Spiral Out Of Control Quotes

Just now he was on a mind-blowing adventure and it was rapidly spiralling out of control, and this is what he needed to concentrate his mind on. How could he squeeze Daley to get the book back; that’s if Daley had it in his possession in the first place? The next few days were going to be crucial.

People are, at their heart, constantly moving toward a state of entropy. Much like this ship. We’re all spiraling out of control.

Let me explain it to you then. I just had a beautiful girl trust me enough to touch her and see her in a way no one else ever has. I got to hold her and watch her and feel her as she came apart in my arms. It was like nothing else I'd ever experienced. She was breathtaking and she was responding to me. She wanted me. I was the one making her spiral out of control.

Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control.

My emotions are spiraling out of control. I never promised I would be logical at a time like this!

He caught hold of my hand. “Sydney, please don’t do this,” he begged. “No matter how confident you feel, no matter how careful you think you are, things will spiral out of control.” “They already have,” I said, opening the passenger door. “And I’m going to stop fighting them. Thank you for everything, Marcus. I mean it.” “Wait, Sydney,” he called. “Just tell me one thing.” I glanced back and waited. “Where did this come from? When you called me to tell me you were coming, you said you’d realized it was the smart thing to do. What made you change your mind?” I gave him a smile that I hoped was as dazzling as one of his. “I realized I’m in love.” Marcus, startled, looked around as though he expected to see my object d’amour in the car with us. “And you just realized that? Did you just have some sort of vision?” “Didn’t need to,” I said, thinking of Wolfe’s ill-fated trip to the Orkneys. “It’s always been right in front of me.

You can be doing great for months, maybe even years, and then boom, something happens, something triggers an episode. Then your life spirals into one big tornado of emotions that has swept you up right out from under yourself, and you lose control of everything, and you just spin around and around inside a dark, twisty, cloud, while everything flies out of control.

It was the problem with creating a web of lies and deceit. It spiraled out of control until it took on a life of its own, and she was helpless to correct it. In too deep. She’d been trapped by her own solution.

When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity. They take down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour their component parts. The process is known as apoptosis or programmed cell death. Every day billions of your cells die for your benefit and billions of others clean up the mess. Cells can also die violently- for instance, when infected- but mostly they die because they are told to. Indeed, if not told to live- if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell- cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance. When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer. Cancer cells are really just confused cells. Cells make this mistake fairly regularly, but the body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with it. It is only very rarely that the process spirals out of control. On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions. Cancer is bad luck in every possible sense of the term.

Mary Daly, author of Beyond God the Father, points out that the model of the universe in which a male God rules the cosmos from outside serves to legitimize male control of social institutions.

He's never fired a gun in his life," Palamedes said. "He abhors weapons." As Palamedes spoke,the group could see Shakespeare put the tonbogiri to his shoulder,then jerk three times. Two of the attacking vimanas spun out of control,both of them crashing into two more. The flour flaming craft spiraled into the sea. "But then he's always been full of surprises," Palamedes added.

If your child fails at something merely express your confidence in their ability to handle the consequences. If they behave irresponsibly, merely point out the consequences to themselves and others, and again express your trust that they will learn. As soon as possible give them another opportunity to be appropriately responsible. Do not slip into the downward spiral of blame, shame, and control. It doesn’t work.

When everything is spiraling out of control, no one can dig in and hold steady. Not really. They lash out, desperate to grab onto anything. They lash out.

Rush please," I begged, fighting the urge to grab his hand and force him to bring me relief from the throbbing underneath his touch "I need..." I didn't know what I needed. I just needed. Rush lifted his head and ran his nose up my neck then pressed a kiss to my chin. "I know what you need. I'm just not sure I can handle watching you get it. You've got me all kinds of worked up, girl. I'm trying hard to be a good boy. I can't lose control in the back of damn car." I shook my head. He couldn't stop. I didn't want him to be good. I wanted him inside me. Now. "Please, don't be good. Please," I begged. Rush let out a rugged breath "Shit, baby. Stop it. I'm going to explode. I'll give you your release but when I finally bury myself inside you for the first time you won't be sprawled in the back of my car. You'll be in my bed." His hand moved before I could respond and my eyes rolled back in my head. "That's it. Come for me, sweet Blaire. Come on my hand and let me feel it. I want to watch you." His words sent me spiralling over the edge of the cliff I'd been trying so hard to reach. "Ruuuuuush!" I heard the loud cry that came from me as i went falling into complete bliss. I knew I was crying for him, screaming out his name and maybe even clawing at him but I could no longer control myself. The ecstasy was too much.

Myths tend to spiral out of control. Do you howl at the full moon and steal maidens to devour?" "Depends on the maiden," he said. Was he flirting with me? Devouring didn't really go with flirting, but his tone of voice did. Was this how werewolves flirted? Hey, baby, if I had to kill any girl and eat her flesh, it would be you... clean sweep

Men started praying to you, begging for a taste. That legend of yours spiraled out of control. You gave the people hope. They were told you were all they ever needed.

Quite without warning, I began to cry. No sobbing, no throat-gripping spasms. Water simply welled in my eyes and flowed down my cheeks, slow as cold honey. A quiet acknowledgment of despair as things spiraled slowly out of control.

People react differently to trauma. There are those who lean on their closest family and friends. There are those who fight so they can smile again. And there are those who close in on themselves and eventually spiral out of control.

He caught hold of my hand. "Sydney, please don't do this," he begged. "No matter how confident you feel, no matter how careful you are, things will spiral out of control." "They already have," I said, opening the passenger door. "And I'm going to stop fighting them. Thank you for everything, Marcus. I mean it." "Wait, Sydney," he called. "Just tell me one thing." I glanced back and waited. "Where did this come from? When you called me to tell me you were coming, you said you'd realized it was the smart thing to do. What made you change your mind?" I gave him a smile that I hoped was as dazzling as one of his. "I realized I'm in love." Marcus, startled, looked around as though he expected to see my object d'armour in the car with us. "And you just realized that? Did you have some sort of vision?" "Didn't need to," I said, thinking of Wolfe's ill-fated trip to the Orkneys. "It's always been right in front of me.

Guard your tongue, and use it for good instead of evil. How many marriages or friendships have been destroyed because of criticism that spiraled out of control? How many relationships have broken down because of a word spoken thoughtlessly or in anger? A harsh word can’t be taken back; no apology can fully repair its damage.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing’s tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight’s powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety.

scary amazing terrifying hot crazy wild awful out-of-control.

People *can* be happy and sad at the same time, I know - it's just that sometimes the sad parts spiral out of control" -Lizzie

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

I just want to hold you. I want to be near you.” She whispered, “I feel like I'm spiraling out of control and you are the one that keeps me together. I don't know why, or how, but that's just what it is. - Melody Roland

When life spirals out of control, you start to grab onto everything you can. Eventually, you stop spinning, but it's hard to say what finally grounded you. Was it the many things you experienced during the trial or just the last thing you held onto?

