Provider Appreciation Quotes

Hard times build determination and inner strength. Through them we can also come to appreciate the uselessness of anger. Instead of getting angry nurture a deep caring and respect for troublemakers because by creating such trying circumstances they provide us with invaluable opportunities to practice tolerance and patience.

Can you accept the notion that once you change your internal state, you don’t need the external world to provide you with a reason to feel joy, gratitude, appreciation, or any other elevated emotion?

A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension -- seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence. This means recognizing that we both have an important part to play in helping each other become more fully who we are....A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion.

To see and appreciate the soul of others with whom you are in a relationship is a higher state of awareness. To see only their outer characteristics provides a limited and incomplete perspective. Their current personality, just like their current physical body, is a temporary manifestation. They have had many bodies and many personalities but only one enduring soul, only one continuous spiritual essence. See this essence and you will see the real person.

Everything is an appreciation, even an insult provided you look at it with that angle.

The goal is to have customers who appreciate the value your business is selling; and customers who are willing and able to pay for that value. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.

One student asks: Why should I live? Steven Pinker answers: In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live! As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy—the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.

I never appreciated "positive heroes" in literature. They are almost always clichesو,copies of copies,until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity,doubt,uncertainty,not just because it provides a more "productive" literary raw material,but because that is the way we humans really are.

I feel like my takeaway from tonight is that it's okay to love shitty television, provided that you make an effort to appreciate other kinds of entertainment.

Leaders can create a high productivity level by providing the appropriate organizational structure and job design, and by acknowledging and appreciating hard work.

What God and good luck provide we must accept with gratitude. Our time is our time. It’s up to us to make the most of it, make it amount to more than the sum of our days.

We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees, but how seldom do we nourish their self-esteem? We provide them with roast beef and potatoes to build energy, but we neglect to give them kind words of appreciation that would sing in their memories for years like the music of the morning stars.

Common sense, indeed!” said the Rocket indignantly; “you forget that I am very uncommon, and very remarkable. Why, anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination. But I have imagination, for I never think of things as they really are; I always think of them as being quite different. As for keeping myself dry, there is evidently no one here who can at all appreciate an emotional nature. Fortunately for myself, I don’t care. The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

History is the view from the cheap seats. Distance from the action provides a unique perspective; one can recognize the plays and appreciate the totality of certain events.

Art provides us with clues about how to live our lives more fully...about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make daily living a masterpiece.

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. It's an unnerving thought that we may be living the universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea-- really none at all-- about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark, the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to about some six hundred per week. (That's extinctions of all types-- plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure ever higher-- to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants-- while allowing that this was "almost certainly an underestimate," particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated. The fact is, we don't know. Don't have any idea. We don't know when we started doing many of the things we've done. We don't know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life: "One planet, one experiment." If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-- and by "we" i mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp. We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings-- that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities-- have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth's history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune. We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

I had come to appreciate the reality of solitude and the illusion of community that bars provide.

I began to appreciate what money can provide: a waterproof imperviousness to the demands of others.

The house seems to appreciate all the attention. The exterior is still stained and gloomy, but the vines are greening faintly, supple and alive, and there are fresh bird’s nests in the eaves. The floor still provides an entire symphony of groans and creaks, but I swear it’s no longer in a minor key.

The strategic problem is, of course, that simulacra are reassuring only when viewed from outside. They do not provide an existential model for how to be in the world. One can appreciate the brilliance of the embalmer's work, but one would not want to be its object.

You are the average of the people you spend the most time with. And that’s why it’s not always where you are in life, but who you have by your side that matters most. Some people drain you and others provide soul food. Spend more time with nice people who are smart, driven and open-minded about personal growth and opportunity. There’s no need to rush into a relationship you are unsure of, or socialize with those who hold you back. Be sure to get in the company of those who feed your spirit, and give the gift of your absence to those who do not appreciate your presence.

Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don’t count—there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book, or the equivalent of losing points in a soccer game, and this absence of negative domain for book sales provides the author with a measure of optionality.

How to be there for someone with depression or anxiety 1. Know that you are needed, and appreciated, even if it seems you are not. 2. Listen. 3. Never say ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘cheer up’ unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions. (Tough love doesn’t work. Turns out that just good old ‘love’ is enough.) 4. Appreciate that it is an illness. Things will be said that aren’t meant. 5. Educate yourself. Understand, above all, that what might seem easy to you –going to a shop, for instance –might be an impossible challenge for a depressive. 6. Don’t take anything personally, any more than you would take someone suffering with the flu or chronic fatigue syndrome or arthritis personally. None of this is your fault. 7. Be patient. Understand it isn’t going to be easy. Depression ebbs and flows and moves up and down. It doesn’t stay still. Do not take one happy/ bad moment as proof of recovery/ relapse. Play the long game. 8. Meet them where they are. Ask what you can do. The main thing you can do is just be there. 9. Relieve any work/ life pressure if that is doable. 10. Where possible, don’t make the depressive feel weirder than they already feel. Three days on the sofa? Haven’t opened the curtains? Crying over difficult decisions like which pair of socks to wear? So what. No biggie. There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

From the lowest depths of his jail cell, Joseph identifies himself for the first time with forefathers, reconnecting to his heritage despite being cut off from his family for years. Despite living in a foreign land alone amidst a foreign people, Joseph declares that he has remained true to his people’s core values. One of those values is gratitude, and for the first time Joseph acknowledges that his talents are God-given rather than earned. He has ended up in prison because of unwavering gratitude to a human master who selflessly cared for him, a devotion that mirrors his gratitude to the Divine Master. In this terrible low moment, Joseph sounds fulfilled for the first time in his life, as the principled decision to accept imprisonment provides an uplifting sense of purpose. With renewed appreciation for God’s care, Joseph challenges his fellow inmates to reject backstabbing pagan deities whose flaring egos drive them to relentlessly pursue self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. As humans naturally emulate the characteristics of their deities, Joseph prefers an ethical and compassionate Divine Mentor.

KM: Yes. Mrs. Lopez, she's human. And you know, clearly, she'd like people to show some appreciation for her hard work. But if people just, you know, take her pie and don't even say, "Hey, nice pie," they just scarf it down or whatever- MH: I could see how that would get to be annoying. I mean, if you're constantly providing...pie. And getting no positive feedback- KM: Right! And what about your future? I mean, how do you know people are still going to want your pie in the future? Supposing they become a famous rock star or something. People are going to be offering them pie all over the place. If they haven't promised only to eat your pie, well, where does that leave you?

It is often assumed that the chief reason for making things—furniture, clothing, toys, a garden—is to save money. There are other factors that may be of equal or greater importance: making what we need for life is a way of expressing creativity and of gaining greater confidence. Emotional security comes from providing the necessities of life in personal, meaningful ways, by our own hands or those of friends and loved ones. Another value in studying how things are made is to increase our appreciation for them as we better understand what makes them work. The knowledge that comes from shaping the things around us helps us build relationships with the world that are more intimate.

Epicurus founded a school of philosophy which placed great emphasis on the importance of pleasure. "Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life," he asserted, confirming what many had long thought, but philosophers had rarely accepted. Vulgar opinion at once imagined that the pleasure Epicurus had in mind involved a lot of money, sex, drink and debauchery (associations that survive in our use of the word 'Epicurean'). But true Epicureanism was more subtle. Epicurus led a very simple life, because after rational analysis, he had come to some striking conclusions about what actually made life pleasurable - and fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive. The first ingredient was friendship. 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship,' he wrote. So he bought a house near Athens where he lived in the company of congenial souls. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not. Epicurus and his friends located a second secret of happiness: freedom. In order not to have to work for people they didn't like and answer to potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from employment in the commercial world of Athens ('We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics'), and began what could best have been described as a commune, accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence. They would have less money, but would never again have to follow the commands of odious superiors. The third ingredient of happiness was, in Epicurus's view, to lead an examined life. Epicurus was concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise. Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus's argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.

