Nurses Make A Difference Quotes

Van Houten, I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invented anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

It is impossible to describe exactly what I learn, though I know it lies somewhere between science and art. It is all about the smallest details and understanding how they make the biggest difference.

Well, if 'exciting means drama and people dying and doctors and nurses rushing around like in the movies, then no, it wasn't. But if it means doing something that seems small now but can make a big difference in the long run, then it was.

I wanted her and I couldn’t have her, so I fed the temptation, I flooded the craving, I would’ve fucking nursed the obsession from my own tits if I could’ve. I made sure I got little doses of her here and there. Except something incredibly enlightening happens when you spend enough time in one woman’s company. You start noticing shit about her, little useless crap that actually begins to mean everything, like how she brushes the hair out her face—even if there isn’t any in her eyes—whenever she’s unsettled, or how she chews on the end of a pen during class whenever she’s listening to something that captures her attention. You learn all her different laughs and know what each one means. You learn what pisses her off the most, or what makes her the happiest. You discover how smart and witty and sarcastic she is, and that her mind is almost as dirty as yours. You see how passionate she becomes when she defends those she loves, and you start to fall. Hard. So, this is my Pathetic Loser’s confession: I am Oren Tenning, and I have fallen. Hard.

Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out." "Yes, sir," Andrews said. "Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you--that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old." "No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is." "You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet....look. You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing. You kill three, four thousand buffalo, and stack their skins neat; and the buffalo will rot wherever you left them, and the rats will nest in the skins. What have you got to show? A year gone out of your life, a busted wagon that a beaver might use to make a dam with, some calluses on your hands, and the memory of a dead man." "No," Andrew said. "That's not all. That's not all I have." "Then what? What have you got?" Andrews was silent. "You can't answer. Look at Miller. Knows the country he was in as well as any man alive, and had faith in what he believed was true. What good did it do him? And Charley Hoge with his Bible and his whisky. Did that make your winter any easier, or save your hides? And Schneider. What about Schneider? Was that his name? "That was his name," Andrews said. "And that's all that's left of him," McDonald said. "His name. And he didn't even come out of it with that for himself." McDonald nodded, not looking at Andrews. "Sure, I know. I came out of it with nothing, too. Because I forgot what I learned a long time ago. I let the lies come back. I had a dream, too, and because it was different from yours and Miller's, I let myself think it wasn't a dream. But now I know, boy. And you don't. And that makes all the difference.

One rule on the handout was that parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M., parents should reswaddle, pat, rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that. An additional instruction was that, from the child’s birth, the mothers should distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a noisy baby, the mother should pause to make sure he’s awake.

We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all. But because of advances in medical science, the majority of Americans will spend the later years of their life actively dying. The fastest-growing segment of the US population is over eighty-five, what I would call the aggressively elderly. If you reach eighty-five, not only is there a strong chance you are living with some form of dementia or terminal disease, but statistics show that you have a 50-50 chance of ending up in a nursing home, raising the question of whether a good life is measured in quality or quantity. This slow decline differs sharply from times past, when people tended to die quickly, often in a single day. Postmortem daguerreotypes from the 1800s picture fresh, young, almost lifelike corpses, many of them victims of scarlet fever or diphtheria. In 1899, a mere 4 percent of the US population was over sixty-five—forget making it to eighty-five. Now, many will know that death is coming during months or years of deterioration. Medicine has given us the “opportunity”—loosely defined—to sit at our own wakes.

Using your wealth to purchase other people’s loyalty is a game as old as humanity itself. Rich men use their wealth to attract women, unscrupulous employers use material incentives and disincentives to manipulate their workers, and wealthy countries like the USA use their national wealth to keep their citizens loyal to the cause of aggressive and genocidal Imperialism. But historical longevity and common practice don’t make the manipulation or exploitation morally or ethically right. Organized religions are inherently POLITICAL organizations. There is a fundamental difference between the financial enterprise and political machinations of an organized religion versus a mass of independent unaffiliated believers, philosophers, and mystics who do not support any organized religion. Christianity and Islam are known as proselytizing religions because they make an organized and systemic effort to gain converts, and they often provide services, products, or employment to attract converts. Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism show far less zeal about gaining converts, which is why you almost never hear about Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist missionaries. Modern medical and nursing schools usually teach their students the moral principle that the provision of medical services should never be used as a means to proselytize or promote a religion, but that does not deter many Christian health care providers from doing exactly that. Most of the medical and charitable organizations based in Christian countries are fronts for Christian proselytizing activities.

Your dreams can change the environment which was not conducive for it at first! However it is a good initiative for the dreams that would change one society to be nursed in another environment, before being transplanted to strive in its original environment for the change process to begin!

Psychologists often make a distinction between mistakes where we already know the right answer and mistakes where we don’t. A medication error, for example, is a mistake of the former kind: the nurse knew she should have administered Medicine A but inadvertently administered Medicine B, perhaps because of confusing labeling combined with pressure of time. But sometimes mistakes are consciously made as part of a process of discovery. Drug companies test lots of different combinations of chemicals to see which have efficacy and which don’t. Nobody knows in advance which will work and which won’t, but this is precisely why they test extensively, and fail often. It is integral to progress.