As theologian and emeritus professor D. A. Carson has observed, People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.1

I think, in retrospect, that it would have been better if I had denied that I had pains in my legs, if I had taken it all back, or brightly said that I was well now. But because I didn’t, the whole business began to spiral out of control. I still believed that honesty was the best policy; but the brute fact was, I was an invalid now, and I wasn’t entitled to a policy, not a policy of my own. I feared that if I didn’t tell the strict truth, my integrity would be eroded; I would have nothing then, no place to stand. The more I said that I had a physical illness, the more they said I had a mental illness. The more I questioned the nature, the reality of the mental illness, the more I was found to be in denial, deluded. I was confused; when I spoke of my confusion, my speech turned into a symptom. No one ventured a diagnosis: not out loud. It was in the nature of educated young women, it was believed, to be hysterical, neurotic, difficult, and out of control, and the object was to get them back under control, not by helping them examine their lives, or fix their practical problems—in my case, silverfish, sulking family, poverty, cold—but by giving them drugs which would make them indifferent to their mental pain—and in my case, indifferent to physical pain too.

Musk’s method, as it had been since the Falcon 1 rocket, was to iterate fast, take risks, be brutal, accept some flameouts, then try again. “We were changing the engines while the plane was spiraling out of control,” he says of Twitter. “It’s a miracle we survived.

His mouth comes down on mine, harder now, more demanding, a raw, hungry need in him rising to the surface. “You belong to me,” he growls. “Say it.” “Yes. Yes, I belong to you.” His mouth finds mine again, demanding, taking, drawing me under his spell. “Say it again,” he demands, nipping my lip, squeezing my breast and nipple, and sending a ripple of pleasure straight to my sex. “I belong to you,” I pant. He lifts me off the ground with the possessive curve of his hand around my backside, angling my hips to thrust harder, deeper. “Again,” he orders, driving into me, his cock hitting the farthest point of me and blasting against sensitive nerve endings. “Oh … ah … I … I belong to you.” His mouth dips low, his hair tickling my neck, his teeth scraping my shoulders at the same moment he pounds into me and the world spins around me, leaving nothing but pleasure and need and more need. I am suddenly hot only where he touches, and freezing where I yearn to be touched. Lifting my leg, I shackle his hip, ravenous beyond measure, climbing to the edge of bliss, reaching for it at the same time I’m trying desperately to hold back. Chris is merciless, wickedly wild, grinding and rocking, pumping. “I love you, Sara,” he confesses hoarsely, taking my mouth, swallowing the shallow, hot breath I release, and punishing me with a hard thrust that snaps the last of the lightly held control I possess. Possessing me. A fire explodes low in my belly and spirals downward, seizing my muscles, and I begin to spasm around his shaft, trembling with the force of my release. With a low growl, his muscles ripple beneath my touch and his cock pulses, his hot semen spilling inside me. We moan together, lost in the climax of a roller-coaster ride of pain and pleasure, spanning days apart, and finally collapse in a heap and just lie there. Slowly, I let my leg ease from his hip to the ground, and Chris rolls me to my side to face him. Still inside me, he holds me close, pulling the jacket up around my back, trailing fingers over my jaw. “And I belong to you.

You quietly slipped into my life, took my hand, and carried me away in a whirlwind of emotions. But then, one day, you just let go, leaving me to spiral out of control until I crashed into a wall. I shattered like glass, and now I'm left walking over the broken pieces, each step reopening the same old wounds. But why?

Neil had grown up wondering why Kevin and Riko were in that room eight years ago and how they'd overcome it. He'd wondered why their luck and circumstances were so different that they could become international stars while Neil's life spiraled so quickly out of control. He'd hated and worshipped them all his life, jealous of their successes and desperate for them to excel. Now it seemed he'd been wrong all along. Kevin hadn't escaped either. No matter what they did or who they became, maybe they never would.

Somehow this conversation had spiraled out of control and he was about to learn the secret destiny of cows, a revelation that Joe McCloud was not ready for.

connection calms the nervous system, soothing children’s reactivity in the moment and moving them toward a place where they can hear us, learn, and even make their own Whole-Brain decisions. When the emotional gauge gets turned up, connection is the modulator that keeps the feelings from getting too high. Without connection, emotions can continue to spiral out of control.

My obsession with Stella might be spiraling out of control, but at least I wasn’t attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies for a charity she liked and planting trees for an Earth Day photo op.

Gosh, British accents should be banned. If Michael had an American accent, I would have never spiralled out of control and questioned my very normal sexuality. I would have felt nothing at all.

He believed the future of the nation was at stake, and he returned day after day to fight his war against the “slaveocracy.” And Quincy voters sent him back to Congress again and again. Louisa fretted about his health and safety, but she had lost all influence over him and could do nothing to restrain him. He was unstoppable—a meteor spiraling out of control in the political firmament.

In conclusion, your worries lead to fears, which gives you anxiety. When you get anxious, you forget to use logic, and then worry takes over and sends you into a spiral of out-of-control thinking.

I… that took a lot of guts, what you did today.” “Can’t really pretend it didn’t happen anymore, right?” And being a better person doesn’t mean hiding from or lying about who I used to be. “So much of what you talked about is shit that happens in school very day, Aria. The gossip, the text messages, the comments. People do it all the time. Everyone does it. I’ve done it. Doesn’t make it okay but… I can see how it spiralled out of control like that.” I shrug. “I figured, if my story makes people stop and think about what their words could do to a person, then I should tell it right?” “Right.” He nods slowly, his eyes roaming my face. “I miss you,” I don’t mean to say it aloud, but it slips out anyway. He offers me a sad smile. “I miss you, too, AJ.

The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the result of credit inflation; (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians would have it) which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the "long run" is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished. At moderate workloads, this effect might be frustrating: a general sense that completing your work is taking longer than it should. As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new. This feedback loop can quickly spiral out of control, pushing your workload higher and higher until you find yourself losing your entire day to overhead activities: meeting after meeting conducted against a background hum of unceasing email and chat. Eventually the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions added after hours—in the evenings and early mornings, or over the weekend—in a desperate attempt to avoid a full collapse of all useful output. You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.

(...) The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network. The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze. Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material. These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold. The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing.

. You are overfed yet under-nourished. Your body needs specific nutrients to run properly or you will get mentally and physically sick. I’m talking about illnesses such as heart disease, some cancers, diabetes and depression, for starters. So, if you’re not eating the right foods—or your “toxic waste” is inhibiting nutrient absorption—your mind will constantly “scream” at your stomach to eat more. It does this in the form of cravings and hunger. Problem is, most people just eat more “nutrient-dead food” and your body continues to starve and cravings spiral out of control.

She had learned, with Izzy’s birth, how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn’t know how to unclench.

But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.