Modern society is in a state of turbulence brought about, in large part, by political efforts to maintain static, equilibrium conditions; practices that interfere with the ceaseless processes of change that provide the fluctuating order upon which any creative system—such as the marketplace—depends. Institutions, being ends in themselves, have trained us to resist change and favor the status quo; to insist upon the certain and the concrete and to dismiss the uncertain and the fanciful; and to embrace security and fear risk. Life, on the other hand is change, is adaptation, creativity, and novelty. But creativity has always depended upon a fascination with the mysterious, and an appreciation for the kinds of questions that reveal more than answers can ever provide. When creative processes become subordinated to preserving established interests; when the glorification of systems takes priority over the sanctity of individual lives, societies begin to lose their life-sustaining vibrancy and may collapse.

A step further. Creationism. If you want to go in so deep as to ignore all of the advances and hard facts that SCIENCE and LEARNING have provided us in the field of biological evolution and instead profess that the creation story, written by men from their holy visions, about how the Christian deity spinning the world together out of the void in the magic of Genesis describes the true origin of the universe, that is your business. Terrific. It’s a cool story, don’t get me wrong; I love magic. Check out Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which won a Newbery Medal. For the record, I don’t believe the book of Genesis ever won one of those. You and your fellow creationists profess belief in a magical story. You are welcome to do so. Sing and chant, and eat crackers and drink wine that you claim are magically infused with the blood and flesh of your church’s original grand wizard, the Prince of Peace. I personally think that’s just a touch squirrelly, but that’s your business, not mine. You will not be punished for those beliefs in our nation of individual freedoms. But I do think the vast majority of your fellow Americans would appreciate it, kind creationists, if you silly motherfuckers would keep that bullshit out of our schools. Your preferred fairy tales have no place in a children’s classroom or textbook that professes to be teaching our youngsters what is REAL. Jesus Christ, it’s irrefutably un-American, people!

Now is the time to stand fast in our faith and on our principles. . . . Now is the time to show our appreciation for the atoning sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . "Now is the time to warn our neighbors by sharing the gospel message with them. Now is the time to provide the world with an example of decency and modesty, an example of virtue and cleanliness. . . . "Now is indeed the time to show we are on the Lord's side.

In later years, your child will still appreciate having some time with you before he goes to sleep. He needs close, warm, personal time , something that simply watching television together, for instance, will not provide: even if the shows are not exciting or scary —which is unlikely— and even if you are sitting next to him, the lack of direct personal interaction makes this bedtime routine a poor one. Instead, use the time to discuss school events, plans for the weekend, soccer, dance class, after-school programs, or music lessons. It might also be helpful to talk about any worries your child may have, so he will be less likely to brood over them in bed.

In our analysis of complex systems (like the brain and language) we must avoid the trap of trying to find master keys. Because of the mechanisms by which complex systems structure themselves, single principles provide inadequate descriptions. We should rather be sensitive to complex and self-organizing interactions and appreciate the play of patterns that perpetually transforms the system itself as well as the environment in which it operates.

Approachable people . . . 1. Use body language to their advantage. 2. Are open-minded to new people and new experiences. 3. Encourage others to feel better about themselves. 4. Are willing to be told not what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. 5. Provide an inviting aura that is warm and comforting. 6. Realize that authenticity and transparency earn trust. 7. Intuitively tune into the feelings and needs of others. 8. Are emotionally steady and respond appropriately when they sense awkwardness or discomfort in others. 9. Radiate happiness and curbs cynicism. 10. Provide a safe environment for others to express themselves. 11. Make others feel valued and appreciated. 12. Listen and consider other people’s viewpoints and opinions.

we will also examine the strengths gained from religious involvement. While there may have been significant damage, it may also be true that you have grown as a result of this involvement. Appreciating this can provide a foundation for further growth.

He expressed appreciation for the information I provided, taking a dozen pages of notes in his small neat hand, and asking plenty of questions, not to challenge but just to elucidate. He did offer a pointed comment about what he called our dodge with Helmar, with his ward upstairs, and I rebutted.

You think ninety percent of the things I want to do are silly." "i think my allowing you to do all these things is silly." She winced visibly. "We need less of this allow stuff.Besides, you owe me a night out without any trouble." "You had trouble tonight?" Gary asked. "There was no trouble." Gregori was clearly puzzled. "You're always getting in fights. Everywhere we go,you just can't help yourself," Savannah accused ndignantly. "You picked the one tonight." "You picked a fight?" Gary was astounded. "I did not pick a fight," Gregori denied. "A few men were determined to mug us,so I provided them with an interesting experience. There was no fight. Had I actually struck them physical blows, they would be in the hospital." His white teeth gleamed, the silver eyes glittering with more than danger, with a hint of amusement. "As it is,they just think they should be hospitalized.There is nothing wrong with any of them.I was quite gentle for Savannah's sake.Which,I see, she does not appreciate." "I would appreciate going out and behaving normally." "I was behaving in my normal fashion, cherie," he reminded her gently. "I take it we're going on a vampire hunt tomorrow night," Gary said, laughter in his voice.

any of us, whatever our temperamental makeup, can be effective leaders, provided that we come to understand our own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of our followers, and provided that we show our appreciation whenever we note our followers contributing their intelligence to our mutual enterprise.

Yet Laplace had built his probability theory on intuition. As far as he was concerned, "essentially, the theory of probability is nothing but good common sense reduced to mathematics. It provides an exact appreciation of what sound minds feel with a kind of instinct, frequently without being able to account for it.

The primary problem with modern psychiatry is its reduction of mental illness to bodily dysfunction. Objectification of those identified as mentally ill, by insisting on the somatic nature of their illness, may apparently simplify matters and help protect those trying to provide care from the pain experienced by those needing support. But psychiatric assessment too often fails to appreciate personal and social precursors of mental illness by avoiding or not taking account of such psychosocial considerations. Mainstream psychiatry acts on the somatic hypothesis of mental illness to the detriment of understanding people's problems.

They insisted that the pleasure of reading is not necessarily just about providing pleasure to the mind, but to the heart, the emotions, the body and – for those who believe in these things- the soul. The problem is that this kind of appreciation of literature has been shrouded in embarrassment and shame for a long time

Choosing to believe that something larger than you is at work in, through, and for you is the starting point for all the good things life has to offer. Trust this larger life to support and sustain you. Trust a wisdom greater than your limited knowledge to be provider and guide in all situations, for the highest good of all.

I instinctively knew that naming was the first part of understanding. According to the Book of Genesis Adam named all the animals before Eve was created: evidently, the ancient scribes appreciated that taxonomy provides the key to grasping the world. Without such a foundation, humans wander blindly in an unstructured wilderness.

As Nassim Taleb has argued, inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment inevitably leads economic agents to take risks they should avoid. However, optimism is highly valued, socially and in the market; people and firms reward the providers of dangerously misleading information more than they reward truth tellers.

Try closing your doors to worldliness and you will see a thousand others opened by God Almighty, the Opener of Doors. That is, He is the only one who opens doors. thus, if you wish His door of providence, good pleasure, and appreciation to open to you, then you must keep your doors closed to all worldly expectations for a lifetime.

Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year's Southern Conference champion, from the NCAA championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of them were emotionally committed to either Villanova or Temple-two local teams that had just been involved in enervating battles with Providence and Connecticut, respectively, scrambling for a chance at the rest of the country. A group of Princeton players shooting basketballs miscellaneously in preparation for still another game hardly promised to be a high point of the evening, but Bradley, whose routine in the warmup time is a gradual crescendo of activity, is more interesting to watch before a game than most players are in play. In Philadelphia that night, what he did was, for him, anything but unusual. As he does before all games, he began by shooting set shots close to the basket, gradually moving back until he was shooting long sets from 20 feet out, and nearly all of them dropped into the net with an almost mechanical rhythm of accuracy. Then he began a series of expandingly difficult jump shots, and one jumper after another went cleanly through the basket with so few exceptions that the crowd began to murmur. Then he started to perform whirling reverse moves before another cadence of almost steadily accurate jump shots, and the murmur increased. Then he began to sweep hook shots into the air. He moved in a semicircle around the court. First with his right hand, then with his left, he tried seven of these long, graceful shots-the most difficult ones in the orthodoxy of basketball-and ambidextrously made them all. The game had not even begun, but the presumably unimpressible Philadelphians were applauding like an audience at an opera.

Although Manmohan Singh, the helmsman, got the credit, it was Rao who took the tough and aggressive decisions and provided the energy and political support. He was shrewd and knew how to deal with dissent. The manner in which he pushed through the industrial policy in the cabinet is an example. At the same time, the reforms would not have happened without Manmohan Singh. To the extent that there was one, he created the road map. In a brilliant move, he set up a set of committees—bank reform under Narsimhan, tax reform under Chelliah, and insurance reform under Malhotra—and they provided crucial intellectual sustenance and legitimacy for reform measures in these areas. It needed Manmohan Singh to come and change the nation’s mind-set to growth. But Manmohan Singh is a reticent man and cautious by nature. On his own, without Rao’s constant support, he would not have done it. The new trade policy would not have come about as speedily without Chidambaram. Varma was a terror as the head of the steering committee and he provided the momentum for the implementation of the reforms for two years. He knew the system well, and he played it in favor of the reforms. Varma’s crucial contributions, I believe, have not been understood or appreciated. In the end, all three—Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, and Varma—derived their strength from Narasimha Rao.

Babylon became the wealthiest city of the ancient world because its citizens were the richest people of their time. They appreciated the value of money. They practiced sound financial principles in acquiring money, keeping money and making their money earn more money. They provided for themselves what we all desire . . . incomes for the future.

I knew that the feelings they got from providing the kindness was stronger than the gratitude I got from receiving it. It was on this day that I realized I wanted to experience that feeling as much and as often as I possibly could. I wanted to do good things for people I didn’t know and watch the surprise and appreciation wash over their faces.

Most people do not appreciate that no decision is also a decision. It is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate, because obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.

But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, "You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge's," or "You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth's." Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, "Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions," or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, "What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?" we are to say like the discontented cabman, "What's this?" or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, "Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?" Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair. This is the principle I was maintaining when I seemed an optimist to Mr. Max Beerbohm; and this is the principle I am still maintaining when I should undoubtedly seem a pessimist to Mr. Gordon Selfridge. The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior.

Groups give us power when we are enthusiastic, speak up, make bold assertions, and express an interest in others. Our capacity to influence rises when we practice kindness, express appreciation, cooperate, and dignify what others say and do. We are more likely to make a difference in the world when we are focused, articulate clear purposes and courses of action, and keep others on task. We rise in power when we provide calm and remind people of broader perspectives during times of stress, tell stories that calm during times of tension, and practice kind speech. Our opportunity for influence increases when we are open and ask great questions, listen to others with receptive minds, and offer playful ideas and novel perspectives. The

I am not all knowing. Therefore, I will not even attempt to be. I need to be loved. Therefore, I will be open to loving children. I want to be more accepting of the child in me. Therefore, I will with wonder and awe allow children to illuminate my world. I know so little about the complex intricacies of childhood. Therefore, I will allow children to teach me. I learn my best from and am impacted most by my personal struggles. Therefore, I will join with children in their struggles. I sometimes need a refuge. Therefore, I will provide a refuge for children. I like it when I am fully accepted for the person I am. Therefore, I will strive to experience and appreciate the person of the child. I make mistakes. They are a declaration of the way I am - human and fallible. Therefore, I will be tolerant of the humanness of children. I react with emotional internalization and expression to my world of reality. Therefore, I will relinquish the grasp I have on reality and try to enter the world as experienced by the child. It feels good to be an authority, to provide answers. Therefore, I will need to work hard to protect children from me! I am more fully me when I feel safe. Therefore I will be consistent in my interactions with children. I am the only person who can live my life. Therefore, I will not attempt to rule a child's life. I have learned most of what I know from experiencing. Therefore, I will allow children to experience. The hope I experience and the will to live come from within me. Therefore, I will recognize and confirm the child's will and selfhood. I cannot make children's hurts and fears and frustrations and disappointments go away. Therefore, I will soften the blow. I experience fear when I am vulnerable. Therefore, I will with kindness, gentleness, and tenderness touch the inner world of the vulnerable child. - Principles for Relationships with Children

Some people are naturally solitary. They want to live lone lives, and are content. Most, however, have a need for enduring, close relationships. These provide both a psychic and social framework for personal growth, under­standing, and development. It is an easy enough matter to shout to the skies: "I love my fellow men," when on the other hand you ronn no strong, enduring relationship with others. It is easy to claim an equal love for all members of the species, but love itself requires an understanding that at your level of activity is based upon intimate experience. You cannot love someone you do not know-not unless you water down the definition of love so much that it becomes meaningless. To love someone, you must appreciate how that per­son differs from yourself and from others. You must hold that person in mind so that to some extent love is a kind of meditation-a loving focus upon another individual. Once you experience that kind of love you can translate it into other tenns. The love itself spreads out, expands, so that you can then see others in love's light. Love is naturally creative and explorative-that is, you want to creatively explore the aspects of the beloved one. Even characteristics that would otherwise appear as mults attain a certain loving significance. They are accepted­seen, and yet they make no difference. Because these are still attributes of the beloved one, even the seeming faults are redeemed. The beloved attains prominence over all others. The span of a god's love can perhaps equally hold within its vision the existences of all individuals at one time in an infinite loving glance that beholds each person, seeing each with all his or her peculiar characteristics and tendencies. Such a god's glance would delight in each person's difference from each other person. This would not be a blanket love, a soupy porridge of a glance in which individuality melted, but a love based on a full understand­ing of each individual. The emotion of love brings you closest to an understanding of the nature of All That Is. Love incites dedication, commitment. It specifies. You cannot, therefore, honestly insist that you love humanity and all people equally if you do not love one other person. If you do not love yourself, it is quite difficult to love another.

He backpedaled hard. "Whatever you've planned is fine with me, Erica. I appreciate your efforts; I always do." True enough. She may be a domineering harpy on occasion, but she was his domineering harpy, and didn't everyone need a bit of domineering harpy in their lives? They made things run much smoother. Nothing provided motivation quite like having her tiny, spike-heeled shoe up his ass.

On our particular mission, senior marines met with local school officials while the rest of us provided security or hung out with the schoolkids, playing soccer and passing out candy and school supplies. One very shy boy approached me and held out his hand. When I gave him a small eraser, his face briefly lit up with joy before he ran away to his family, holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph. I have never seen such excitement on a child’s face. I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is. But that moment, with that boy, was pretty close for me. For my entire life, I’d harbored resentment at the world. I was mad at my mother and father, mad that I rode the bus to school while other kids caught rides with friends, mad that my clothes didn’t come from Abercrombie, mad that my grandfather died, mad that we lived in a small house. That resentment didn’t vanish in an instant, but as I stood and surveyed the mass of children of a war-torn nation, their school without running water, and the overjoyed boy, I began to appreciate how lucky I was: born in the greatest country on earth, every modern convenience at my fingertips, supported by two loving hillbillies, and part of a family that, for all its quirks, loved me unconditionally. At that moment, I resolved to be the type of man who would smile when someone gave him an eraser. I haven’t quite made it there, but without that day in Iraq, I wouldn’t be trying. The

I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me. They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction. With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country.