When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all. Afterward comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological-- vertigo in a shelving canyon -- but it's not like that; it's just misery as regular as a job. What do we doctors say? I'm deeply sorry, Mrs Blank; there will of course be a period of mourning but rest assured you will come out of it; two of these each evening, I would suggest; perhaps a new interst, Mrs Blank; can maintenance, formation dancing?; don't worry, six months will see you back on the roundabout; come and see me again any time; oh nurse, when she calls, just give her this repeat will you, no I don't need to see her, well it's not her that's dead is it, look on the bright side. What did she say her name was? And then it happens to you. There's no glory in it. Mourning is full of time; nothing but time.... you should eat stuffed sow's heart. I might yet have to fall back on this remedy. I've tried drink, but what does that do? Drink makes you drunk, that's all it's ever been able to do. Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn't; often, it doesn't even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands. Other people think you want to talk. 'Do you want to talk about Ellen?' they ask, hinting that they won't be embarrassed if you break down. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don't; it makes little difference. The word aren't the right ones; or rather, the right words don't exist. 'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other people's griefs. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the syllables. And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But your don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that's only the grammar of virtue. It's not there that the sap is. He doesn't make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

So self-centeredly Human, the assumption that everything that's other must be shrouded in the supernatural and the arcane. They nurse their myths and legends, in which Vampyres and Weres are creatures of magic and lore, capable of curses and mystical acts. They think us able to see the future, to fly, to make ourselves invisible. Because we're different from them, our existence must be governed by otherworldly forces - and not simply, like theirs, by biology.

Granny has had nine different nurses since she was admitted. Seven of these she refused to cooperate with, and two refused to cooperate with her, one of them because Granny said he had a “nice ass.” Granny insists it was a compliment to his ass, not to him, and he shouldn’t make such a fuss about it. Then Mum told Elsa to put on her headphones, but Elsa still heard their argument about the difference between “sexual harassment” and “basic appreciation of a perfectly splendid ass.

It took me many more years of prospective follow-up, and many more years of emotional growth, to learn to take love seriously. What it looks like—God, a nurse, a child, a good Samaritan, or any of its other guises—is different for everybody. But love is love. At age seventy-five, Camille took the opportunity to describe in greater detail how love had healed him. This time he needed no recourse to Freud or Jesus. Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one. My professional life hasn’t been disappointing—far from it—but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I’ve slowly become: comfortable, joyful, connected and effective. Since it wasn’t widely available then, I hadn’t read that children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, which tells how connectedness is something we must let happen to us, and then we become solid and whole. As that tale recounts tenderly, only love can make us real. Denied this in boyhood for reasons I now understand, it took me years to tap substitute sources. What seems marvelous is how many there are and how restorative they prove. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric. . . . I never dreamed my later years would be so stimulating and rewarding. That convalescent year, transformative though it was, was not the end of Camille’s story. Once he grasped what had happened, he seized the ball and ran with it, straight into a developmental explosion that went on for thirty years. A

Along the way, I learned the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, which means 'the healing of the world' and is accomplished through presence in the midst of pain. It can be summarized in the phrase "I'm here with you and I love you" and is accomplished through simple acts of presence. It became a rallying cry for me in my work as a funeral director. Rachel Naomi Remen, in an interview with Krista Tippett, describes it as 'a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world...It's not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It's about the world that touches you.' Presence and proximity before performance. As I took that to heart, I started to see small, everyday examples of tikkun olam everywhere. When a mother comforts a child, she's healing the world. Every time someone listens to another - deeply listens - she's healing the world. A nurse who bathes the weakened body of an elderly patient is healing the world. The teacher who invests herself in her students is healing the world. The plumber who makes the inner workings of a house run smoothly is healing the world. A funeral director who finds that he can heal the world even at his family's business. When we practice presence and proximity, we may not change anyone, we may not shift culture or move mountains, but it's a healing act, if for none other than ourselves. When we do our work with kindness - no matter what kind of work - if we're doing it with presence, we're practicing tikkun olam.

What do you think is sexy?” said Nona, in her normal voice. Pyrrha seemed pleased to think about something different, and waited until the bubbles were getting really big before she took the spatula and slid it under a rising patty, flipping it over. Nona had come up by her elbow to watch. “Do you want to know what I really think is sexy, or what I’d tell someone if they asked and I wanted to impress them?” Nona was pleased Pyrrha understood. “The first one.” “Landmine people,” said Pyrrha, and when she saw Nona’s brows cross in confusion, she said: “Some people were put into the universe to rig it to explode, then walk away… I always fell for that.” Nona thought she got it, but was unsure on a few points. “But you can’t really tell that about someone when you first look at them.” “Oh, you can,” said Pyrrha. “You haven’t looked for it.” She flipped over another pikelet, looked grave and intelligent for a moment, and then said: “I mean, also redheads. Love a redhead.” Apart from Pyrrha, whose hair was a very deep dark russet, Honesty was the only redhead that Nona knew, and Honesty had big, pallid blue eyes that he could make float in different direction, when one wasn’t smushed. He also had skin like a horrible ghost’s. You could see all the veins in his eyelids. Nona said, “Okay. I don’t think redheads are sexy.” “What? Hang on,” said Camilla, opening the door—no, Palamedes, opening the door, busy buttoning himself into Camilla’s jacket—“That’s a very interesting thing you just said, Nona. Let me write that down. Is that pikelets Pyrrha? You’re a legend.” Nona wondered how Palamedes couldn’t see the hitch in Pyrrha’s shoulder, nor all the crinkles in her posture or her clothes that screamed PARK…PARK…PARK…, but took her moment. “Palamedes, what do you think is sexy?” “Those little outfits nurses wear,” said Palamedes promptly. So Camilla had been lying, after all.