It was almost painful to watch,that kite of mine. Tethered to the string in my hand. Dancing in the sky all alone. My breath caught in my throat, my pulse beating wild and crazy on my chest. My heart soaring with every dip and turn of the kite,as if I were flying along,instead of standing with my two feet on the ground, squinting against the sun to see the dance. What if it fell? What if the breeze took it away? I counted the seconds until I could reel it back in. I was that kite. Fragile against the wind. Soaring one minute. Spiraling straight down next. Just looking for something to hold me up. Before I spun out of control and flew away. Dissappearing fron sight.

Notice what you notice. You can’t control the random bits of information that pop into your head. But you can start to notice your biases. When you get annoyed that you’re stuck at a red light think, Oh, that’s interesting. I noticed this red light, but I didn’t notice the last green light I made. In short, try practicing nonjudgmental awareness. Nonjudgmental awareness is a form of mindfulness that simply means noticing without reacting emotionally, even when things don’t turn out as you expected. Awareness does not require emotion, because emotion and awareness are mediated by different brain regions. Noticing a mistake might automatically trigger the emotional amygdala, but becoming aware of your own reaction activates the prefrontal cortex, which calms the amygdala.

Combat, like anything in life, has inherent layers of complexities. Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster. Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise. Everyone that is part of the mission must know and understand his or her role in the mission and what to do in the event of likely contingencies. As a leader, it doesn’t matter how well you feel you have presented the information or communicated an order, plan, tactic, or strategy. If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed. You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands.

We all live in a highly strung, overstimulated, highly cerebral world. Overthinking puts our ordinary cognitive instincts in overdrive. Excessive thinking occurs when our thought processes are out of control, causing us distress. Endless analysis of life and of self is usually unwanted, unstoppable, and self-defeating. Ordinarily, our brains help us solve problems and understand things more clearly—but overthinking does the opposite.

To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one another’s behavior to estimate an item’s value, look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control.

And I was – still am – in a state of permanent terror that the pancreatitis may return. I still have nightmares about hospital and it is two years since my last admission. Those nights in A&E haunt me, and will probably do so forever, with their brutality and pain. No wonder I took a bit more, then a bit more, until it all spiralled out of control. No wonder I tried to run from those damaging memories into the arms of mother opiate. Charlie

Well," he asked, "whaddya expect?" It was so obviously a rhetorical question that of course I answered it. My truth impulse seemed stronger around this boy,my impulse control way under par. "I would expect you to be dancing." His expression was unreadable in the limited light. "Is that an invitation?" "No. An observation." He shrugged. "Okay. I needed a break. It was either keep an eye on Chase while he pukes up a fifth of cheap rum in the guys' bathroom or follow the girls into the ladies' room." I almost smiled and told him about Willing's bathrooms and me. Instead, some truly horrific and irresistible impulse had me announcing, "Amanda looks really pretty tonight." "So do you." Bizarrely, I felt my breath catch in my chest, and for a long, awful second, I thought I might cry. I gripped the top of my pad tightly, concentrated on the spiral metal binding where it dug into my skin. "It's a cool costume," he said. "Water nymph?" "Sea goddess," I answered quietly. "Roman." "Hmm." Alex was staring out toward the garden now,looking so at ease that I went from pretzel to knot. Could it really be that easy for him? To say things like he did without thinking? Without meaning them at all? "Too many mermaids tonight. Not that I have anything against mermaids.Mermaids are hot. I mean,you saw my drawing." I nodded. "You know," he went on, "that day in the hall,you compared my stuff to two Japanese artists-" I nodded again,even though he was looking out into the darkened gardens now and not at me. "Suzuki Harunobu and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. They were eighteenth and nineteeth-century woodblock print masters-" "Ella," he interrupted. "I know who they are." "Oh." "In fact, I have a couple original Kuniyoshi prints." "Oh.Wow.Wow.

More recently, Dallas Willard put it this way: Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.5 Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control. To make a bad problem worse, this is exacerbated by our cultural moment of digital marketing from a society built around the twin gods of accumulation and accomplishment. Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness. They say we see upward of four thousand ads a day, all designed to stoke the fire of desire in our bellies. Buy this. Do this. Eat this. Drink this. Have this. Watch this. Be this. In his book on the Sabbath, Wayne Muller opined, “It is as if we have inadvertently stumbled into some horrific wonderland.”6 Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.

Twist sat in front of his desk as the office spun around him. He remembered that feeling—relentless dizziness. At nine years old, Harry’s parents had taken him on a rollercoaster ride. They’d said they wanted their steady child to experience a moment of unbounded exhilaration. Harry was pushed into a situation he couldn’t control, thrown around and flipped upside down until the content of his guts reached his mouth. He tried to focus on the physics and the engineering powering his experience, but nothing worked, and he screamed and he threw up and begged to get out. Stuck in a car, close to the clouds, there was no way out.

Pay attention to everything the dying person says. You might want to keep pens and a spiral notebook beside the bed so that anyone can jot down notes about gestures, conversations, or anything out of the ordinary said by the dying person. Talk with one another about these comments and gestures. • Remember that there may be important messages in any communication, however vague or garbled. Not every statement made by a dying person has significance, but heed them all so as not to miss the ones that do. • Watch for key signs: a glassy-eyed look; the appearance of staring through you; distractedness or secretiveness; seemingly inappropriate smiles or gestures, such as pointing, reaching toward someone or something unseen, or waving when no one is there; efforts to pick at the covers or get out of bed for no apparent reason; agitation or distress at your inability to comprehend something the dying person has tried to say. • Respond to anything you don’t understand with gentle inquiries. “Can you tell me what’s happening?” is sometimes a helpful way to initiate this kind of conversation. You might also try saying, “You seem different today. Can you tell me why?” • Pose questions in open-ended, encouraging terms. For example, if a dying person whose mother is long dead says, “My mother’s waiting for me,” turn that comment into a question: “Mother’s waiting for you?” or “I’m so glad she’s close to you. Can you tell me about it?” • Accept and validate what the dying person tells you. If he says, “I see a beautiful place!” say, “That’s wonderful! Can you tell me more about it?” or “I’m so pleased. I can see that it makes you happy,” or “I’m so glad you’re telling me this. I really want to understand what’s happening to you. Can you tell me more?” • Don’t argue or challenge. By saying something like “You couldn’t possibly have seen Mother, she’s been dead for ten years,” you could increase the dying person’s frustration and isolation, and run the risk of putting an end to further attempts at communicating. • Remember that a dying person may employ images from life experiences like work or hobbies. A pilot may talk about getting ready to go for a flight; carry the metaphor forward: “Do you know when it leaves?” or “Is there anyone on the plane you know?” or “Is there anything I can do to help you get ready for takeoff?” • Be honest about having trouble understanding. One way is to say, “I think you’re trying to tell me something important and I’m trying very hard, but I’m just not getting it. I’ll keep on trying. Please don’t give up on me.” • Don’t push. Let the dying control the breadth and depth of the conversation—they may not be able to put their experiences into words; insisting on more talk may frustrate or overwhelm them. • Avoid instilling a sense of failure in the dying person. If the information is garbled or the delivery impossibly vague, show that you appreciate the effort by saying, “I can see that this is hard for you; I appreciate your trying to share it with me,” or “I can see you’re getting tired/angry/frustrated. Would it be easier if we talked about this later?” or “Don’t worry. We’ll keep trying and maybe it will come.” • If you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything. Sometimes the best response is simply to touch the dying person’s hand, or smile and stroke his or her forehead. Touching gives the very important message “I’m with you.” Or you could say, “That’s interesting, let me think about it.” • Remember that sometimes the one dying picks an unlikely confidant. Dying people often try to communicate important information to someone who makes them feel safe—who won’t get upset or be taken aback by such confidences. If you’re an outsider chosen for this role, share the information as gently and completely as possible with the appropriate family members or friends. They may be more familiar with innuendos in a message because they know the person well.

