Tense Situation Quotes

Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit.

Anika nodded, reflecting on her situation as the sirens grew louder. She had some time, but cops, hurricanes, and jealous women weren’t the party favors she’d expected for her homecoming parade.

Love', this English word: like other English words it has tense. 'Loved' or 'will love' or 'have loved'. All these tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '爱' (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

Indeed, in many situations wisdom lies in being strategic rather than spontaneous. This is especially true when we’re dealing with a difficult person, a hot issue, or a tense situation. The enormous challenge is to make wise decisions about how and when to say what to whom, and even before that, to know what we really want to say and what we hope to accomplish by saying it.

As for LSD, I highly recommend it. We had a fine, wild weekend and no trouble at all. The feeling it produces is hard to describe. 'Intensity' is a fair word for it. Try half a cube at first, just sit in the living room and turn on the music - after the kids have gone to bed. But never take it in uncomfortable or socially tense situations. And don't have anybody around whom you don't like.

Has God called you to speak out for peace in a tense situation? Are there lives on the line God is calling you to stand up for, to declare peace to, and to encourage toward a non-violent solution? If so, do it. You never know what might happen. Maybe the Lord is likewise sending you to save many lives from destruction.

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s’s from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with “That’s not unusual.” But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, “It be’s like that sometimes.

The woman recovering from abuse or other stressful life situations may feel she's in no way in charge of anything, least of all her own world. She faces the horse with trepidation. The horse senses the fear and becomes tense and concerned. The wise instructor starts small. The woman is handed a soft brush and sent to fuss over the horse. It's pointed out that if she stands close to the animal, she will be out of range of a well-aimed kick. She is warned to watch for tell-tale signs of fear in herself and the horse. She's warned to keep her feet out from under the horse's stomping hoof. They're both allowed to back away and regroup and try again until they reach an accord regarding personal space. Calm prevails, and within a few minutes, hours or sessions, interaction becomes friendship. It happens almost every time a woman is allowed enough time and space to work through the situation. So a woman whose daily life is overwhelming her learns to step back. Is this a cure for her endless problems? Of course not. Simple is not simplistic.

A small way to have control in a tense situation, I suppose

Anger met with anger only increases enmity rather than diffusing a tense situation. Anger, in turn, gives birth to hate. In such cases the wisest thing to do is not to engage through emotion. Emotions are self-centered and denying them spares animosity.

Bilateral symmetry can have grave consequences for a police officer in a tense situation where he is holding a pistol on a suspect.

Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you're currently making, every second of every day." "There's a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person's actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things.

Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over spirited. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt. The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future. One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.

Both in fighting and in everyday life, you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased.

Under stress, an unexercised heart will explode in frustration or fury. If the situation is especially tense, that exploding heart may be hurled like a fragment grenade toward the source of its pain. But a heart that has been consistently exercised through conscious engagement with suffering is more likely to break open instead of apart. Such a heart has learned how to flex to hold tension in a way that expands its capacity for both suffering and joy.

How do you react with your body, breath, and eyes? Notice if you react to a person or situation that hurts you by withdrawing, hiding, or closing in on yourself. Notice if there are times when you find it difficult to look into someone’s eyes, or times your chest and solar plexus become tense and contracted. These are signs of an unskillful reaction to hurt.

Turns out, it's pretty simple to win people over, especially in tense situations, if you're able to take their perspective and validate their feelings.

Impulsively, I threw up a new wall in my head. And suddenly I saw the situation for what it really was. Dante had me backed up against a tree, all right, but I did not want to make out with him. “Demonstration finished,” Dante said, his smile a bit too cocky for my liking. “Next time choose a more appropriate demonstration,” I said tensely. “Patch would kill you if he found out about this.” His smile didn’t fade. “That’s a figure of speech that doesn’t work very well with Nephilim.” I wasn’t in the mood for humor. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to set him off. This petty feud between the two of you will blow up to a whole new level if you mess with me. Patch is the last person you want to antagonize. He doesn’t hold grudges, because the people who cross him tend to disappear quickly. And what you just did? That was crossing him.

But the fact remained that a tense situation just made McKay think faster. You could probably phrase it as an equation, where the increasing awfulness of whatever tight spot they were in was directly proportional to the speed of McKay's ability to think a way out of it.

Create a Clear Idea or Picture Create an idea, a mental picture, or a feeling of the object or situation exactly as you want it. You should think of it in the present tense as already existing the way you want it to be. Imagine yourself in the situation as you desire it, now. Include as many details as you can.

When we’re with other people and they say nothing, the situation becomes irritating, tense, unbearable.

I idly wished for something else, for any situation that was neither this forsaken chamber nor the tenseness of Burrich’s room. For a restfulness that perhaps I had once known somewhere else but could no longer recall. And so I drowsed into oblivion.

Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over spirited. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to choose between your loved ones, knowing that whatever you decided, you would have to lie to one of them?’ ‘Yes. More than once.’ Elijah’s words sounded far too cold in the sudden silence. His finely chiselled face tensed up and his eyes grew cold. ‘And before you ask, I chose you every time.

Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense is: a pure portion of anxiety.

Imagine failing at a major project, lying to your woman and getting caught, or overhearing her joke about your shortcomings in bed. How do you react with your body, breath, and eyes? Notice if you react to a person or situation that hurts you by withdrawing, hiding, or closing in on yourself. Notice if there are times when you find it difficult to look into someone’s eyes, or times your chest and solar plexus become tense and contracted. These are signs of an unskillful reaction to hurt. Contracted and closed in on yourself, you are unable to act.

Yes. According to the charter of the school. One sec.” I held the phone away and called for Ingrid to inform Frau Blümen. Then I returned to the call. “What’s the situation with the press?” I asked. “None so far” came the tense answer over the phone. I could hear people in the background being frantically busy. “There’s been some chatter, but we got this very quickly.” I weighed the situation and took a deep breath. “Cut the city’s communications,” I said. “Excuse me?” came the startled response. “Do it, and call me back when it’s done—wait, Lewis! Are you there?” “Yes, Rook Thomas.

She realized at once that he expected trouble and that he was used to handling deadly situations. It was the first time she’d actually seen him do it, despite their long history. It gave her a new, adult perspective on his lifestyle. No wonder he couldn’t settle down and become a family man. She’d been crazy to expect it, even in her fantasies. He was used to danger and he enjoyed the challenges it presented. It would be like housing a tiger in an apartment. She sighed as she saw the last tattered dream of a future with him going up in smoke. Tate looked through the tiny peephole and took his hand away from the pistol. He glanced at Cecily with an expression she couldn’t define before he abruptly opened the door. Colby Lane walked in, eyebrows raised, new scars on his face and bone weariness making new lines in it. “Colby!” Cecily exclaimed with exaggerated delight. “Welcome home!” Tate’s face contracted as if he’d been hit. Colby noticed that, and smiled at Cecily. “Am I interrupting something?” he asked, looking from one tense face to the other. “No,” Tate said coolly as he reholstered his pistol. “We were discussing security options, but if you’re going to be around, they won’t be necessary.” “What?” “I’m fairly certain that the gambling syndicate tried to kill her,” Tate said somberly, nodding toward Cecily. “A car almost ran her down in her own parking lot. She ended up in the hospital. And decided not to tell anyone about it,” he added with a vicious glare in her direction. “Way to go, Cecily,” Colby said glumly. “You could have ended up floating in the Potomac. I told you before I left to be careful. Didn’t you listen?” She shot him a glare. “I’m not an idiot. I can call 911,” she said, insulted. Colby was still staring at Tate. “You’ve cut your hair.” “I got tired of braids,” came the short reply. “I have to get back to work. If you need me, I’ll be around.” He paused at the doorway. “Keep an eye on her,” Tate told Colby. “She takes risks.” “I don’t need a big strong man to look out for me. I can keep myself out of trouble, thank you very much,” she informed Tate. He gave her a long, pained last look and closed the door behind him. As he walked down the staircase from her apartment, he couldn’t shake off the way she looked and acted. Something was definitely wrong with her, and he was going to find out what.

In strategy, your spiritual bearing must not be any different from normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over-spirited. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.

Originally, the word power meant able to be. In time, it was contracted to mean to be able. We suffer the difference. Iwas waiting for a plane when I overheard two businessmen. One was sharing the good news that he had been promoted, and the other, in congratulation, said, “More power to you.” I've heard this expression before, but for some reason, I heard it differently this time and thought, what a curious sentiment. As a good wish, the assumption is that power is the goal. Of course, it makes a huge difference if we are wishing others worldly power or inner power. By worldly power, I mean power over things, people, and situations—controlling power. By inner power, I mean power that comes from being a part of something larger—connective power. I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure the wish here was for worldly power, for more control. This is commonplace and disturbing, as the wish for more always issues from a sense of lack. So the wish for more power really issues from a sense of powerlessness. It is painfully ironic that in the land of the free, we so often walk about with an unspoken and enervating lack of personal freedom. Yet the wish for more controlling power will not set us free, anymore than another drink will quench the emptiness of an alcoholic in the grip of his disease. It makes me think of a game we played when I was nine called King of the Hill, in which seven or eight of us found a mound of dirt, the higher the better, and the goal was to stand alone on top of the hill. Once there, everyone else tried to throw you off, installing themselves as King of the Hill. It strikes me now as a training ground for worldly power. Clearly, the worst position of all is being King of the Hill. You are completely alone and paranoid, never able to trust anyone, constantly forced to spin and guard every direction. The hills may change from a job to a woman to a prized piece of real estate, but those on top can be so enslaved by guarding their position that they rarely enjoy the view. I always hated King of the Hill—always felt tense in my gut when king, sad when not, and ostracized if I didn't want to play. That pattern has followed me through life. But now, as a tired adult, when I feel alone and powerless atop whatever small hill I've managed to climb, I secretly long for anyone to join me. Now, I'm ready to believe there's more power here together.