Life is worth living because without life nothing is possible; to choose life is to succeed and appreciate all things that life can give or provide. Life enables one to achieve all that one requires.Life is an opportunity,a privilege and a reward to strive to achieve the unachievable. Life is a blessing from God who provides understanding and knowledge for all life. Yet life is knowledge and understanding. Without life nothing is gained or lost because it is null and void.

The man of perfect virtue in repose has no thoughts, in action no anxiety. He recognizes no right, nor wrong, nor good, nor bad. Within the Four Seas, when all profit—that is his repose. Men cling to him as children who have lost their mothers; they rally around him as wayfarers who have missed their road. He has wealth to spare, but he knows not whence it comes. He has food and drink more than sufficient, but knows not who provides it…. In an age of perfect virtue, good men are not appreciated; ability is not conspicuous. Rulers are mere beacons, while the people are as free as the wild deer. They are upright without being conscious of duty to their neighbors. They love one another without being conscious of charity. They are true without being conscious of loyalty. They are honest without being conscious of good faith. They act freely in all things without recognizing obligations to anyone. Thus, their deeds leave no trace; their affairs are not handed down to posterity.5 [62a]

Every prayer request (and every scenario that triggers a prayer request) is actually an opportunity for us to witness His glory firsthand. Because when He answers, that’s what He’s doing. He’s wanting us to see what He is like. Our Provider. Our Healer (2 Kings 20:5). Our Sustainer (Ps. 54:4). The One who is wiser than our own wisdom (1 Cor. 1:25). He wants you to know Him as your Creator, Savior, Lord, Provider, Protector, Friend, Counselor . . . and for you to worship Him as such with full appreciation. Not just generally, but personally.

1. Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly and with high quality. Comparative Advantage means that some people will be better than others at accomplishing certain tasks, so it pays to invest time and resources in recruiting the best team for the job. Don’t make that team too large, however—Communication Overhead makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best. 2. Clearly communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and must clearly know the specific parts of the project they’re individually responsible for completing—otherwise, you’re risking Bystander Apathy. 3. Treat people with respect. Consistently using the Golden Trifecta—appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important and is also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under mutually supportive conditions, the more Clanning will naturally occur, and the more cohesive the team will become. 4. Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. The best working Environment takes full advantage of Guiding Structure—provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work the team is doing. To avoid having energy sapped by the Cognitive Switching Penalty, shield your team from as many distractions as possible, which includes nonessential bureaucracy and meetings. 5. Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance that Uncertainty and the Planning Fallacy mean your initial plan will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in a few important respects. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works, given the necessary Trade-offs required by the work. 6. Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. One of the primary fallacies of effective Management is that it makes learning unnecessary. This mind-set assumes your initial plan should be 100 percent perfect and followed to the letter. The exact opposite is true: effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Constantly Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators (discussed later)—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, Experiment with another approach.

My mom's Busy Day Cake," Nellie said, lifting the carrier slightly. "With lemon frosting and some violets from the garden I sugared." Her mother had often made the cake for social gatherings, telling Nellie everyone appreciated a simple cake. "It's only when you try to get too fancy do you find trouble," Elsie was fond of saying, letting Nellie lick the buttercream icing from the beaters as she did. Some might consider sugaring flowers "too fancy," but not Elsie Swann- every cake she made carried some sort of beautiful flower or herb from her garden, whether it was candied rose petals or pansies, or fresh mint or lavender sugar. Elsie, a firm believer in the language of flowers, spent much time carefully matching her gifted blooms and plants to their recipients. Gardenia revealed a secret love; white hyacinth, a good choice for those who needed prayers; peony celebrated a happy marriage and home; chamomile provided patience; and a vibrant bunch of fresh basil brought with it good wishes. Violets showcased admiration- something Nellie did not have for the exhausting Kitty Goldman but certainly did for the simple deliciousness of her mother's Busy Day Cake.

If we struggle with low self-esteem and a partner is proved trustworthy, we might say, “She makes me feel so good that I forget my uphill battle with self-worth. I am dependent on her now to help me feel good about myself, and she dare not go off duty because I can’t provide that for myself.” This is not the foundation of a healthy relationship. We do not require our partner to give us more than about 25 percent of our total need for the five A’s (attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing). No single person should be expected to fulfill all or even most of our emotional needs.

You don’t often find trusting and kindness like this in the world anymore. Strangers inviting strangers into their homes to have dinner with them is practically unheard of in this day and age. It felt amazing to be on the receiving end of such kindness, but somehow I knew that the feelings they got from providing the kindness was stronger than the gratitude I got from receiving it. It was on this day that I realized I wanted to experience that feeling as much and as often as I possibly could. I wanted to do good things for people I didn’t know and watch the surprise and appreciation wash over their faces.

Many scientific and scholarly disciplines are slowly coming around to the idea that consciousness is far more important than previously imagined. This shift of opinion, combined with the idea that reality is a form of information, provides a renewed appreciation of ancient esoteric Legends about magic. If we can get past the supernatural connotations, the religious figures in prohibitions, and the occult baggage, then through the scientific study of magic we have the potential to make rapid progress and gaining a better understanding of who and what we are. If we can’t escape or pass, then we may be running headlong into extinction. Magic is real. Let’s deal with it.

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things. As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

The evaluation of the merits of medical treatments for madness has always been a calculation made by doctors and, to a certain extent, by society as a whole. Does the treatment provide a method for managing disturbed people? That is the usual bottom line. The patient’s subjective response to the treatment—does it help the patient feel better or think more clearly?—simply doesn’t count in that evaluation. The “mad,” in fact, are dismissed as unreliable witnesses. How can a person crazy in mind possibly appreciate whether a treatment—be it Rush’s gyrator, a wet pack, gastrointestinal surgery, metrazol convulsive therapy, electroshock, or a neuroleptic—has helped? Yet to the person so treated, the subjective experience is everything.

There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference between the all-important and the unimportant—why, such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who though able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide.

We might ask what role relational neuroscience plays in these kinds of experiences. For me, it begins with the body. Cultivating an understanding -- and most importantly a felt sense -- of these neural pathways helps us attune body to body with our people as they enter these deeper, more challenging realms. Through resonance, our capacity to attend to our bodies while remaining in a ventral state gradually becomes theirs. An indispensable support comes from our left hemisphere's deepening understanding of the particulars of the healing process. The stability this provides helps our right stay as engaged as possible in the relationship with all its emerging uncertainty. When Joshua became so suddenly depressed, Jaak Panksepp came to mind, so I could remain curious rather than scared. When Caroline entered increasingly intense states with her mother, Stephen Porges helped me remain mindful of our joined windows of tolerance and the necessity of staying in connection for co-regulation and disconfirmation to occur. The whole process of leading, following and responding rests on his statement, "Safety IS the treatment". In the broadest way, Dan Siegel's voice fosters deep acquaintance with the principles of interpersonal neurobiology, which supports hope for healing, confidence in our inherent health, and appreciation for our co-organizing brains. Each of these strands of knowledge increases our trust in the process. You may sense yourself adding to the list those that have been most helpful for you.