What can we do to maintain slowness in the face of those periods of busyness? How can we avoid overload, exhaustion, or even burnout? Perhaps unsurprisingly, my answer is simply to pay attention. I recognize the way I'm inclined to stay up late, the way I will procrastinate at every option- and instead of spiraling into that overwhelming sense of too much, I check in with myself. Why am I feeling this way? What has changed? What is there more of? What is there less of? Become better at recognizing the signs of a looming backslide and pay close attention to the areas of our lives that have the greatest impact, ensuring they never slip too far out of hand. Nicholas Bate refers to this regular checking in as "taking your MEDS" or more specifically, paying attention to: - Mindfulness - Exercise - Diet - Sleep Once I recognize which of these areas has changed, its simpler (not necessarily easier) to recognize the issue and start fixing it. Sometimes the changes aren't in my control, so I need to look for ways of finding slow by creating more opportunities for a moment of deep breathing or paying close attention to whats in front of me. But other times, I've simply lost sight of what works, and its a matter of adding more of these things I've neglected- Mindfulness, simplicity, kindness- and reducing the things that don't serve me well. Above all else, though, I simply go back to my Why. I call to mind the foundation of this life I want. The vivid imaging of a life well lived. The loved ones, the generosity, the adventure, and the world I want to leave behind. And if that feels too big, I call to mind even smaller reminders, like the warm pressure of my kids hands in mine, the wholeness of a good conversation with Ben, the lightness of simply sitting quietly. Our Why is the antidote to overload. Its a call back to the important things and a reminder that we don't need to carry the weight of everything- only those things that are important to us.

The game resembles the act of writing in that you can’t help but compete with yourself: no one is watching, but you still desire perfection, even if such a thing is unattainable. In fact, the toss of a Frisbee is a bit like the writing of a sentence. Each must move along a certain line to keep the game going forward. Each can go astray, spin out of control. At times what is called for is a long, unspooling line, a toss that slices and circles and hovers in the wind, feinting one way before turning back in another, just as a sentence can move in spirals around a central idea, curving ever closer to the center, the heart, the rock. Other times you need a direct approach. Straight and crisp. A shot from short range.

I’ll teach you as much as I can before we arrive in Skull’s Bay,” Rowan said. “We may find someone there who escaped the butchers—someone to instruct you more than I can.” “You taught Aelin.” Again, silence. Then, “Aelin is my heart. I taught her what I knew, and it worked because our magics understood each other deep down—just as our souls did. You are … different. Your magic is something I have rarely encountered. You need someone who grasps it, or at least how to train you in it. But I can teach you control; I can teach you about spiraling down into your power, and taking care of yourself.” Dorian nodded his thanks. “The first time you met Aelin, did you know … ?” A snort. “No. Gods, no. We wanted to kill each other.” The amusement flickered. “She was … in a very dark place. We both were. But we led each other out of it. Found a way—together.

It was the first time I got to grips with the notion of that kind of trust and, more so, of relinquishing control. Giving myself to something bigger that might have a purpose for my life. Certainly not an easy concept, but it suddenly seemed more sensible and more humble than thinking it was all down to me; that I had to make sense of all life's twists and turns and downward spirals and darkness. That I had to grip on, and it was all my fault if it didn't work out, even if what I did was my absolute best. That hadn't been working out for me in the past. I wanted what Peggy had. I wanted my existence to be one of purpose and with discipline over my choices, following as obediently and calmly as I could a thing which I believed had my best interests at heart and loved me unconditionally. The latter being the crunch point I suppose. That if a God is 'up there' loving me unconditionally (as Peggy knows I love her), I would rather believe that than not.

Growing up I was afraid of heights; if I looked down I got instantly queasy. So what did I decide to do a few years ago? Go skydiving with my sisters. I stood on the ground, waiting for my turn, watching them jump out of a small plane strapped to some dude’s back. All I could see were these tiny blond dots floating in the air. Then one of the instructors (thankfully he was on his own and not tied to a Hough!) lost control of his chute. It got twisted and he began to spiral toward the ground. Everyone watching below gasped; he was plunging to his death. At the very last second, he pulled his auxiliary chute and glided down to safety. After landing, he walked right over to me. “Phew, that was a close one. Okay, Derek, you’re up next. You’re comin’ with me.” I felt my stomach leap into my throat. Are you serious? You’re a dead man walking and you want me to go up with you? Then reason kicked in: What was the likelihood lightning would strike twice and his chute would fail again? And if it did, clearly the guy knew how to get out of trouble. “Um, okay…I guess.” I read the disclaimer and signed it. In a nutshell, it said, “If you die, we’re not responsible.” Thanks a lot.

They were all joking about the party at my place when they walked away. As I uncapped my drink, I noticed Michael was hanging back a bit. “Got something on your mind?” I called out, gesturing at him with my chin. He was a good player, he worked hard on the field, and I respected him. I got the feeling, though, that I wasn’t going to like what he wanted to say. I could tell by the hesitation in his face and body language. He probably disagreed with some of the plays I wanted to try tonight and didn’t want to piss me off in fear I would freeze him out on the field. But I wasn’t like that. I left personal shit in the locker room. There was no room for drama in the game. He walked back over in front of me as he adjusted the strap on his shoulder. “I’m not sure I should say anything.” “Just say it, man. It’s cool.” “I saw your girl this morning.” He started, and everything in me went cold. This wasn’t about football. This was personal. “You looking at Rimmel?” I asked, my voice calm and low. His eyes widened a little, but he shook his head. “No, man. I probably wouldn’t have known it was her, but she was wearing your hoodie.” I nodded for him to continue. “She was in the hall, outside her class,” he said, glancing at me. He needed to get to the fucking point already. I was losing patience. “That guy Zach was with her. It looked pretty intense.” I jerked upright. “What?” I growled. What the fuck was Rimmel doing with Zach? Why was he talking to her? “He was grabbing her arm. Jerking her around pretty good.” Red tinged my vision and adrenaline started pumping in my veins. “What did you just say?” Michael nodded grimly. “It’s why I noticed them. He grabbed her and she cried out. She told him to let go, but he just jerked her more. She almost fell.” A noise rumbled out of my chest and anger so swift and hot that it hurt filled me. “Tell me you pulled him off her,” I intoned. “I was going to. I called out to them and started forward, but that’s when he let her go and walked away.” I was going to kill him. Dead. “I asked her if she was okay. I don’t think she knew I’m on the team with you.” “Probably not,” I muttered, still trying to control the anger spiraling out of control inside me. “She said she was.” He continued, but I heard the doubt in his voice. “But?” The word came out harsher than I intended, but he didn’t seem to notice. “But her wrist was pretty red. Looked like it was going to bruise.” Thought ceased in my head. Rationality evaporated. “Thanks for telling me,” I said and rushed away in the opposite direction of my next class.