Anyway, there is an essential difference in gender that isn't politically correct to mention these days. Women are the ones to bear the children after all. They are the ones to nurse. They are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time.' He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd... 'Did you just say that women aren't creative geniuses because they have babies?' 'No," he said, 'No. Not because. I wouldn't say that. I love women, and not all women have babies. My wife, for one, at least not yet. But listen, we're all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we;re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman continues to spend hers creating actual life and not imaginary life, that's a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she's creating so much more than just a world on the page, she's creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it's so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today, and no one could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human wife. I mean the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it's because they're making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself. It's a kind of bodily genius. You can't tell me that isn't at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men, better in many ways. But the reason for the disparity in creation, is because women have turned their creative energies inward not outward.

was no one else there to comfort her. There was only him. The real him. She stepped forward and laid her head against his chest. Samantha: I’ll never forget the moment when Perry and Celeste walked into the trivia night. There was like this ripple across the room. Everyone just stopped and stared. 23. Isn’t this FANTASTIC!” cried Madeline to Chloe as they took their really very excellent seats in front of the giant ice rink. “You can feel the cold from the ice! Brrr! Oh! Can you hear the music? I wonder where the princesses—” Chloe had reached over and placed one hand gently over her mother’s mouth. “Shhh.” Madeline knew she was talking too much because she was feeling anxious and ever so slightly guilty. Today needed to be stupendous to make it worth the rift she’d created between herself and Renata. Eight kindergarten children, who would otherwise be attending Amabella’s party, were here watching Disney On Ice because of Madeline. Madeline looked past Chloe at Ziggy, who was nursing a giant stuffed toy on his lap. Ziggy was the reason they were here today, she reminded herself. Poor Ziggy wouldn’t have been at the party. Dear little fatherless Ziggy. Who was possibly a secret psychopathic bully . . . but still! “Are you taking care of Harry the Hippo this weekend, Ziggy?” she said brightly. Harry the Hippo was the class toy. Every weekend it went home with a different child, along with a scrapbook that had to be returned with a little story about the weekend, accompanied by photos. Ziggy nodded mutely. A child of few words. Jane leaned forward, discreetly chewing gum as always. “It’s quite stressful having Harry to stay. We have to give Harry a good time. Last weekend he went on a roller coaster— Ow!” Jane recoiled as one of the twins, who was sitting next to her and fighting his brother, elbowed her in the back of the head. “Josh!” said Celeste sharply. “Max! Just stop it!” Madeline wondered if Celeste was OK today. She looked pale and tired, with purplish shadows under her eyes, although on Celeste they looked like an artful makeup effect that everyone should try. The lights in the auditorium began to dim, and then went to black. Chloe clutched Madeline’s arm. The music began to pound, so loud that Madeline could feel the vibrations. The ice rink filled with an

Physician, professor, and author Atul Gawande tells of a doctor working at a nursing home who persuaded its administrator to bring in dogs, cats, parakeets, a colony of rabbits, and even a group of laying hens to be cared for by the residents. The results were significant. “The residents began to wake up and come to life. People who we had believed weren’t able to speak started speaking. … People who had been completely withdrawn and nonambulatory started coming to nurses’ station and saying, ‘I’ll take the dog for a walk.’ All the parakeets were adopted and named by the residents.”5 The use and need for psychotropic drugs for agitation dropped significantly, to 38 percent of the previous level. And “deaths fell 15 percent.” Why? The architect of these changes concluded, “I believe that the difference in death rates can be traced to the fundamental human need for a reason to live.”6 Gawande goes on to ask “why simply existing—why being merely housed and fed and safe and alive—seems empty and meaningless to us. What more is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile? The answer … is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.

Vague assertions as to the equality of the sexes and the similarity of their duties are only empty words; they are no answer to my argument. It is a poor sort of logic to quote isolated exceptions against laws so firmly established. Women, you say, are not always bearing children. Granted; yet that is their proper business. Because there are a hundred or so of large towns in the world where women live licentiously and have few children, will you maintain that it is their business to have few children? And what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? There are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, what difference does it make? Is it any the less a woman's business to be a mother? And do not the general laws of nature and morality make provision for this state of things? Even if there were these long intervals, which you assume, between the periods of pregnancy, can a woman suddenly change her way of life without danger? Can she be a nursing mother to-day and a soldier tomorrow? Will she change her tastes and her feelings as a chameleon changes his color? Will she pass at once from the privacy of household duties and indoor occupations to the buffeting of the winds, the toils, the labors, the perils of war? Will she be now timid, now brave, now fragile, now robust? If the young men of Paris find a soldier's life too hard for them, how would a woman put up with it, a woman who has hardly ventured out of doors without a parasol and who has scarcely put a foot to the ground? Will she make a good soldier at an age when even men are retiring from this arduous business? There are countries, I grant you, where women bear and rear children with little or no difficulty, but in those lands the men go half-naked in all weathers, they strike down the wild beasts, they carry a canoe as easily as a knapsack, they pursue the chase for 700 or 800 leagues, they sleep in the open on the bare ground, they bear incredible fatigues and go many days without food. When women become strong, men become still stronger; when men become soft, women become softer; change both the terms and the ratio remains unaltered.

Reason No. 1. Overcoming the fear of losing money. I have never met anyone who really likes losing money. And in all my years, I have never met a rich person who has never lost money. But I have met a lot of poor people who have never lost a dime. . .investing, that is. The fear of losing money is real. Everyone has it. Even the rich. But it's not fear that is the problem. It's how you handle fear. It's how you handle losing. It's how you handle failure that makes the difference in one's life. That goes for anything in life, not just money. The primary difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they handle that fear. It's OK to be fearful. It's OK to be a coward when it comes to money. You can still be rich. We're all heroes at something and cowards at something else. My friend's wife is an emergency room nurse. When ; she sees blood, she flies into action. When I mention investing, she runs'j away. When I see blood, I don't run. I pass out. My rich dad understood phobias about money. "Some people are terrified of snakes. Some people are terrified about losing money. Both are phobias," he would say. So his solution to the phobia of losing money was this little rhyme: "If you hate risk and worry. . .start early.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.

She said I was crazy. She said I did not understand the stress of being a twenty-four-hour nurse. She said I should be more understanding and help her more. I really tried, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. After that, we just grew further apart. After a while, there was no love left, just deadness. Both of us agreed that the marriage was over.