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Singapore's tragedy is not the absence of idealism, but that it systematically rewards the individualistic majority and discourages the socially-conscious minority. This is at odds with Singapore's self-image as a communitarian Asian society, an image conjured up largely to justify the protection of family values and paternalistic government. In truth, the overwhelming ethos is to mind your own business. Singapore's embrace of the market forces - based on the PAP's clear appreciation of the fact that people's desire to live in comfort is the most powerful force for civilisation's progress - has provided rich incentives for Singaporeans to work hard, and create wealth. But its exercise of illiberal controls to maintain ownership of the public sphere adds up to a heavy tax on thinking socially and acting politically. The public has been privatised.

Therapists must be familiar with their own dark side and be able to empathize with all human wishes and impulses. A personal therapy experience permits the student therapist to experience many aspects of the therapeutic process from the patient’s seat: the tendency to idealize the therapist, the yearning for dependency, the gratitude toward a caring and attentive listener, the power granted to the therapist. Young therapists must work through their own neurotic issues; they must learn to accept feedback, discover their own blind spots, and see themselves as others see them; they must appreciate their impact upon others and learn how to provide accurate feedback. Lastly, psychotherapy is a psychologically demanding enterprise, and therapists must develop the awareness and inner strength to cope with the many occupational hazards inherent in it. Many

The larger point is that as society and the economy go through this shift there will not only be less economic opportunity to fulfill your role as “father, protector, provider, and bread winner,” there will be less appreciation for such roles.  Therefore, to make sure you have purpose and agency in life, you need to find hobbies and interests that are not dependent on economic circumstances and cannot be supplanted by government intervention.   Fun – Because of the Darwinistic programming you have, many men will approach life from the angle of attaining financial security first, and THEN relaxing and enjoying life.  You will get everything in order, get your degree, get your career, pay off your debts, pay off your house, and then, once financially stable, finally permit yourself to enjoy life.  There is just one minor problem with that approach:   Life doesn’t work that way.   Not

And yet it seems to me that the thought and activity of those friends who have never given up direct political work and who are always ready to assume direct political responsibility very often suffer from one chronic fault: an insufficient understanding of the historical uniqueness of the posttotalitarian system as a social and political reality. They have little understanding of the specific nature of power that is typical for this system and therefore they overestimate the importance of direct political work in the traditional sense. Moreover, they fail to appreciate the political significance of those "pre-political" events and processes that provide the living humus from which genuine political change usually springs. As political actors-or, rather, as people with political ambitions-they frequently try to pick up where natural political life left off. They maintain models of behavior that may have been appropriate in more normal political circumstances and thus, without really being aware of it, they bring an outmoded way of thinking, old habits, conceptions, categories, and notions to bear on circumstances that are quite new and radically different, without first giving adequate thought to the meaning and substance of such things in the new circumstances, to what politics as such means now, to what sort of thing can have political impact and potential, and in what way- Because such people have been excluded from the structures of power and are no longer able to influence those structures directly (and because they remain faithful to traditional notions of politics established in more or less democratic societies or in classical dictatorships) they frequently, in a sense, lose touch with reality. Why make compromises with reality, they say, when none of our proposals will ever be accepted anyway? Thus they find themselves in a world of genuinely utopian thinking.

Deprived of all forms of memory, people would act only to satiate the immediacy of their base cravings. Without past memories acting as guidepost, humankind’s dynamics diminish to the entropy of commission and reaction. The desire to achieve lastingness would be frivolous without appreciation of our joint history. In absence of historical awareness, there could be no culture dialogue or community inwardness. Absent historical awareness, there would be no evolving community consciousness and there would be no social engine capable of generating any communities’ battery of self-determinacy. Self-improvement would be frivolous without forging an intimate relationship with our historiology as well as familiarity with the account of select people’s exhibited character traits that we might wish to emulate. Notions of personal pliancy and individual lability would lose its root structure without the prongs of memory to provide the necessary griddle and supporting trusses to configure and provide cohesion for our developing sense of selfhood.

Anyway,” he whispers, “I knew it was too good to be true. I thought she was being understanding last night, but of course the complaining starts up again first thing this morning. So I say, ‘You miss me? What kind of guilt trip is that?’ I mean, I’m right here. I’m here every night. I’m one hundred percent loyal. Never cheated, never will. I provide a nice living. I’m an involved father. I even take care of the dog because Margo says she hates walking around with plastic bags of poop. And when I’m not there, I’m working. It’s not like I’m off in Cabo all day. So I tell her I can quit my job and she can miss me less because I’ll be twiddling my thumbs at home, or I can keep my job and we’ll have a roof over our heads.” He yells “I’ll just be a minute!” to someone I can’t see and then continues. “And you know what she does when I say this? She says, all Oprah-like”—here he does a dead-on impression of Oprah—“‘I know you do a lot, and I appreciate that, but I also miss you even when you’re here.’” I try to speak but John plows on. I haven’t seen him this stirred up before.

People in bands often have this well-intentioned but misguided notion that, somehow, the payin' customers have some sort of responsibility to... y'know... pay and be customers - that the general populace has some kinda cultural duty to provide an audience for musicians, so their latest bit of creative brilliance may be dutifully appreciated and validated. The truth is nothing of the sort. No one has a duty, real or implied, to pay attention to ANYTHING. A band isn't entitled to an audience just because they put in the effort required for being a band; a band isn't really entitled to anything ((other than free beer. Fair is fair!)). This ass-backwardness of the highest order. The only entitlement in the whole band-crowd dynamic is on the part of the crowd, who, by paying their cover ((or, at bare minimum, showing up)), are ENTITLED to being ENTERTAINED. Conversely, the only cultural duty in a crowd-band situation is incumbent on the BAND, not the crowd - it is the band's sworn duty to ENTERTAIN THE CROWD. That's how it works. The BAND are the ones with responsibilities and duties; the crowd can do whatever the fuck they want.

happening. He went into a restaurant and sat down. A radio was blaring out the latest composition in dissarythm, the new quarter-tone dance music in which chorded woodwinds provided background patterns for the mad melodies pounded on tuned tomtoms. Between each number and the next a frenetic announcer extolled the virtues of a product. Munching a sandwich, Roger listened appreciatively to the dissarhythm and managed not to hear the commercials. Most intelligent people of the nineties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loudspeaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then-infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully-cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses. For that reason a good part of the newscast which followed the dissarhythm program went, as it were, into one

I want you to cook more. It's good for you. You know exactly what you're nourishing yourself with (which for me almost always includes a healthy dose of fresh vegetables). It allows you to feel the natural rhythms of life in a way that microwaved frozen dinners never can. And cooking often draws people to the table, encouraging dialogue and providing a moment to appreciate the good (and truly tasty) things in life. I know: if I want you to cook more, I need to make it easy for you. And to my way of thinking, that means I need to help you with three things: First I need to help wean you from a slavish dependency on recipes - I need to hand you a few go-to recipes that are easily varied depending on what you have on hand, and teach you to look at other recipes with an eye to how they can be varied to suit your own tastes and kitchen. Second, I need to help you know what ingredients and basic preparations to have on hand so that a good meal is never more than a few minutes away. And third, I need to help you know which kitchen equipment will enable you to create delicious food fast (and, of course, I need to guide you in how to use it to its best advantage). I can do all that.