On many occasions in our nearly thirty years of marriage my wife and I have had a disagreement—sometimes a deep disagreement. Our unity appeared to be broken, at some unknowably profound level, and we were not able to easily resolve the rupture by talking. We became trapped, instead, in emotional, angry and anxious argument. We agreed that when such circumstances arose we would separate, briefly: she to one room, me to another. This was often quite difficult, because it is hard to disengage in the heat of an argument, when anger generates the desire to defeat and win. But it seemed better than risking the consequences of a dispute that threatened to spiral out of control. Alone, trying to calm down, we would each ask ourselves the same single question: What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about? However small, however distant…we had each made some error. Then we would reunite, and share the results of our questioning: Here’s how I was wrong…. The problem with asking yourself such a question is that you must truly want the answer. And the problem with doing that is that you won’t like the answer. When you are arguing with someone, you want to be right, and you want the other person to be wrong. Then it’s them that has to sacrifice something and change, not you, and that’s much preferable. If it’s you that’s wrong and you that must change, then you have to reconsider yourself—your memories of the past, your manner of being in the present, and your plans for the future. Then you must resolve to improve and figure out how to do that. Then you actually have to do it. That’s exhausting. It takes repeated practice, to instantiate the new perceptions and make the new actions habitual. It’s much easier just not to realize, admit and engage. It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain wilfully blind. But it’s at such a point that you must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace.216 You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate. You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong—defeated and wrong. Do that ten thousand times and your marriage will be over (or you will wish it was). To choose the alternative—to seek peace—you have to decide that you want the answer, more than you want to be right. That’s the way out of the prison of your stubborn preconceptions. That’s the prerequisite for negotiation. That’s to truly abide by the principle of Rule 2 (Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping).

She squirmed with delight, making him groan. Her wriggling must test him. Some devil made her move again. "Jesus, Grace," he gritted out. "You try my limits." "I hope so," she purred. He felt so wonderful inside her. As if he supplied part of her that she only realized now she'd lacked. She bent her knees and tilted her hips so he went deeper. She ran her hands down the tense muscles of his back. He flexed under her touch. "That felt good," she said breathlessly. "Do it again." "If I start, I won't stop." his voice was rough. "Start." She shifted again and felt him shudder. "Grace," he grated out. He withdrew, then plunged into her. Her nails sank into his back and her womb clenched in welcome. With deliberate slowness, he set the familiar rhythm. Except none of this was familiar. Every time he settled in her body, he forged an emotional connection that nothing could sever. On and on he went. Possession. Release. Possession. Release. Every thrust another link in the chain that bound her to him. Eventually his inhuman control fractured and he drove into her faster, more wildly. With every thrust, her excitement built. It echoed how she'd felt when he kissed her between the legs. That had been wonderful, astounding.But this was more powerful. Because he was with her. He pounded into her as though he meant to crush her. She didn't care. She never wanted this spiraling feeling to end. The storm swirled her higher and higher. Ecstasy poised her on a knife edge. She cried out and rose to meet him. He changed the angle of his penetration and went even deeper. The pleasure edged close to pain. She tensed as he pressed hard inside her. Then her womb opened and she took all of him. Her inner muscles convulsed into spasms of delight and she screamed. Violent rapture flung her against the doors of heaven itself. She was lost in a hot, dark world where nothing existed except Matthew. All she could do was hold him and prayed she survived. Through the tempest that blasted her, he reached his climax. He groaned and convulsed in her arms. For this moment, he was unequivocally hers and she reveled in the possession.

The key to preventing this is balance. I see the give and take between different constituencies in a business as central to its success. So when I talk about taming the Beast, what I really mean is that keeping its needs balanced with the needs of other, more creative facets of your company will make you stronger. Let me give you an example of what I mean, drawn from the business I know best. In animation, we have many constituencies: story, art, budget, technology, finance, production, marketing, and consumer products. The people within each constituency have priorities that are important—and often opposing. The writer and director want to tell the most affecting story possible; the production designer wants the film to look beautiful; the technical directors want flawless effects; finance wants to keep the budgets within limits; marketing wants a hook that is easily sold to potential viewers; the consumer products people want appealing characters to turn into plush toys and to plaster on lunchboxes and T-shirts; the production managers try to keep everyone happy—and to keep the whole enterprise from spiraling out of control. And so on. Each group is focused on its own needs, which means that no one has a clear view of how their decisions impact other groups; each group is under pressure to perform well, which means achieving stated goals. Particularly in the early months of a project, these goals—which are subgoals, really, in the making of a film—are often easier to articulate and explain than the film itself. But if the director is able to get everything he or she wants, we will likely end up with a film that’s too long. If the marketing people get their way, we will only make a film that mimics those that have already been “proven” to succeed—in other words, familiar to viewers but in all likelihood a creative failure. Each group, then, is trying to do the right thing, but they’re pulling in different directions. If any one of those groups “wins,” we lose. In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win. Their interaction with one another—the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals—yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.

I glanced over and saw Wyatt glaring at me. Journey’s “Lovin’ Touchin’, Squeezin’” was playing on the radio. “What?” I asked. “You secretly hate me, don’t you.” He gestured toward the radio. “You can’t stand the thought of me taking a much needed nap and leaving you to drive without conversation. You’re torturing me with this sappy stuff.” “It’s Journey. I love this song.” Wyatt mumbled something under his breath, picked up the CD case, and started looking through it. He paused with a choked noise, his eyes growing huge. “You’re joking, Sam. Justin Bieber? What are you, a twelve-year old girl?” There’s gonna be one less lonely girl, I sang in my head. That was a great song. How could he not like that song? Still, I squirmed a bit in embarrassment. “A twelve-year old girl gave me that CD,” I lied. “For my birthday.” Wyatt snorted. “It’s a good thing you’re a terrible liar. Otherwise, I’d be horrified at the thought that a demon has been hanging out with a bunch of giggling pre-teens.” He continued to thumb through the CDs. “Air Supply Greatest Hits? No, no, I’m wrong here. It’s an Air Supply cover band in Spanish.” He waved the offending CD in my face. “Sam, what on earth are you thinking? How did you even get this thing?” “Some tenant left it behind,” I told him. “We evicted him, and there were all these CDs. Most were in Spanish, but I’ve got a Barry Manilow in there, too. That one’s in English.” Wyatt looked at me a moment, and with the fastest movement I’ve ever seen, rolled down the window and tossed the case of CDs out onto the highway. It barely hit the road before a semi plowed over it. I was pissed. “You asshole. I liked those CDs. I don’t come over to your house and trash your video games, or drive over your controllers. If you think that will make me listen to that Dubstep crap for the next two hours, then you better fucking think again.” “I’m sorry Sam, but it’s past time for a musical intervention here. You can’t keep listening to this stuff. It wasn’t even remotely good when it was popular, and it certainly hasn’t gained anything over time. You need to pull yourself together and try to expand your musical interests a bit. You’re on a downward spiral, and if you keep this up, you’ll find yourself friendless, living in a box in a back alley, stinking of your own excrement, and covered in track marks.” I looked at him in surprise. I had no idea Air Supply led to lack of bowel control and hard core drug usage. I wondered if it was something subliminal, a kind of compulsion programmed into the lyrics. Was Russell Hitchcock a sorcerer? He didn’t look that menacing to me, but sorcerers were pretty sneaky. Even so, I was sure Justin Bieber was okay. As soon as we hit a rest stop, I was ordering a replacement from my iPhone.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