Why is this? How can experience be so valuable in some professions but almost worthless in others? To see why, suppose that you are playing golf. You are out on the driving range, hitting balls toward a target. You are concentrating, and every time you fire the ball wide you adjust your technique in order to get it closer to where you want it to go. This is how practice happens in sport. It is a process of trial and error. But now suppose that instead of practicing in daylight, you practice at night—in the pitch-black. In these circumstances, you could practice for ten years or ten thousand years without improving at all. How could you progress if you don’t have a clue where the ball has landed? With each shot, it could have gone long, short, left, or right. Every shot has been swallowed by the night. You wouldn’t have any data to improve your accuracy. This metaphor solves the apparent mystery of expertise. Think about being a chess player. When you make a poor move, you are instantly punished by your opponent. Think of being a clinical nurse. When you make a mistaken diagnosis, you are rapidly alerted by the condition of the patient (and by later testing). The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgments. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice. For psychotherapists things are radically different. Their job is to improve the mental functioning of their patients. But how can they tell when their interventions are going wrong or, for that matter, right? Where is the feedback? Most psychotherapists gauge how their clients are responding to treatment not with objective data, but by observing them in clinic. But these data are highly unreliable. After all, patients might be inclined to exaggerate how well they are to please the therapist, a well-known issue in psychotherapy. But there is a deeper problem. Psychotherapists rarely track their clients after therapy has finished. This means that they do not get any feedback on the lasting impact of their interventions. They have no idea if their methods are working or failing—if the client’s long-term mental functioning is actually improving. And that is why the clinical judgments of many practitioners don’t improve over time. They are effectively playing golf in the dark.11

Whether it be brand marketers trumpeting the new BMW X5, game developers getting players to spend real money on virtual goods, or someone selling an online nursing degree, the only difference is the time frame in which those different goals occur—in other words, the time between attention and action. If the time frame is very short, like browsing for and buying a shirt at nordstroms.com, it’s called “direct response,” or “DR” advertising. If the time frame is very long, such as making you believe life is unlivable outside the pricey mantle of a Burberry coat, it’s called “brand advertising.” Note that the goal is the same in both: to make you buy shit you likely don’t need with money you likely don’t have. In the former case, the trail is easily trackable, as the “conversion” usually happens online, usually after clicking on the very ad you were served.* In the latter, the media employed is a multipronged strategy of Super Bowl ads, Internet advertising, postal mail, free keychains, and God knows what else. Also, the conversion happens way after the initial exposure to the media, and often offline and in a physical space, like at a car dealership. The tracking and attribution are much harder, due to both the manifold media used and the months or years gone by between the exposure and the sale. As such, brand advertising budgets, which are far larger than direct-response ones, are spent in embarrassingly large broadsides, barely targeted or tracked in any way. Now you know all there is to know about advertising. The rest is technical detail and self-promoting bullshit spun by agencies. You’re officially as informed as the media tycoons who run the handful of agencies that manage our media world.

Most people think they know pain. Everyone's done something: broken a limb, been stung by a wasp, recovered from an operation or rammed a baby through their birth canal. But chronic pain is different. It isn't just pain that lingers; it's pain that dominates. It swaddles you in its gloom and slips blinkers on you until everything you see, and everything you experience, is filtered through that pea soup of pain. The vast majority of chronic pain conditions are not only incurable but also untreatable. They don't respond to drugs, and science hasn't -- yet -- located a central fuse box to repair. So people with chronic pain not only live with pain; they're told that this is it until death they do part. It is a diagnosis that dehumanises your body as much as it eviscerates your spirit. And it's made worse because, if there's no obvious physical explanation for it -- as is the case with most types of chronic pain (diseases like arthritis aside) -- people think, consciously or not, that you're making it up. Three GPs, eight consultants, three physiotherapists, one nurse and two psychologists had tried to rout my pain in the first year of its existence. All had failed, though each had laid their failure at my door, not theirs. There's no physical reason for it, they said; or there's kind of a physical reason but not enough of a physical reason to correspond to your level of pain. Maybe, some of them ventured, possibly, do you think... could it be in your head?

For those who feel alienated from their sex, who feel like they can’t get warm in their bodies, no matter how many layers they put on, Jesus offers hope. Not the hope of a differently sexed body, but the hope of a new reality that no longer feels like labor pains. The transgender person I met after my talk in England thanked me for treating these questions with tenderness. But Jesus’s tenderness utterly surpasses ours. It’s the tenderness of the God who likens his love to that of a nursing mother (Isa. 49:15). We can trust our fragile bodies to this God, however out of joint with them we feel, because he loves us with an everlasting love. One day he will wipe away every tear from our eyes and make our groaning bodies new.

I was on my own to cover the hundreds of patients there, some of the sickest of the sick. It was on one of those nights that, staggering through a sleep-deprived haze, I got the call. Up until then, all the deaths I had seen were those in which the patient was either dead on arrival or had died during cardiac “codes,” when we try desperately, and nearly always unsuccessfully, to resuscitate. This man was different. He was wide-eyed, gasping for air, his cuffed hands clawing at the bed. The cancer was filling up his lungs with fluid. He was being drowned by lung cancer. While he thrashed desperately, pleading, my mind was in medical mode, all protocols and procedures, but nothing much could be done. The man needed morphine, but that was held on the other side of the ward, and I’d never get to it in time, let alone back to him. I was not popular on the prison floor. I had once reported a guard for beating a sick inmate and was rewarded with death threats. There was no way they’d let me through the gates fast enough. I begged the nurse to try to get some, but she didn’t make it back in time. The man’s coughing turned to gurgling. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I said. Immediately, I thought, What a stupid thing to say to someone choking to death. Just another lie in probably a long line of condescension from other authority figures throughout his life. Helpless, I turned from doctor back to human being. I took his hand in my own, which he then gripped with all his might, tugging me toward his tear-streaked, panic-stricken face. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m right here.” Our gaze remained locked as he suffocated right in front of me. It felt like watching someone being tortured to death. Take a deep breath. Now imagine what it would feel like not to be able to breathe. We all need to take care of our lungs.

