Manhattan 1979 Quotes

including salutary effects on the following: • major depression • drug addiction • binge eating • smoking cessation • stress among cancer patients • loneliness among senior citizens • ADHD • asthma • psoriasis • irritable bowel syndrome Studies also indicated that meditation reduced levels of stress hormones, boosted the immune system, made office workers more focused, and improved test scores on the GRE. Apparently mindfulness did everything short of making you able to talk to animals and bend spoons with your mind. This research boom got its start with a Jew-Bu named Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Manhattan-raised, MIT-trained microbiologist who claimed to have had an elaborate epiphany—a “vision,” he called it—while on a retreat in 1979. The substance of the vision was that he could bring meditation to a much broader audience by stripping it of Buddhist metaphysics. Kabat-Zinn designed something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course that taught secularized meditation to tens of thousands of people around America and the world. Having a simple, replicable meditation protocol made it easy to test the effects on patients.

I was one of those people. Stepping off a bus from Manhattan into the glass and concrete terminal dressed in my TWA uniform and on my way to a faraway city. From the moment I had my wings pinned onto my dark blue jacket in 1979, to the day in 1986 when I hung my uniform up for good, being a flight attendant brought me everything that I had dreamed. By the time I had stopped flying, I had flown well over a million miles, much of it out of that terminal on 747s that took me to all those places I dreamed of visiting. But the job gave me things that I could never have imagined: the ability to talk in front of a couple hundred people and navigate the subways and streets of foreign cities with ease. It taught me to listen, to be kind and helpful and compassionate. For every honeymooning passenger I treated to a celebratory bottle of Champaign, there was another whose hand I held as the flew home after someone they loved had died. For every love story I heard, there was a tale of cruelty or a broken heart. I learned that there are misogynists in the world, sure, but that most people are pretty wonderful. I learned to laugh at human foibles and therefore to laugh at myself and to stop taking small things too seriously. We forget bride's maid dresses and Christmas presents on airplanes, we loose our passports and our wallets, we spill coffee on our white pants and red wine on our suits, but we also offer to hold a strangers crying baby or give up a seat so that newlyweds can sit together.