As I watched Walter's thug make a crude and clumsy attempt to treat Clarence's wound, it sank in just how much danger we were in. The danger we seemed to keep putting ourselves in. The original idea of tracking down some odd items that had strange powers had been almost like a fairy tale adventure. Some mystery men had stolen them and we set out to get them back. For God and country, or something like that. It was exciting, as Clarence said, but the whole thing had spiraled out of control.

In the words of leadership guru Marshall Goldsmith, “What got you here won’t get you there.” Market share and revenue growth earn headlines, but you can’t achieve customer and revenue scale without scaling up your organization, in terms of the size and scope of your staff, as well as your financial, product, and technology strategy. If the organization doesn’t grow in lockstep with its revenues and customer base, things can quickly spiral out of control. For example, during a period of blitzscaling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Oracle Corporation focused so single-mindedly on sales growth that its organization lagged badly on both technology (where it fell behind archrival Sybase’s) and finance and nearly went bankrupt as a result. It took the turnaround efforts of Ray Lane and Jeff Henley to stave off disaster and reposition Oracle for its later success.

It is a process running in circles-in circles which get narrower, like the coils of a spiral, as the cell becomes more and more specialised. The genes control the activities of the cell by relatively simple coded instructions which are spelt out in the complex operations of the cell-body. But the activities of the genes are in turn guided by feedbacks from the cell-body, which is exposed to the hierarchy of environments. this contains, apart from the chemical triggers, a number of other factors in the 'epigenetic landscape' which are relevant to the cell's future, and about which the genes must be informed.

As much as I acted like I didn’t care about relationships: having sex just for the fun of it. I was still a girl inside and I still had feelings. I hated myself for the way I treated people. I hated the person I had become. The guilt for treating guys badly and acting destructively took a toll on me mentally. At all times I was moments away from a breakdown, but I didn’t see a way out. I didn’t see an end to the madness. I was spiraling out of control, but there didn’t seem to be a bottom for me to hit.

Quincy’s bad  habit was quickly spiraling out of control, his good locks were diminishing and Quincy couldn’t get any pussy if he wanted too.

look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control. It’s possible that a similar mechanism was in play during the enigmatic and controversial stock market “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, when, in a matter of minutes, the price of several seemingly random companies in the S&P 500 rose to more than $100,000 a share, while others dropped precipitously—sometimes to $0.01 a share. Almost $1 trillion of value instantaneously went up in smoke.

I'd caught what cameras call an updraft: just as the viewers got over the first rush of interest, others smelled the excitement and tuned in. The surprise of the newcomers strengthened the scent, attracting still more people, in a spiral that could make the feedback escalate out of control. Wave upon wave of astonishment crashed through me. I tried to look down, but the curiosity of millions forced my head back up. I stood there staring at the whale like someone forced to look into the sun, unable to turn away, though my mind cringed from the sight and my eyes were burning. It was not just an updraft, but riptide: feedback so strong that it flooded out my own emotions and derailed my thoughts. The audience grew so large and so greedy that it wouldn't even let me blink.

There are lots of stories around of how COVID-19 emerged into humans. Secret China laboratory leak, jumping the species barrier, government engineered virus, and so on. I wrote a book about the environment called “Solar Radiation, Global Warming and Human Disease” that I first published in 2010. I was aware human disease was going to spiral out of control as the environment changed. I was not surprised a decade later we were in a global pandemic!

There are those that handle mental illness with responsibility while others spiral out of control.

The Five Prana Vayus 1.Udana Vayu – The upward and outward movement of energy. This vayu governs enthusiasm, inspiration, expansion, and ascension. As prana enters the body, udana moves it upward toward the throat and face. With pranayama, udana vayu is affected by controlling the inhalation side of the breath and any retention of the breath after inhalation. 2.Prana Vayu – (Sometimes called “Pran” Vayu): The inward and upward movement of energy. This vayu governs the intake of prana into the body, as well as inhalation, eating, drinking, sensory impression, and mental experiences, and it is energizing and vitalizing. Prana vayu controls prana as it enters the body through the region of the chest and then ascends. With pranayama, prana vayu is affected by controlling the inhalation side of the breath and its capacity in the body. 3.Samana Vayu – The assimilating, inward-spiraling movement of energy. This vayu governs the assimilation of food, oxygen, and all experiences into the system. As prana enters the body, samana spirals it inward to coalesce around the navel center. With pranayama, samana vayu is affected by balancing the lengths and capacity of both the inhalation and exhalation. 4.Apana Vayu – The downward and outward movement of energy. This vayu governs the elimination of waste, as well as exhalation, energetic grounding, childbirth, and the removal of negative emotional and psychological experiences. Apana vayu moves prana downward toward the reproductive organs and out of the body, aiding with letting go. With pranayama, apana vayu is affected by controlling the exhalation side of the breath. 5.Vyana Vayu – The expanding and circulating movement of energy. This vayu governs the circulation of nutrients in the blood and bodily fluids, emotions and thoughts, and engagement in the wider world. Vyana vayu spirals from the center of the body and expands outward, integrating prana into the body and world. With pranayama, vyana vayu is affected by controlling the capacity of both the inhalation and exhalation.

FROM DESPAIR TO DESTINY Life (and traffic) have a way of skewing our perspective. Difficult, overwhelming circumstances can cause our emotions and thoughts to spiral out of control. I’m not saying those feelings and thoughts are not real. They absolutely are. But they are not the whole picture. And they aren’t designed to make our decisions for us. Which of these things have you felt lately? Or maybe even right now? Lonely Frustrated Bitter Betrayed Discouraged Anxious Overwhelmed Confused Guilty Useless Rejected Ignored Hurt Abandoned Used Lost Hopeless Powerless Those feelings, if left unchecked, will affect your actions and decisions. You might find yourself doing or saying things that you later regret—things that don’t align with who you are, what you value, what you believe, or how you want to live. Again, the feelings are valid. Don’t ignore them. But don’t define yourself by them either. Don’t let them tell you who you are. They are feelings, and feelings never give the whole picture. They come and go, they rise and fall, they make a lot of noise and then fade into the background. There is a reason the book of Psalms is so emotionally charged. It’s an ancient record of the heartfelt cries of people just like us. They turned their pain and anxiety into prayers, poetry, and songs. Their words resonate with us today, across the barriers of language, culture, and time, because their experiences are intensely human.