5236 rue St. Urbain The baby girl was a quick learner, having synthesized a full range of traits of both of her parents, the charming and the devious. Of all the toddlers in the neighbourhood, she was the first to learn to read and also the first to tear out the pages. Within months she mastered the grilling of the steaks and soon thereafter presented reasons to not grill the steaks. She was the first to promote a new visceral style of physical comedy as a means of reinvigorate the social potential of satire, and the first to declare the movement over. She appreciated the qualities of movement and speed, but also understood the necessity of slowness and leisure. She quickly learned the importance of ladders. She invented games with numerous chess-boards, matches and glasses of unfinished wine. Her parents, being both responsible and duplicitous people, came up with a plan to protect themselves, their apartment and belongings, while also providing an environment to encourage the open development of their daughter's obvious talents. They scheduled time off work, put on their pajamas and let the routines of the apartment go. They put their most cherished books right at her eye-level and gave her a chrome lighter. They blended the contents of the fridge and poured it into bowls they left on the floor. They took to napping in the living room, waking only to wipe their noses on the picture books and look blankly at the costumed characters on the TV shows. They made a fuss for their daughter's attention and cried when she wandered off; they bit or punched each other when she out of the room, and accused the other when she came in, looking frustrated. They made a mess of their pants when she drank too much, and let her figure out the fire extinguisher when their cigarettes set the blankets smoldering. They made her laugh with cute songs and then put clothes pins on the cat's tail. Eventually things found their rhythm. More than once the three of them found their faces waxened with tears, unable to decide if they had been crying, laughing, or if it had all been a reflex, like drooling. They took turns in the bath. Parents and children--it is odd when you trigger instinctive behaviour in either of them--like survival, like nurture. It's alright to test their capabilities, but they can hurt themselves if they go too far. It can be helpful to imagine them all gorging on their favourite food until their bellies ache. Fall came and the family went to school together.

We (Abraham) Describe Ourselves as Teachers Abraham: Good morning! It is nice to have an opportunity to visit. We extend our appreciation to Esther for allowing this communication, and to you for soliciting it. We have been considering the immense value of this interaction, as it will provide an introduction of that which we are to our physical friends. But even more than a mere introduction of Abraham to your physical world, this book will provide an introduction of the role of the Non-Physical in your physical world, for these worlds are inextricably tied together, you know. There is no way of separating one from the other. Also, in the writing of this book, we are all fulfilling an agreement that we set forth long before you came into your physical bodies. We, Abraham, agreed that we would remain here focused in the broader, clearer, and therefore more powerful Non-Physical perspective, while you, Jerry and Esther, agreed to go forth into your magnificent physical bodies and into the Leading Edge of thought and creation. And once your life experiences had stimulated within you clear and powerful desire, it was our agreement to rendezvous for the purpose of powerful co-creation. Jerry, we are eager to answer your long list of questions (so

The two hit it off well, because de Broglie was trying, like Einstein, to see if there were ways that the causality and certainty of classical physics could be saved. He had been working on what he called “the theory of the double solution,” which he hoped would provide a classical basis for wave mechanics. “The indeterminist school, whose adherents were mainly young and intransigent, met my theory with cold disapproval,” de Broglie recalled. Einstein, on the other hand, appreciated de Broglie’s efforts, and he rode the train with him to Paris on his way back to Berlin. At the Gare du Nord they had a farewell talk on the platform. Einstein told de Broglie that all scientific theories, leaving aside their mathematical expressions, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description “that even a child could understand them.” And what could be less simple, Einstein continued, than the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics! “Carry on,” he told de Broglie as they parted at the station. “You are on the right track!” But he wasn’t. By 1928, a consensus had formed that quantum mechanics was correct, and de Broglie relented and adopted that view. “Einstein, however, stuck to his guns and continued to insist that the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics could not possibly be complete,” de Broglie recalled, with some reverence, years later.

The author explores the contours of a restless mind racked with fear and doubt and questions the origins of his personal disenchantment and cynical bitterness. Do other people share similar feelings of disquiet and despair, and how does a person escape a vortex of suffering? Perchance he can marshal human beings’ innate gifts of memory, language, and consciousness to transform his vile existence. Perhaps by studiously examining the self and seeking to unite all disparate parts of a fragmented psyche, he will become a thoughtful, considerate, and affectionate man who lives joyfully without pangs of pain, shame, and misgivings. The goal of this vision quest is to attain personal harmony with the world and enjoy an admirable state of attentive mindfulness after investigating and expressing all that is sayable pertaining the meaning of existence and the unique features of being human. The author aspires to discard frivolous attachments, pierce mental delusions, and attain a peaceful state of serenity by accepting reality and appreciating the incomparable beauty of this magnificent world and the little pleasures that each unfolding day affords. Perhaps writing of his struggles to transcend his own pain and develop the wisdom and serenity of the mind that comes from living an examined life might even provide a template for other people explore their own life story.

Happiness Fu. Happiness. The left side means a revelation from heaven and is used in all words with abstract meanings. The right side shows the word for “beans” on the top and “fields” on the bottom; when the beans are harvested, people are happy. All abundance is provided by Tao. If we appreciate that, we will see that we are surrounded by happiness. Like everything else in Tao, happiness comes from within. What minimal support we need from the outside—a bit of food, some shelter—can actually be very simple and plain and is readily available. Nevertheless, people are unhappy because they do not know moderation. “All I need to be happy is to be rich,” many say. But the newspapers are filled with stories of wealthy people who live in deep despair. In fact, the simple phrase, “All I need to be happy is to be rich”—complete with your choice of substitutes for the word rich—is an immediate indication of the source of our unhappiness: there is no end to what we want. Know when enough is enough. Some die from hunger, but many die from overeating. So to be happy, we have to control our desires. The ancients taught two ways to do this. Sometimes they used discipline to curb desire. Sometimes they satisfied their desires. This is the genius of Tao: moderation. We do not need to cleave to the extremism of the ascetic. We do not need to lose ourselves in the indulgence of the hedonist. We follow Tao, the middle path.

SECTION XI.--The Strength of Simplicity. The soul in the state of abandonment knows how to see God even in the proud who oppose His action. All creatures, good or evil, reveal Him to it. __________________________________________________________________ The whole practice of the simple soul is in the accomplishment of the will of God. This it respects even in those unruly actions by which the proud attempt to depreciate it. The proud soul despises one in whose sight it is as nothing, who beholds only God in it, and in all its actions. Often it imagines that the modesty of the simple soul is a mark of appreciation for itself; when, all the time, it is only a sign of that loving fear of God and of His holy will as shown to it in the person of the proud. No, poor fool, the simple soul fears you not at all. You excite its compassion; it is answering God when you think it is speaking to you: it is with Him that it believes it has to do; it regards you only as one of His slaves, or rather as a mask with which He disguises Himself. Therefore the more you take a high tone, the lower you become in its estimation; and when you think to take it by surprise, it surprises you. Your wiles and violence are just favours from Heaven. The proud soul cannot comprehend itself, but the simple soul, with the light of faith, can very clearly see through it. The finding of the divine action in all that occurs at each moment, in and around us, is true science, a continuous revelation of truth, and an unceasingly renewed intercourse with God. It is a rejoicing with the Spouse, not in secret, nor by stealth, in the cellar, or the vineyard, but openly, and in public, without any human respect. It is a fund of peace, of joy, of love, and of satisfaction with God who is seen, known, or rather, believed in, living and operating in the most perfect manner in everything that happens. It is the beginning of eternal happiness not yet perfectly realised and tasted, except in an incomplete and hidden manner. The Holy Spirit, who arranges all the pieces on the board of life, will, by this fruitful and continual presence of His action, say at the hour of death, "fiat lux," "let there be light" (Gen. i, 14), and then will be seen the treasures which faith hides in this abyss of peace and contentment with God, and which will be found in those things that have been every moment done, or suffered for Him. When God gives Himself thus, all that is common becomes wonderful; and it is on this account that nothing seems to be so, because this way is, in itself, extraordinary. Consequently it is unnecessary to make it full of strange and unsuitable marvels. It is, in itself, a miracle, a revelation, a constant joy even with the prevalence of minor faults. But it is a miracle which, while rendering all common and sensible things wonderful, has nothing in itself that is sensibly marvellous.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote: we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us . . . To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that . . . we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educate . . . So, invited by the great sweetness of his beneficence and goodness, let us study to love and serve him with all our heart.3 It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.