I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school. Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.

I worked in a nursing home long enough to notice something extremely devastating. Residents will rot in their rooms, barely any visitors, their mental disintegrating, dealing with different staff member personalities every day, their bodies ache from age, but the moment those people die, their funerals are packed with people. Why do we not treat each other properly while we are alive? People will fight against abortion, glorify someone when they die, never mentioning their flaws. But will spend the short amount of time they have in life, arguing with each other about EVERYTHING, it doesn't make sense to me!

I’m Jay Powers, the circulating nurse”; “I’m Zhi Xiong, the anesthesiologist”—that sort of thing. It felt kind of hokey to me, and I wondered how much difference this step could really make. But it turned out to have been carefully devised. There have been psychology studies in various fields backing up what should have been self-evident—people who don’t know one another’s names don’t work together nearly as well as those who do. And Brian Sexton, the Johns Hopkins psychologist, had done studies showing the same in operating rooms. In one, he and his research team buttonholed surgical staff members outside their operating rooms and asked them two questions: how would they rate the level of communications during the operation they had just finished and what were the names of the other staff members on the team? The researchers learned that about half the time the staff did not know one another’s names. When they did, however, the communications ratings jumped significantly. The investigators at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had also observed that when nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of a case, they were more likely to note problems and offer solutions. The researchers called it an “activation phenomenon.” Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up. These were limited studies and hardly definitive. But the initial results were enticing. Nothing had ever been shown to improve the ability of surgeons to broadly reduce harm to patients aside from experience and specialized training. Yet here, in three separate cities, teams had tried out these unusual checklists, and each had found a positive effect. At Johns Hopkins, researchers specifically measured their checklist’s effect on teamwork. Eleven surgeons had agreed to try it in their cases—seven general surgeons, two plastic surgeons, and two neurosurgeons. After three months, the number of team members in their operations reporting that they “functioned as a well-coordinated team” leapt from 68 percent to 92 percent. At the Kaiser hospitals in Southern California, researchers had tested their checklist for six months in thirty-five hundred operations. During that time, they found that their staff’s average rating of the teamwork climate improved from “good” to “outstanding.” Employee satisfaction rose 19 percent. The rate of OR nurse turnover—the proportion leaving their jobs each year—dropped from 23 percent to 7 percent. And the checklist appeared to have caught numerous near errors. In

When the problems of the world seem too huge to handle, I think of the classic starfish story: an old man sees a young boy throwing starfish back into the sea from a beach where tens of thousands of them lie. The man looks at the boy and tells him he won’t be able to make a difference. The boy picks up another starfish, looks at the man and throws it back into the ocean. ‘It sure made a difference to that one,’ he says.

It was impossible for me not to notice that the women's movement in Norway during the 1960s and 1970s took a different, more inclusive course from that taken in the United States during the same period. The main goals of feminist leaders here focused on making it possible (and safer) for women to choose not to be mothers, expanding women's access to higher education and jobs and professions that had previously been closed to them, giving women the means to combat sexual harassment and domestic violence, and creating access to political office. Norway's feminists worked on all of these issues but on another vitally important area as well: They demanded legislation that would significantly benefit Norwegian mothers and babies. Paid maternity leave, onsite nursery care in the workplace, flexible schedules for working women, and parental benefits were all part of the legislative advances made in Norway during the 1960s and 1970s. Architects followed suit by designing shopping malls, airports, and other public areas with comfortable, attractive places for nursing women and their children to use.

After we were back to the sitting-room a number of women were ordered to make the beds, and some of the patients were put to scrubbing and others given different duties which covered all the work in the hall. It is not the attendants who keep the institution so nice for the poor patients, as I had always thought, but the patients, who do it all themselves--even to cleaning the nurses' bedrooms and caring for their clothing.

All involve risk, uncertainty, and complexity — and therefore steps that are worth committing to a checklist and testing in routine care. Good checklists could become as important as doctors and nurses as good stethoscopes (which, unlike checklist, have never been proved to make a difference in patient care). The hard question — still unanswered — is whether medical culture can seize the opportunity.

In the blink of an eye, Barbara had turned ninety-five. Taking her final breath in the Ottowan Nursing Home in Goodsprings, Nevada, she couldn’t believe her life would end like this. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She had had so many plans growing up. Where did it all go wrong? Looking back, she realized it was all Roger’s fault. Roger, that bastard. Her mother had told her once that she could be anything she wanted, as long as she set her mind to it. Barbara had wanted to be a nurse. She enjoyed helping people, and even as a young girl, felt that she could make a difference in people’s lives. After finishing high school in 1915, she had enrolled at the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, only a short distance from where she had grown up, a little town called Fort Howard, Maryland. That had been before The Great War.

We spent twenty days and endured three thousand miles of jolting, pounding, off-road bush driving. But we had a hard-won sense of accomplishment when we pulled up on the stunning cliff-side view of the Great Australian Bight, a huge open bay carved out of the southern coastline. We had made it. Below us, three hundred feet down a sheer rock face, was the Southern Ocean. A pod of southern right whales passed by, their calves following along with them. Steve and I and the crew watched the family dramas of the whales play out below us. A calf felt naughty and went darting away from his mother’s side. Come back, the mother called, come back, come back, you naughty little whale. When she was under the water, we couldn’t hear anything, but as she surfaced we could actually hear the whale song from our perch three hundred feet in the air. Mama scolded the calf, and we saw the young whale come dutifully shooting back over to follow his mother for a while. Sometimes the calf would approach his mama for a drink of milk and nurse for a few minutes. Then he would escape once more, and the whole scenario played itself out all over again. We watched the whales for hours. That night around the campfire, we discussed whaling, how sad and cruel and horrible it was. “If we killed cows the way we killed whales, people wouldn’t stand for it,” Steve said. “Imagine if you drove a truck with a torpedo gun off the back. When you saw a cow you fired at it, and then you either electrocuted it over the course of half an hour or the head of the torpedo blew up inside of it, rendering it unable to walk or move until it finally bled to death.” “We’ve got to get that message out,” I said to Steve. But his idea was to bring the beauty and joy of the whales to people, so that they would naturally fall in love with them and not want to hurt them. He didn’t want to dwell on images that would make people sad and upset. Steve remained thoughtful and silent as the fire died. The ocean sounded against the cliffs below. The games of the whale families played over and over in our minds. In spite of our extensive searching, we never saw a live dingo down the whole line of our journey. It was time to try a different approach. The next morning the helicopter pilot arrived early. Going up with him, Steve actually finally spotted some dingoes from the air. The beautiful, ginger-colored dogs played along the fence, jumping over it or skirting under it with effortless ease.

Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted teacake, and the nurses will say "Poor Mrs. Frazer, that's the end," and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It's not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady.

You need to have a diploma from nursing school and be certified as a registered nurse.             Ideally, you should have at least two to three years of clinical experience as an outpatient nurse or as an emergency room nurse.             You should be certified in Basic Life Support and Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS). Some cruise lines request Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) certification as well.             You may need to have experience in dealing with laboratory procedures and basic x-ray procedures as there is not likely to be a lab tech or x-ray tech on duty.             You should have a background in general medicine and/or emergency medicine.             You should have past experience caring for patients in a trauma, cardiac care, emergency care, or internal medicine practice.             Because cruise liners travel to often to foreign lands and have people of all different cultures on board, you may need to have knowledge of other languages besides English.   As

Early July 2012 In one of Andy’s responses, my ex-lover wrote, Young, That sounds great! I look forward to co-writing the fourth book of A Harem Boy Saga with you. This will provide us time to map out the outline of our joint project during the course of our correspondence. As much as I’d love to work with you on this project, I want to be sure that Walter is okay with us going into this venture together. I have no desire to upset your loving relationship and certainly have no wish to be an unwelcome intruder into your lives. Let me know if he agrees. When I was in hospital recovering from my nervous breakdown, I met Jack, a 24-year-old nursing student. He cared for me during my recovery. We dated for several months before his transfer to a hospice in a different city. I did not have the courage to tell Toby that Jack and I were dating. I was afraid Toby would threaten suicide again, until the fateful evening when he discovered Jack and me making out in my flat. My caregiver and I had proceeded to my lodgings after a scrumptious dinner one evening. After several glasses of wine while watching television, Jack leaned his head against my shoulder. His dreamy, doe-like eyes looked adoringly at me, reminding me of your beautiful Asian eyes staring at me during our intimate moments together. Our kisses soon led to lingering sensual foreplay. Before long, our clothes were scattered all over. Jack went on his knees, eagerly caressing my growing hardness and wrapping his luscious lips around me under my briefs. Easing down my underwear, he went to work. His sweetness stirred my longing for you. Closing my eyes to savor his warm fallation, I reclined against the comfortable sofa and enjoyed the pleasurable sensation showered upon my erection. He engulfed my pulsating manhood, suckling away as if to satisfy his hunger. It was similar to the way you used to relish my hardness for hours on end. Like you, he pleasured me with deep, devotional worship; I was overwhelmed by his sexual imperativeness, wanting his warmth to wash over my entirety. His expert titillation did wonders for my soul, causing me to spasm involuntarily. He devoured my length as if deprived of nourishment while I nurtured my feed into Jack’s bobbing head, pressing him against my quivering palpitations.

James’s general position on the difference between the sexes, which was that woman is “by nature inferior to man. She is man’s inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength”; she is, very properly, her husband’s “patient and unrepining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass, his cook, his tailor, his own cheerful nurse and the sleepless guardian of his children.” But their inferiority, James thought, is precisely what makes women attractive to men, so that any “great development of passion or intellect in woman is sure to prejudice” male attention. “Would any man fancy a woman after the pattern of Daniel Webster?”33 He consequently opposed serious education for women, a doctrine that had disastrous consequences in the case of his youngest child and only daughter, Alice.

February 2 Donna Made a Difference Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.—1 Corinthians 10:31b Donna’s big brown eyes and sweet smile were like magnets drawing people to her. Her face had a glow that just can’t be described. Donna and I became good friends after meeting each other in a Bible study several years ago. My dear friend battled cancer for four years. She lost her battle, one day past her fifty-second birthday. Donna lived to glorify God. She always put God and others first in her life. Donna never complained about her years of suffering. When I telephoned her to see how she was doing, she always blessed me more than I blessed her. Donna never missed an opportunity to tell others the good news of Jesus Christ. Because her face glowed with God’s love, people listened to her. She shared the good news of Jesus to waitresses, to physicians, to nurses, to hospital employees. Instead of being consumed with her sad situation, she was concerned about others knowing how to have eternal life. Many people will be in heaven because Donna made a difference. I want to be more like Donna—patient, kind, uplifting, and always ready to tell someone about Jesus Christ. She was his faithful servant. She studied the Word, she claimed the Word, she lived the Word, and she shared the Word. Christians have the responsibility of representing Christ in all we do. We all need to be more like Donna. She did everything in the name of her Lord Jesus. She lived as Christ’s ambassador while on this earth. Today’s Scripture tells us that we should do everything for the glory of God. Glorifying God means that we give honor and praise to God. It means that we recognize His power and His importance. A good question that we might ask ourselves as a guiding principle is this: Will these words or this action bring glory to God? Do you make a difference?