I wasn’t doing the stupid things for acknowledgement, I did them because my life was spiraling out of control, but I did love the attention. I needed it. In a way, it was a lifeline.

Since loads of hippies, potheads, and drug addicts believed in these things, I often found myself in likeable company. These were the people I preferred to be around, the people who understood me, and those I understood. In a sense, these beliefs allowed us to do what we wanted, hook up, do drugs, whatever, all under the banner of spirituality. Yet each time I did one of these things, I found myself either regretting it or spiraling out of control. After a while, I realized that most of the people who believed in this stuff were still actively doing drugs and were just as stuck as I was, even though, like me, they pretended not to be.

I was grieved that my life had come to this point; it had all happened so quickly. I just found myself running from one thing to the next and the things I was using to cope started more problems in and of themselves. The cycle spiraled out of control when one coping mechanism created consequences that led to the next coping mechanism, which created consequences, and on and on, without ever addressing the hurt and confusion inside.

Thoughts are not the enemy—latching on to them and allowing them to spiral out of control is!

Conflict prolonged over an extended period tends to be self perpetuating, and can easily plunge out of control.

Maybe I have to be in mortal danger,” I huff. “Should we ask for Lucas’s gun?” Usually Julian laughs at my jokes, but right now he’s too busy thinking. “You’re like a child,” he finally says. I wrinkle my nose at the insult, but he continues anyway. “This is how children are at first, when they can’t control themselves. Their abilities present in times of stress or fear, until they learn to harness those emotions and use them to their advantage. There’s a trigger, and you need to find yours.” I remember how I felt in the Spiral Garden, falling to what I thought was my doom. But it wasn’t fear running through my veins as I collided with the lightning shield—it was peace. It was knowing that my end had come and accepting there was nothing I could do to stop it—it was letting go. “It’s worth a try, at least,” Julian prods. With a groan, I face the wall again. Julian lined it with some stone bookshelves, all empty of course, so I have something to aim at. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him back away, watching me all the time. Let go. Let yourself go, the voice in my head whispers. My eyes slide closed as I focus, letting my thoughts fall away so that my mind can reach out, feeling for the electricity it craves to touch. The ripple of energy, alive beneath my skin, moves over me again until it sings in every muscle and nerve. That’s usually where it stops, just on the edge of feeling, but not this time. Instead of trying to hold on, to push myself into this force, I let go. And I fall into what I can’t explain, into a sensation that is everything and nothing, light and dark, hot and cold, alive and dead. Soon the power is the only thing in my head, blotting out all my ghosts and memories. Even Julian and the books cease to exist. My mind is clear, a black void humming with force. Now when I push at the sensation, it doesn’t disappear and it moves within me, from my eyes to the tips of my fingers. To my left, Julian gasps aloud. My eyes open to see purple-white sparks jumping from the contraption to my fingers, like electricity between wires.

In 1928, attempts by some Jews to extend their access to the wall by bringing screens and benches were fiercely challenged by Hajj Amin, no doubt as part of a larger political campaign to enhance his national status. Claims and counterclaims became increasingly heated over the following year and, when a Revisionist Party youth movement organized a demonstration demanding Jewish control over the whole complex, tensions spiralled out of control. Rioting broke out in Jerusalem in August 1929, the British struggled to restore order, and the violence spread to Hebron, Jaffa, and Safad, cities with significant Jewish populations. The massacre of Jews in Hebron was especially horrifying, and those who survived fled Hebron in the wake of the riots. Overall, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs lost their lives. Palestinians worried that the Jews were violating the sanctity of Islam and dispossessing them of their patrimony. Jews compared Hebron to the pogroms of Eastern Europe.

Beyond these, illuminated by past summers, one summer remained that stayed the sun long into the night after you had watched the others; others with their fathers knee-deep, belly-button unconcerned, roly-poly mothers stretching out of the sea. Whiter than starch hands on bat and ball, you failed to catch. Tents, buckets, spades; others that went on digging barricades. You castle-bound, spying on princesses, honey-gold, singing against the blue, if touched surely their skin would ooze? Aware of own smell, skin-texture, sun in eyes, lips, toes, the softness underneath, in between, wondering what miracle made you, the sky, the sea. Conscious of sound, gulls hovering, crying, or silent at rarer intervals, their swift turns before being swallowed by the waves. Then no sound, all suddenly would be soundless, treading softly, dividing rocks with fins, and sword-fish fingers plucking away clothes, that were left with your anatomy, huddled like ruffled birds waiting. A chrysalis heart formed on the water’s surface, away from the hard-polished pebbles, sand-blowing and elongated shadows. Away, faster than air itself, dragon-whirled. Be given to, the sliding of water, to forget, be forgotten; premature thoughts—predetermined action. In a moment fixed between one wave and the next, the outline of what might be ahead. On your back, staring into space, becoming part of the sky, a speckled bird’s breast that opened up at the slightest notion on your part. But the hands, remember the hands that pulled your legs, that doubled you up, and dragged you down? Surprised at non-resistance. Voices that called, creating confusion. Cells tighter than shells, you spinning into spirals, quick-silver, thrashing the water, making stars scatter. Narcissus above, staring at a shadow-bat spreading out, finally disappearing into the very centre of the ocean. They were always there waiting by the edge, behind them the cliffs extended. Your head disembodied, bouncing above the separate force of arms and legs, rhythmical, the glorious sensation of weightlessness, moon-controlled, and far below your heart went on exploring, no matter how many years came between, nor how many people were thrust into focus. That had surely been the beginning, the separating of yourself from the world that no longer revolved round you, the awareness of becoming part of, merging into something else, no longer dependent upon anyone, a freedom that found its own reality, half of you the constant guardian, watching your actions, your responses, what you accepted, what you might reject.

How can something we can't see control so much of who we are, determine what we feel and what we do and what we say or don't, dictate how we move or sleep, and inform what we want, what we hate, and what we love?

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

Spiraling out of control. I never wanted to stop, because for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I wasn’t broken anymore.

When doubts spiraled out of control, they easily undermined your sanity. Thus you had to rely on a steadfast reality most of the time. It was just like evidence when you came under suspicion. Your selfhood required something outside you that you couldn't revise even if you wanted to, a stern other.

After a time his breathing steadied and he watched his brain go to work slyly, quietly. He fought the quiet hateful brain down and it slipped aside and went about its work. He fought it more weakly, for hate was seeping all through his body, poisoning every nerve. He could feel himself losing control. Then there came a point where the control and the fear were gone and his brain cried out in an aching triumph. His hand went to a pencil and he drew tight little spirals one after another on his blotting pad. When Lee came in an hour later there were hundreds of spirals, and they had become smaller and smaller. He did not look up.