How does marital love shed light on the nature of the celibate vocation? John Paul II writes that the fidelity and “total self-donation” lived by spouses provide a model for the fidelity and self-donation required of those who choose the celibate vocation. Both vocations in their own way express marital or spousal love, which entails “the complete gift of self” (see TOB 78:4). Furthermore, the fruit of children in married life helps celibate men and women realize that they are called to a fruitfulness as well—a fruitfulness of the spirit. In these ways we see how the “natural” reality of marriage points us to the “supernatural” reality of celibacy for the kingdom. In fact, full knowledge and appreciation of God’s plan for marriage and family life are indispensable for the celibate person. As the Pope expresses it, in order for the celibate person “to be fully aware of what he is choosing ... he must also be fully aware of what he is renouncing” (TOB 81:2). Celibacy, in turn, “has a particular importance and particular eloquence for those who live a conjugal life” (TOB 78:2). Celibacy, as a direct anticipation of the marriage to come, shows couples what their union is a sacrament of. In other words, celibacy helps married couples realize that their love also is oriented toward “the kingdom.” Furthermore, by abstaining from sexual union, celibates demonstrate the great value of sexual union. How so? A sacrifice only has value to the degree that the thing sacrificed has value. For example, we do not give up sin for Lent; we are supposed to give up sin all the time.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

Thank you for picking up a copy of my book. I spent many hours putting this book together, so I hope that you will enjoy reading it. As a Minecraft player, it brings me great joy to be able to share my stories with you. The game is fun and entertaining, and surprisingly, writing about it can be almost just as fun. Once you are done reading this book, if you enjoyed it, please take a moment to leave a review. It will help other people discover this book. If after reading it, you realize that you hate it with such passion, please feel free to leave me a review anyway. I enjoy reading what people think about my books and writing style. I hope that many people will like this book and encourage me to keep writing. Thanks in advance. Special thanks to readers of my previous books. Thank you for taking the time to leave a review. I appreciate it so much; your support means so much to me. I will continue to keep writing and will try to provide the highest quality of unofficial Minecraft books. Thank you for your support. If anyone needs to reach me, you can email me at steve.the.noob.diaries@gmail.com 1/6/2019 10:48 p.m. ​Hey, everyone! I don’t even know how to begin, so I’ll just write whatever that’s on my mind. First of all, I’m really sorry for the super-duper long delay of book 39. I started the outline for it and everything over two months ago and was ready to work on it. But then out of nowhere, I felt burnt out. I didn’t even know what burnt out meant until I told my friends how I was feeling, and they told me that I was burnt out. Basically, it’s a sucky feeling that’s like a combination of writer’s block and depression. At the time, I didn’t want

Only recently has it been discovered that sneezes are a much more drenching experience than anyone thought. A team led by Professor Lydia Bourouiba of MIT, as reported by Nature, studied sneezes more closely than anyone had ever chosen to before and found that sneeze droplets can travel up to eight meters and drift in suspension in the air for ten minutes before gently settling onto nearby surfaces. Through ultra-slow-motion filming, they also discovered that a sneeze isn’t a bolus of droplets, as had always been thought, but more like a sheet—a kind of liquid Saran Wrap—that breaks over nearby surfaces, providing further evidence, if any were needed, that you don’t want to be too close to a sneezing person. An interesting theory is that weather and temperature may influence how the droplets in a sneeze coalesce, which could explain why flu and colds are more common in cold weather, but that still doesn’t explain why infectious droplets are more infectious to us when we pick them up by touch rather than when we breathe (or kiss) them in. The formal name for the act of sneezing, by the way, is sternutation, though some authorities in their lighter moments refer to a sneeze as an autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst, which makes the acronym ACHOO (sort of). Altogether the lungs weigh about 2.4 pounds, and they take up more space in your chest than you probably realize. They jut up as high as your neck and bottom out at about the breastbone. We tend to think of them as inflating and deflating independently, like bellows, but in fact they are greatly assisted by one of the least appreciated muscles in the body: the diaphragm. The diaphragm is a mammalian invention and it is a good one. By pulling down on the lungs from below, it helps them to work more powerfully.

Keynesian argument that wage earners consume a greater proportion of their income than landlords or entrepreneurs, and therefore that a decreased total wage bill is a calamity because consumption will decline and savings increase. In the first place, this is not always accurate. It assumes (1) that the laborers are the relatively “poor” and the nonlaborers the relative “rich,” and (2) that the poor consume a greater proportion of their income than the rich. The first assumption is not necessarily correct. The President of General Motors is, after all, a “laborer,” and so also is Mickey Mantle; on the other hand, there are a great many poor landlords, farmers, and retailers. Manipulating relations between wage earners and others is a very clumsy and ineffective way of manipulating relations between poor and rich (provided we desire any manipulation at all). The second assumption is often, but not necessarily, true, as we have seen above. As we have also seen, however, the empirical study of Lubell indicates that a redistribution of income between rich and poor may not appreciably affect the social consumption–saving proportions. But suppose that all these objections are waved aside for the moment, and we concede for the sake of argument that a fall in total payroll will shift the social proportion against consumption and in favor of saving. What then? But this is precisely an effect that we should highly prize. For, as we have seen, any shift in social time preferences in favor of saving and against consumption will speed the advent of recovery, and decrease the need for a lengthy period of depression readjustment. Any such shift from consumption to savings will foster recovery. To the extent that this dreaded fall in consumption does result from a cut in wage rates, then, the depression will be cured that much more rapidly.

You will promote harmony in your words and actions. You will not compete with other leaders or compare to them. You will work together with others to make meaningful changes. You will not measure success in numbers: dollars, followers, ranks, sales, reviews, Facebook likes. Rather, you will measure by people helped, connections made, and moments savoured. You will help people accept themselves by being real with them. You will not show up on the pulpit for attention or approval. You will show up because you have something important to say. You will build tribes instead of cults. You will see your followers as equals. You will learn with them, and they will trust you. And there is nothing like the trust of people who resonate with your most authentic, vulnerable self to push you, every day, to do your best. It will hold you to a higher standard of behaviour. As a self-aware leader, you can be honest. This is the missing element in so many ineffective and addictive doctrines. You can tell people the things that are true but hard to hear. Not everyone will be brave enough to sidestep idealism, but those who do will appreciate your honesty. If you do not describe the darkness and the light, the voyager who has followed in your footsteps will believe he is lost. He will blame himself or blame you for teaching him lies. By being honest about what the journey looks like—failures, warts, and all—your teachings will become sources of consolation rather than frustration. As that voyager travels down the crooked, lonely paths within him, he may find a dark, terrifying cave, but if you mentioned it, he will feel elated. Yes, he will think, it looks horrifying, but at least I’m on track if I’ve found this awful thing. Your honesty may be bitter medicine, but when it digests, it’ll provide such potent healing that its taste will become a distant memory.

I’m not sure I see your point.” “Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?” “Get where?” “Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like—” eloquently, he batted at the air as if at a blown leaf. “But—maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me.” “Sorry but I’m not really appreciating your point here.” “You don’t need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own. Because—” up went the batwing eyebrow—“well, if you didn’t take picture from museum, and Sascha didn’t steal it back, and I didn’t think of claiming reward—well, wouldn’t all those dozens of other paintings remain missing too? Forever maybe? Wrapped in brown paper? Still shut in that apartment? No one to look at them? Lonely and lost to the world? Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?” “I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.’ ” “Yes—but why give it a name? Can’t they both be the same thing?

