunting. “Do you want me to answer that honestly?” “I’d appreciate it. I’ve asked you out for . . . shit. I don’t know, nine months now? No matter what I said, your answer was always no. Until last night.” “Well . . .” I looked down at the sidewalk passing beneath our feet. “You can tell me, it’s fine. You never were one to hide your feelings. And your hate for me lately has been a little more than apparent. I’m already expecting the worst.” “I don’t hate you. I just don’t exactly like you . . . anymore.” I squinted up at him and nudged his side with the arm he still had a firm grip on. He gave a little grunt with a forced smile. “Um, Candice is always bugging me for turning you down. She said she would stop if I agreed to one date with you.” I know, I know, I could have made something up that wasn’t so harsh. But I didn’t. If I hadn’t looked back down, I probably would have missed the pause in his step. “Figures.” We walked for a few more minutes before he paused and turned to me. “I’m not going to make you go out with me.” “You aren’t. I said I’d go.” He raised an eyebrow, making it disappear under his shaggy hair. “You also told me earlier today that we weren’t going anymore. I’m just letting you know I’ll stop. All of it. Asking you all the time, what I did today. And I’ll talk to Candice.” “Blake—” “No, Rach, I should have stopped a long time ago. I’m sorry you felt pressured into it last night. I want you to want to go on a date with me. I don’t want you to go just so she’ll drop it or because you want me to quit asking. Which I will.” I couldn’t tell if he looked more embarrassed or hurt. Is it ridiculous that I want to comfort him? “I want to go.” “No, you don’t.” Okay, still somewhat true. “I didn’t . . . before.” Ugh, who am I kidding. He knows I’m lying anyway. “Look, I don’t know what you want me to say. You can’t exactly blame me for not wanting to go out with you.” He looked as if I’d slapped him. I hurried on before I could chicken out on the rest. “I mean, come on, Blake, you were rumored to be screwing all these students, coworkers, and faculty. And not once did you try to shut down those rumors. Add to that, the Blake I grew up with is completely gone; now you’re usually kind of a douche. Why would I want to go out with someone like that?” “Rumors are going to spread no matter what I do. The more I try to stop them, the guiltier I look. Trust me. As for you thinking I’m a douche . . .” His voice trailed off and he ran a hand through his hair. “Try seeing it from my side. The only girl I’ve wanted for years now and can’t get out of my head no matter what I do repeatedly blows me off like I’m nothing.” Did he say years? Letting go of my hand, he turned away from me and ran a hand agitatedly through his hair. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to your dorm.” “What about drinks?” “I’m not going to make you do this, Rachel.” “Blake, why can’t you just be like this all the time? If how you were growing up, last night, and the last hour was how you always were . . . I probably wouldn’t have ever turned you down.” He huffed a sad laugh. “Yeah, well . . . obviously I’ve already fucked that up.” I watched him begin walking in the direction of the dorms and squeezed my eyes shut as I called after him, “You know, you kinda traumatized me tonight. I feel like you owe me a beer.” Peeking through my eyelashes, I saw him stop but not turn around. “And maybe dinner on Friday night?” When Blake turned to face me, his smile was wide and breathtaking.

She thrust the pink box she was holding into Mr. Rutherford’s hands before she opened up her reticule and pulled out a fistful of coins. Counting them out very precisely, she stopped counting when she reached three dollars, sixty-two cents. Handing Mr. Rutherford the coins, she then took back the pink box, completely ignoring the scowl Mr. Rutherford was now sending her. “This is not the amount of money I quoted you for the skates, Miss . . . ?” “Miss Griswold,” Permilia supplied as she opened up the box and began rummaging through the thin paper that covered her skates. Mr. Rutherford’s brows drew together. “Surely you’re not related to Mr. George Griswold, are you?” “He’s my father,” Permilia returned before she frowned and lifted out what appeared to be some type of printed form, one that had a small pencil attached to it with a maroon ribbon. “What is this?” Mr. Rutherford returned the frown, looking as if he wanted to discuss something besides the form Permilia was now waving his way, but he finally relented—although he did so with a somewhat heavy sigh. “It’s a survey, and I would be ever so grateful if you and Miss Radcliff would take a few moments to fill it out, returning it after you’re done to a member of my staff, many of whom can be found offering hot chocolate for a mere five cents at a stand we’ve erected by the side of the lake. I’m trying to determine which styles of skates my customers prefer, and after I’m armed with that information, I’ll be better prepared to stock my store next year with the best possible products.” “Far be it from me to point out the obvious, Mr. Rutherford, but one has to wonder about your audacity,” Permilia said. “It’s confounding to me that you’re so successful in business, especially since not only are you overcharging your customers for the skates today, you also expect those very customers to extend you a service by taking time out of their day to fill out a survey for you. And then, to top matters off nicely, instead of extending those customers a free cup of hot chocolate for their time and effort, you’re charging them for that as well.” “I’m a businessman, Miss Griswold—as is your father, if I need remind you. I’m sure he’d understand exactly what my strategy is here today, as well as agree with that strategy.” Permilia stuck her nose into the air. “You may very well be right, Mr. Rutherford, but . . .” She thrust the box back into his hands. “Since I’m unwilling to pay more than I’ve already given you for these skates, I’ll take my money back, if you please.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mr. Rutherford said, thrusting the box right back at Permilia. “Now, if the two of you will excuse me, I have other customers to attend to.” With that, he sent Wilhelmina a nod, scowled at Permilia, and strode through the snow back to his cash register.