Robert Harris wrote a 2011 novel, The Fear Index, that played with the idea of AI actively promoting a feedback loop to spiral human fear out of control, creating market disruption that the “evil hedge fund” could take advantage of.

I struggle to control my thoughts sometimes, and when they spiral out of control as they did...I can't always find air. My mind is this irrational, uncontrolled nightmare without an escape.

placed her hand on his upper arm. It was an innocent gesture, but the sensation was like a jolt of lightning, even through the fabric of his shirt. His body reacted instantly. He swallowed hard and cleared his throat. Right now, his emotions spiraled out of control. “Aw, hell!” In one fluid movement he pulled her to him, one hand at the back of her head, his other arm coiled around her waist. He tilted her head and claimed her mouth with the hunger born of weeks of pent-up desire for this woman. Kissing her like a starved man who’d finally been given a morsel of food, Daniel savored the feel of her soft body pressed to his. It’s what he’d longed to do since he first laid eyes on her.

ANXIOUS CONTRACTIONS Life is movement. It’s dynamic and pulsating like a swift moving river. To be in a contented and happy state is to be in a state of flow where your thoughts and feelings follow a natural current and there is no inner friction or need to check in on your anxiety every five minutes. When you feel in flow, your body feels light and your mind becomes spontaneous and joyful. Anxiety and fear are the total opposite. They’re the contractions of life. When we get scared, we contract in fear. Our bodies become stiff and our minds become fearful and rigid. If we hold that contracted state, we eventually cut ourselves off from life. We lose flexibility. We lose our flow. We can think of this a bit like pulling a muscle. When a muscle is overused and tired, its cells run out of energy and fluid. This can lead to a sudden and forceful contraction, such as a cramp. This contraction is painful and scary as it comes without warning. In the same way, we can be living our lives with a lot of stress and exhaustion, similar to holding a muscle in an unusual position for too long. If we fail to notice and take care of this situation, we can experience an intense and sudden moment of anxiety or even panic. I call this an “anxious contraction,” and it can feel quite painful. Learning how to respond correctly to this anxious contraction is crucial and determines how quickly we release it. Anxious contractions happen to almost everyone at some point in their lives. We suddenly feel overwhelmed with anxiety as our body experiences all manner of intense sensations, such as a pounding heart or a tight chest or a dizzy sensation. Our anxiety level then is maybe an 8 or 9 out of 10. We recoil in fear and spiral into a downward loop of more fear and anxiety. Some might say they had a spontaneous panic attack while others might describe the feeling as being very “on edge.”   THE ANXIETY LOOP It’s at this point in time where people get split into those that develop an anxiety disorder and those that don’t. The real deciding factor is whether a person gets caught in the “anxiety loop” or not. The anxiety loop is a mental trap, a vicious cycle of fearing fear. Instead of ignoring anxious thoughts or bodily sensations, the person becomes acutely aware and paranoid of them. “What if I lose control and do something crazy?” “What if those sensations come back again while I’m in a meeting?” “What if it’s a sign of a serious health problem?” This trap is akin to quicksand. Our immediate response is to struggle hard to free ourselves, but it’s the wrong response. The more we struggle, the deeper we sink. Anxiety is such a simple but costly trap to fall into. All your additional worry and stress make the problem worse, fueling more anxiety and creating a vicious cycle or loop. It’s like spilling gasoline onto a bonfire: the more you fear the bodily sensations, the more intense they feel. I’ve seen so many carefree people go from feeling fine one day to becoming fearful of everyday situations simply because they had one bad panic attack and then got stuck in this anxious loop of fearing fear. But there is great hope. As strange as it sounds, the greatest obstacle to healing your anxiety is you. You’re the cure. Your body wants to heal your anxiety as much as you do.

He was out of control. Spiraling in fact. And he didn’t care about himself. Not really. But he desperately wanted someone to. Needed to remember that feeling, if only so he didn’t feel so damn wretched at the end of each day. Even if it was only for one night.

There had been a great deal riding on Toy Story, of course, and since making a film is an extremely complicated proposition, our production leaders had felt tremendous pressure to control the process—not just the budgets and schedules but the flow of information. If people went willy-nilly to anybody with their issues, they believed, the whole project could spiral out of control. So, to keep things on track, it was made clear to everyone from the get-go: If you have something to say, it needs to be communicated through your direct manager. If an animator wanted to talk to a modeler, for example, they were required to go through “proper channels.” The artists and technical people experienced this everything-goes-through-me mentality as irritating and obstructionist. I think of it as well-intentioned micromanaging. Because

Michaels’ thoughts spiraled out of control. Judge was everything he’d wanted in a man… in a partner. His big, hairy, kinky ass. Damnit. He’d only have him for a short time; he tried to not think about the inevitable yet. He went down on his forearms, his face pressed into Judge’s pillow, breathing in his strong, masculine scent. His ass poised and ready for the taking. Judge thighs were pressed against the backs of his. Those wiry hairs tickling against his own. He shamelessly rubbed his ass along Judge’s shaft, the spit and lube running hotly down his crease. Judge gripped Michaels’ hip and nudged his aching hole first, warning him he was coming in. He was patient and let Judge go at his pace, and he was glad he did; it was the right thing. He

Except when Kellan and Lucas sleep with Sydney, a woman Kellan has flirted with for weeks, things quickly spiral out of control. Because

There was never a doubt in my mind that I’d keep working toward stopping the destruction of our environment and wildlife that was spiraling out of control. There were so many triumphs that Steve had already worked so hard for. I sat down with Wes. “First, we’re going to work on everything Steve wanted to achieve,” I said. “Then we’ll move on to everything that we were collectively working toward. And finally, I want to continue with my own goals, in terms of our conservation work.” We strategized about the expansion of the zoo. I didn’t want to just maintain the zoo as it was, I wanted to follow Steve’s plans for the future. I felt that I was still having this wonderful, cheeky, competitive relationship with Steve. Wes and I took the stacks of plans, blueprints, and manila folders from Steve’s desk. I assembled them and laid them out on a conference table. “This was Steve’s plan for Australia Zoo over the next ten years,” I said. “I want to do it in five.” We would secure more land. I remember the first two acres we ever bought to enlarge the zoo, how Steve and I sat with our arms around each other, looking at the property next door and dreaming. Now we were negotiating for an additional five hundred acres of forestry land. This tract would join the existing zoo property with the five hundred acres of our conservation property, bringing our total to fifteen hundred acres at Australia Zoo. This winter we christened Steve’s Whale One, a whale-watching excursion boat that will realize another of his long-held dreams. He always wanted to expand the experience of the zoo to include whales. Steve’s Whale One is a way for people to see firsthand some of the most amazing creatures on earth. The humpbacks in Australian waters approach whale-watching boats with curiosity and openness. It is a delightful experience, and one that I am confident will work to help inspire people and end the inhumane practice of whaling.