Although parents and teachers are forever telling children to “grow up,” maturation cannot be commanded. One cannot teach a child to be an individual or train a child to be his own person. This is the work of maturation and maturation alone. We can nurture the process, provide the right conditions, remove the impediments, but we can no more make a child grow up than we can order the plants in our garden to grow. Dealing with immature children, we may need to show them how to act, draw the boundaries of what is acceptable, and articulate what our expectations are. Children who do not understand fairness have to be taught to take turns. Children not yet mature enough to appreciate the impact of their actions must be provided with rules and prescriptions for acceptable conduct. But such scripted behavior mustn't be confused with the real thing. One cannot be any more mature than one truly is, only act that way when appropriately cued. To take turns because it is right to do so is certainly civil, but to take turns out of a genuine sense of fairness can only come from maturity. To say sorry may be appropriate to the situation, but to assume responsibility for one's actions can come only from the process of individuation. There is no substitute for genuine maturation, no shortcut to getting there. Behavior can be prescribed or imposed, but maturity comes from the heart and mind. The real challenge for parents is to help kids grow up, not simply to look like grownups. If discipline is no cure for immaturity and if scripting is helpful but insufficient, how can we help our children mature? For years, develop-mentalists puzzled over the conditions that activated maturation. The breakthrough came only when researchers discovered the fundamental importance of attachment. Surprising as it may be to say, the story of maturation is quite straightforward and self-evident. Like so much else in child development, it begins with attachment.

The Princeton economist and wine lover Orley Ashenfelter has offered a compelling demonstration of the power of simple statistics to outdo world-renowned experts. Ashenfelter wanted to predict the future value of fine Bordeaux wines from information available in the year they are made. The question is important because fine wines take years to reach their peak quality, and the prices of mature wines from the same vineyard vary dramatically across different vintages; bottles filled only twelve months apart can differ in value by a factor of 10 or more. An ability to forecast future prices is of substantial value, because investors buy wine, like art, in the anticipation that its value will appreciate. It is generally agreed that the effect of vintage can be due only to variations in the weather during the grape-growing season. The best wines are produced when the summer is warm and dry, which makes the Bordeaux wine industry a likely beneficiary of global warming. The industry is also helped by wet springs, which increase quantity without much effect on quality. Ashenfelter converted that conventional knowledge into a statistical formula that predicts the price of a wine—for a particular property and at a particular age—by three features of the weather: the average temperature over the summer growing season, the amount of rain at harvest-time, and the total rainfall during the previous winter. His formula provides accurate price forecasts years and even decades into the future. Indeed, his formula forecasts future prices much more accurately than the current prices of young wines do. This new example of a “Meehl pattern” challenges the abilities of the experts whose opinions help shape the early price. It also challenges economic theory, according to which prices should reflect all the available information, including the weather. Ashenfelter’s formula is extremely accurate—the correlation between his predictions and actual prices is above .90.

By appealing to the moral and philosophical foundation work of the nation, Lincoln hoped to provide common ground on which good men in both the North and the South could stand. “I am not now combating the argument of necessity, arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been.” Unlike the majority of antislavery orators, who denounced the South and castigated slaveowners as corrupt and un-Christian, Lincoln pointedly denied fundamental differences between Northerners and Southerners. He argued that “they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. . . . When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” And, finally, “when they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them . . . and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives.” Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.” Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” This, he concluded, was the only road to victory—to that glorious day “when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.” Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place

Collateral Capacity or Net Worth? If young Bill Gates had knocked on your door asking you to invest $10,000 in his new company, Microsoft, could you get your hands on the money? Collateral capacity is access to capital. Your net worth is irrelevant if you can’t access any of the money. Collateral capacity is my favorite wealth concept. It’s almost like having a Golden Goose! Collateral can help a borrower secure loans. It gives the lender the assurance that if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the collateral. For example, car loans are secured by cars, and mortgages are secured by homes. Your collateral capacity helps you to avoid or minimize unnecessary wealth transfers where possible, and accumulate an increasing pool of capital providing accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding. It is the amount of money that you can access through collateralizing a loan against your money, allowing your money to continue earning interest and working for you. It’s very important to understand that accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding are the key components of collateral capacity. It’s one thing to look good on paper, but when times get tough, assets that you can’t touch or can’t convert easily to cash, will do you little good. Three things affect your collateral capacity: ① The first is contributions into savings and investment accounts that you can access. It would be wise to keep feeding your Golden Goose. Often the lure of higher return potential also brings with it lack of liquidity. Make sure you maintain a good balance between long-term accounts and accounts that provide immediate liquidity and access. ② Second is the growth on the money from interest earned on the money you have in your account. Some assets earn compound interest and grow every year. Others either appreciate or depreciate. Some accounts could be worth a great deal but you have to sell or close them to access the money. That would be like killing your Golden Goose. Having access to money to make it through downtimes is an important factor in sustaining long-term growth. ③ Third is the reduction of any liens you may have against these accounts. As you pay off liens against your collateral positions, your collateral capacity will increase allowing you to access more capital in the future. The goose never quit laying golden eggs – uninterrupted compounding. Years ago, shortly after starting my first business, I laughed at a banker that told me I needed at least $25,000 in my business account in order to borrow $10,000. My business owner friends thought that was ridiculously funny too. We didn’t understand collateral capacity and quite a few other things about money.

Since emotions have to be programmed into robots from the outside, manufacturers may offer a menu of emotions carefully chosen on the basis of whether they are necessary, useful, or will increase bonding with the owner. In all likelihood, robots will be programmed to have only a few human emotions, depending on the situation. Perhaps the emotion most valued by the robot’s owner will be loyalty. One wants a robot that faithfully carries out its commands without complaints, that understands the needs of the master and anticipates them. The last thing an owner will want is a robot with an attitude, one that talks back, criticizes people, and whines. Helpful criticisms are important, but they must be made in a constructive, tactful way. Also, if humans give it conflicting commands, the robot should know to ignore all of them except those coming from its owner. Empathy will be another emotion that will be valued by the owner. Robots that have empathy will understand the problems of others and will come to their aid. By interpreting facial movements and listening to tone of voice, robots will be able to identify when a person is in distress and will provide assistance when possible. Strangely, fear is another emotion that is desirable. Evolution gave us the feeling of fear for a reason, to avoid certain things that are dangerous to us. Even though robots will be made of steel, they should fear certain things that can damage them, like falling off tall buildings or entering a raging fire. A totally fearless robot is a useless one if it destroys itself. But certain emotions may have to be deleted, forbidden, or highly regulated, such as anger. Given that robots could be built to have great physical strength, an angry robot could create tremendous problems in the home and workplace. Anger could get in the way of its duties and cause great damage to property. (The original evolutionary purpose of anger was to show our dissatisfaction. This can be done in a rational, dispassionate way, without getting angry.) Another emotion that should be deleted is the desire to be in command. A bossy robot will only make trouble and might challenge the judgment and wishes of the owner. (This point will also be important later, when we discuss whether robots will one day take over from humans.) Hence the robot will have to defer to the wishes of the owner, even if this may not be the best path. But perhaps the most difficult emotion to convey is humor, which is a glue that can bond total strangers together. A simple joke can defuse a tense situation or inflame it. The basic mechanics of humor are simple: they involve a punch line that is unanticipated. But the subtleties of humor can be enormous. In fact, we often size up other people on the basis of how they react to certain jokes. If humans use humor as a gauge to measure other humans, then one can appreciate the difficulty of creating a robot that can tell if a joke is funny or not.