I’m going to guess that in our seventeen years together, Joe and I have eaten an average of at least one meal out a week—plus at least one or two weeks a year when we are on vacation and we get to enjoy twenty-one restaurant meals. Using this rough calculation, I have heard my husband utter that exact line approximately one thousand four hundred times. If I didn’t madly love the man, or I had years of bitter resentment born of unmet needs and unheard desires festering in me, I can see where this might make me want to stick something sharp into his eye socket and twist it around a few dozen times for good measure. But I do and I don’t, respectively, so his attempted joke is actually endearing. It’s one of his things that I’d miss tragically if it went away. It would be that “Yeah, I hated it” line—not his dashing good looks or prowess with power tools or skills on the basketball court or anything else the rest of the world can plainly see—that I’d get most choked up on if I were delivering his eulogy today. There was a breakthrough, pivotal scene in the epically good movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams plays a therapist reminiscing about his dead wife with his patient (Matt Damon). “She used to fart in her sleep,” Williams tells the clueless Damon character during an otherwise unproductive therapy session. “One night it was so loud it woke the dog up . . . She’s been dead two years, and that’s the shit I remember . . . little things like that, those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about; that’s what made her my wife. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. No, that’s the good stuff.” That.

This is a very French trait. Today, if a big manufacturing company is in trouble, it will parachute in a graduate of one of France’s grandes écoles, someone who has studied business theory and maths for ten years but never actually been inside a factory. The important thing to the French is not experience, it is leadership – or, more exactly, French-style leadership, which mainly involves ignoring advice from anyone with lots of experience but no French grande école on their CV.

The only thing secretive about secret societies is the fear that the arrogant inside these groups have of sharing the little they know, because they often don't even understand their own books and struggle with little. Their real fear is that someone may come along, understand everything better and faster than they do and before they can, and then, by default, lead them to exclusion by ignorance. On the other hand, their fear blinds them from knowing more and identifying those who can take them to a higher level, the same individuals that they clame to be waiting for and that only appear every couple of hundred years or thousand. This paradox is what leads their groups to extinction by self-imposed destructive behavior or to practices that have are in complete contradiction towards what their founder or founders intended. As a matter of fact, the more this reality manifests before our eyes, the easier it is to find quotes in books written by founders of such groups in complete contradiction with what you hear everyone inside these groups speaking. What I’m really saying here is that Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Scientology, and many other groups out there, have long lost their entitlement to ownership of their own name, and as much as Christianity is today more in tune to an evil God than a benevolent one. Their real intention, even if manifested mostly at a subconscious level, is to keep away anyone that contradicts what they want to see, rather than what they should be seeing. Ironically, they are doing exactly what was done unto them by the Inquisition, the Nazis, the Egyptians, and any other group that once opposed them. They are their own enemy. And when their Jesus comes, they neglect him, ridicule him, ignore him and even conspire against him. They are the greatest shame of their own ancestors. They are the poison they fear. They are the real enemy of their own group.

FLETCHER: The truth is I don’t think people understand what it is I did at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it’s about pushing people beyond what’s expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it you’re depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker. Why did Charlie Parker become Charlie Parker, Andrew? ANDREW: Because Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him. FLETCHER: Exactly. Young kid, pretty good on the sax, goes up to play his solo in a cutting session, fucks up -- and Jones comes this close to slicing his head off for it. He’s laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night. But the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And practices and practices. With one goal in mind: that he never ever be laughed off-stage again. A year later he goes back to the Reno, and he plays the best motherfucking solo the world had ever heard. Now imagine if Jones had just patted young Charlie on the head and said “Good job.” Charlie would’ve said to himself, “Well, shit, I did do a good job,” and that’d be that. No Bird. Tragedy, right? Except that’s just what people today want. The Shaffer Conservatories of the world, they want sugar. You don’t even say “cutting session” anymore, do you? No, you say “jam session”. What the fuck kind of word is that? Jam session? It’s a cutting session, Andrew, this isn’t fucking Smucker’s. It’s about weeding out the best from the worst so that the worst become better than the best. I mean look around you. $25 drinks, mood lighting, a little shrimp cocktail to go with your Coltrane. And people wonder why jazz is dying. Take it from me, and every Starbucks jazz album only proves my point. There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than “good job”.

Avis puts aside the 'Saint-Honore' and decides to embark on a new pastry. She's assembling ingredients when the phone rings in the next room. She ignores it as she arranges her new mise en place. This recipe is constructed on a foundation of hazelnuts- roasted, then roughed in a towel to help remove skins. These are ground into a gianduja paste with shaved chocolate, which she would normally prepare in her food processor, but today she would rather smash it together by hand, using a meat tenderizer on a chopping block. She pounds away and only stops when she hears something that turns out to be Nina's voice on the answering machine: "Ven, Avis, you ignoring me? Contesta el telefono! I know you're there. Ay, you know what- you're totally impossible to work for..." Avis starts pounding again. Her assistants never last more than a year or two before something like this happens. They go stale, she thinks: everything needs to be turned over. Composted. She feels invigorated, punitive and steely as she moves through the steps of the recipe. It was from one of her mother's relatives, perhaps even Avis's grandmother- black bittersweets- a kind of cookie requiring slow melting in a double boiler, then baking, layering, and torching, hours of work simply to result in nine dark squares of chocolate and gianduja tucked within pieces of 'pate sucree.' The chocolate is a hard, intense flavor against the rich hazelnut and the wisps of sweet crust- a startling cookie. Geraldine theorized that the cookie must have been invented to give to enemies: something exquisitely delicious with a tiny yield. The irony, from Avis's professional perspective was that while one might torment enemies with too little, it also exacted an enormous labor for such a small revenge.

you don't have to have it all figured out, today or in a month or in a year. and when you do figure it out, then you can figure it out again. you can change your mind, change your passion, learn something new, let something go. there is no right age to finalize your life. there is no timeline on your happiness. life is not one puzzle to solve- it is endless pieces that fit together perfectly some days and the next. it is making mistakes and learning that it was exactly what needed to happen to find your next path.