Okay, then, how does Zev not having sex with me make sense? You just said you’ve been sleeping with Lori since high school. You went to nursing school out of state, so clearly that didn’t stop you.” “That’s different, Jonah. My relationship with Lori isn’t like your relationship with Zev.” Jonah wasn’t surprised, he was just tired. Of course Toby would see the relationships as different. Two men couldn’t possibly feel about each other the way a man feels about a woman. Apparently having a gay uncle couldn’t change that type of thinking. “Right. Because we’re gay. Our relationship can’t be as meaningful as yours,” he responded sarcastically. “No,” Toby replied, looking straight into Jonah’s eyes with a somber expression. “What you have with Zev is much deeper.” Jonah’s mouth dropped open, and he stared at Toby. As long as Jonah had known the other man, he’d had a thing for Lori, and, as far as Jonah knew, they were very happy together. “Last night when we came to your place, Zev flipped out. Did you know that?” Toby said. Jonah shook his head. He’d been sitting in his bedroom and hadn’t heard a thing. “Well, he did. He lost it and ran outside. I followed him and caught up to him in the alley. He’d punched a hole in the side of your apartment building and he was kneeling on the ground, vomiting and crying.” Jonah’s heart broke. So that was how Zev had acquired those injured knuckles. He didn’t want to hear any more. “I didn’t know what the hell was wrong,” Toby continued. “I couldn’t get him to come inside and I didn’t want to leave him out there alone. Once his stomach was empty, he just kept dry heaving and shaking. Eventually Lori came out and told me what’d been going on before we got there.” Toby glared at Jonah. “I wanted to go upstairs and kick your ass myself when I heard there’d been another man in your bedroom. You wanna know what stopped me?” Jonah couldn’t bring himself to respond. He was still thinking about Zev crying on the street. The man was always so strong, so steady and confident. He’d never seen Zev cry, and the knowledge that he’d caused that level of pain made Jonah feel sick. “I knew that if I so much as looked at you crosswise, Zev would’ve crippled me. No matter what you’d done to him.

For decades, doctors and nurses trained in Western medicine had been dismissive of whole categories of diagnoses that predominated among the Indigenous population. Villagers would often visit healers and shamans who treated ailments such as mal de ojo (evil eye), pérdida del alma (loss of the soul), and el susto (the fright). Some of these afflictions dated to pre-Columbian times and went by a range of different names. El susto, the anthropologist Linda Green wrote, was “understood by its victims to be the loss of the essential life force as a result of fright.” In more conventional terms, its symptoms included depression, lethargy, insomnia, nightmares, diarrhea, and vomiting. To anyone mindful of La Violencia of the war years, the connection to post-traumatic stress was unavoidable. These conditions were, as Green put it, “social memory embodied.

For decades, doctors and nurses trained in Western medicine had been dismissive of whole categories of diagnoses that predominated among the Indigenous population. Villagers would often visit healers and shamans who treated ailments such as mal de ojo (evil eye), pérdida del alma (loss of the soul), and el susto (the fright). Some of these afflictions dated to pre-Columbian times and went by a range of different names. El susto, the anthropologist Linda Green wrote, was “understood by its victims to be the loss of the essential life force as a result of fright.” In more conventional terms, its symptoms included depression, lethargy, insomnia, nightmares, diarrhea, and vomiting. To anyone mindful of La Violencia of the war years, the connection to post-traumatic stress was unavoidable. These conditions were, as Green put it, “social memory embodied.” In the summer of 2016, the Health Ministry announced that it would open clinics and hire personnel to treat seven different types of “ancestral maladies” that were contributing to high mortality rates in the countryside. “Independently of whether you believe it or don’t believe in this, we have seen that it’s necessary to be vigilant,” Lucrecia told one newspaper.

This is your life and you're so deep in it that you can't unmake it, you can't unbirth your baby because she wishes to be alive, you can't remake your career, there's no way you'll be a professional dancer anymore or join the philharmonic, don't even fantasize about one day becoming that avant-garde independent filmmaker because you're here, feeling like you did when your mother died but now wondering who around you thinks it's of importance to know how difficult it is to nurse? Or how often you are covered— down to your elbows-in feces when changing diapers? What difference does it make if anyone knows the quantity of laundry that is created between these four walls? Or the hanging of the laundry, the folding of the laundry. Who wants to recognize the repetition? Who cares about what domesticity is made of? The very thing that brought us into this world and its conditions are spat upon.

Career Choice is a program where we prepay 95 percent of tuition for our employees to take courses for in-demand fields, such as airplane mechanic or nursing, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. The goal is to enable choice. We know that for some of our fulfillment center employees, Amazon will be a career. For others, Amazon might be a stepping-stone on the way to a job somewhere else—a job that may require new skills. If the right training can make the difference, we want to help.

Most frustrating and important, Wilson said, assisted living isn’t really built for the sake of older people so much as for the sake of their children. The children usually make the decision about where the elderly live, and you can see it in the way that places sell themselves. They try to create what the marketers call “the visuals”—the beautiful, hotel-like entryway, for instance, that caught Shelley’s eye. They tout their computer lab, their exercise center, and their trips to concerts and museums—features that speak much more to what a middle-aged person desires for a parent than to what the parent does. Above all, they sell themselves as safe places. They almost never sell themselves as places that put a person’s choices about how he or she wants to live first and foremost. Because it’s often precisely the parents’ cantankerousness and obstinacy about the choices they make that drive children to bring them on the tour to begin with. Assisted living has become no different in this respect than nursing homes.

Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

Before Schopenhauer, the artist was generally seen as someone who manufactured things – things that were admittedly difficult to manufacture, and of a special order, such as concertos, sculptures and plays – but it was still a matter of manufacture. This is, of course, a legitimate point of view – and Schopenhauer would be the last person to overlook the difficulties in conceiving and executing a work of art. (People these days sometimes try to get back to this idea in order to minimize art, to make it a little more harmless, as when novelists are considered as mere story tellers, and contemporary artists chatter about their craft.) But the original point, the generating point of all creation, is fundamentally quite different; it consists in an innate (and thus not teachable) disposition for a passive and, as it were, dumbstruck contemplation of the world. The artist is always someone who might just as well do nothing but immerse himself contentedly in the world and in the vague daydream associated with it. Today, when art has become accessible to the masses and generates considerable financial flows, this has very comical consequences. Thus, the ambitious and enterprising individual with a range of social skills who nurses the ambition to have a career in art will rarely succeed; the palm will always go to pathetic blob-like folk who everyone initially thought were just losers.

She’d come here to make a difference, to save lives, and God knew lives still needed saving. As much as she sometimes hated the war, she loved nursing more.

Ginger was well aware of the difference between how she was perceived at school and how she felt at home. At school she was a reliable, efficient, clear-headed thinker. At home, she felt like a poster child for the derailed. In the past, she’d tried to apply her no-nonsense nurseness to her off-duty home life, but she never managed to make it work. This was how it would go: a boy at school would complain that he had to keep clearing his throat, and she’d confidently reassure him it was probably just a cold. If the problem persisted, she would call home and suggest the mother take him to an allergist. But if Julia complained of the same postnasal drip, instead of thinking allergist, Ginger would suddenly remember the mother she met at Field Day whose brain tumor had presented with exactly that symptom.

Yes, we are on the way back. Back to wives, sweethearts, children, parents, and friends. Back to the ways of peace. Yet we can never go back, only forward. We will not find conditions just as we left them. The buildings, the land, the trees will still be there, but we cannot exp ect to find people unchanged. Those with whom we worked and played, many will not be there, others will have developed new friends, new interests, different habits. Even we ourselves will not be quite the same. Men who have had to face the probability of death day after day, week after week, will always look at life through different eyes. The normal man will have a keener appreciation of the values that contribute to life. He will appreciate many kindly, true, and beautiful influences we had, before the war, taken for granted. The near-neurotics will try to make the world give them a living, will more and more tend to live in the past, nursing their grievances, pathetic creatures who won a war and lost their souls. Shipmates, we cannot go back, only forward. All of us having a lot of living yet to do. We can make the years ahead great in accomplishment, rich, satisfaction. We had what it takes to win a tough war, we cannot fail to win our personal victory when we return to the ways of peace. May you all be blessed with that inner strength and peace which the world can neither give nor take away.32

left shoots me another leering glance. He’s nursing what must be his umpteenth scotch, his glazed eyes telling. Isn’t it funny how creepy men exist everywhere, in each and every layer of our society? A suit and a six-figure income makes no difference. I don’t delete that. It’s too true. The man moves a few chairs over, a sly smile on his lips. “Good evening, gorgeous.

Why should the gross “under-representation” of Asian Americans in professional basketball be a “gap” to be closed, if Asian Americans do not have nearly as much interest in that sport as black Americans have? Why should the “under-representation” of women in chess clubs or men in nursing be a gap to be closed? The process goal of preventing biased decision-making from arbitrarily closing off opportunities is an understandable goal. Creating a tableau to match the preconceptions of a vision is something very different.

Becoming a woman means losing a body almost indistinguishable from a boy’s in terms of strength and solidity and growing into one that is softer, more sexually inviting, but more vulnerable, too. For the first few years, you can feel like a hermit crab who has outgrown a shell it must then abandon, blindly scurrying for another. The armor you eventually take up is of a different sort. You can no longer credibly challenge the boys to an arm-wrestling match and expect to win. Forced to rely on subtler talents, you develop them. You learn to strike with a glance; you learn to soothe with one, too. If done right, you fill your quiver with words, humor, intrigue, and emotion. You’ll spend a lifetime learning when to deploy each to greatest effect—and when to forbear and offer none. But for Pete’s sake, whatever type of women young girls become, they should all listen to feminists of a prior era and stop taking sex stereotypes seriously. A young woman can be an astronaut or a nurse; a girl can play with trucks or with dolls. And she may find herself attracted to men or to other women. None of that makes her any less of a girl or any less suited to womanhood. Young women have more educational and career options today than they ever have. Remember to tell your daughter that. Tell her also that a woman’s most unique capacity—childbirth—is perhaps life’s greatest blessing. But whatever else you teach your daughter, remember to include something more. Tell her because the culture so often denies it. Tell her because people will try to make a victim of her. Tell her because it’s natural to doubt. Most of all, tell her because it’s true. She’s lucky. She’s special. She was born a girl. And being a woman is a gift, containing far too many joys to pass up.

The idea is doing [A Course in Miracles] is itself a way of saving the world. And one of the things that is very, very clear if you pay attention to the course - you have what the course calls your 'special function', some work here that only you can do, in this world. Nobody else can tell you what it is for yourself because they're lucky if they know for themselves. And your function may be quite different... I think what happens is people want to do something for the world but they do it in kind of very naive ways. One example is whenever there's any disaster, all these people come to help. 'Do you know how to do anything?' 'Well, no not really.' I mean yeah they need doctors and nurses and stuff but they don't need some ordinary slob hanging around. Oh and by the way this ordinary slob has to be fed and housed. In addition to all these people who lost their homes and their livelihoods. So they're like the second wave of the disaster. And that's kind of a naive way of helping the world. Uou have to do it in a way that's in a sense shrewd, that makes sense to you. And it necessarily follows that what you do and what I do and what you're supposed to do and what I'm supposed to do are really quite different things... A lot of people equate saving the world with embracing some cause or another. And... your work, very likely, is nothing to do with that. The problems, you know, the usual disasters and calamities that the human race is predicting for itself, yeah, those problems are there. Your job might be something quite different. And you have to know yourself well enough to know what your own job is. To paraphrase a line of the Bhagavad Gita 'It's better to do your own job badly than someone else's job well'...