Apply humor. Lightening up lends perspective to any situation. The following story, sent to me on the Internet, provides a good example of humor diffusing a tense situation: An irate crowd of air travelers stood in a long line at a United Airlines ticket counter after their flight had been canceled, when an angry man walked to the front of the line, threw his ticket on the counter, and yelled, “I want a first-class seat on the next flight out, now!” The harried ticket agent, brushing back a lock of hair, replied, “I'll be glad to help you, sir, as soon as I take care of the people in line.” “You want me to wait in line?“ he yelled even louder. “Do you know who I am?“ The ticket agent hesitated only a moment before picking up the microphone, turning up the PA system, and announcing to the waiting area, “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a man at gate seventeen who does not know who he is. If anyone can help him find his identity—” “Screw you, lady!” the man yelled, storming off. In a parting shot she added, “Sir, I'm afraid you'll have to wait in line for that, too.” Her humor didn't help improve his emotions, but it helped hers. And the previously irate people waiting in the line were now smiling or laughing. No one else complained.

In tense moments, explains the clinical psychologist Rod Martin, the purpose of pranks like Venanzi’s isn’t merely to elicit a chuckle; joking actually reformats your perception of a stressor. “Humor is about playing with ideas and concepts,” said Martin, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario. “So whenever we see something as funny, we’re looking at it from a different perspective. When people are trapped in a stressful situation and feeling overwhelmed, they’re stuck in one way of thinking: This is terrible. I’ve got to get out of here. But if you can take a humorous perspective, then by definition you’re looking at it differently—you’re breaking out of that rigid mind-set.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation Even when you feel at ease, you may still experience tightness in your body. People with chronic anxiety often have a hard time telling when their muscles are completely relaxed because feeling tense is their natural state. Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a two-step technique that helps you recognize when your muscles are tense and when they are relaxed. First, you deliberately tense certain muscle groups. Second, you release the tension and become aware of how the relaxed muscles feel. It is recommended that you practice PMR every day in a quiet place with no distractions until you feel capable of performing the practice in social situations. Ultimately, you will be able to use PMR whenever you feel any anxiety.

Through the dimness she could just make him out, stretched on his back, his arms crossed behind his head. He might have been silent, but he hadn't been asleep. She could feel his frown as he looked at her. "What are you doing?" "Moving closer to you." Dropping her gowns, she shook out her cloak and laid it next to his. "Why?" "Mice." He let a heartbeat pass, then asked, carefully, "You're afraid of mice?" She nodded. "Rodents. I don't discriminate." Swinging around, she sat on her cloak, then picked up her gowns and wriggled back and closer to him. "If I'm next to you, then either they'll give us both a wide berth, or if they decide to take a nibble, there's at least an even chance they'll nibble you first." His chest shook. He was struggling not to laugh. But at least he was trying. "Besides," she said, lying down and snuggling under her massed gowns, "I'm cold." A moment ticked past, then he sighed. He shifted in the hay beside her. She didn't know what he did, but suddenly she was sliding the last inches down a slope that hadn't been there before. She fetched up against him, against his side-hard, muscled, and wonderfully warm. Her senses leapt greedily, pleasantly shocked, delightedly surprised; she caught her breath and slapped them down. Desperately; this was Breckenridge-this was definitely not the time. His arm shifted and came around her, cradling her shoulders and gathering her against him. "This doesn't mean anything." The whispered words drifted down to her. Comfort, safety, warmth-it meant all those things. "I know," she murmured back. Her senses weren't listening. Her body now lay alongside his. Her breast brushed his side; through various layers her thighs grazed his. Her heartbeat deepened, sped up a little, too. Yet despite the sensual awareness, she could feel reassurance along with his warmth stealing through her, relaxing her tensed muscles bit by bit as, greatly daring, she settled her cheek on his chest. This doesn't mean anything. She knew what he meant. This was just for now, for this strange moment out of their usual lives in which he and she were just two people finding ways to weather a difficult situation. She quieted. Listened. The sound of his heartbeat, steady and sure, blocked out any rustlings. Thinking of the strange moment, of what made it so, she murmured, "We're fugitives, aren't we?" "Yes." "In a strange country, one not really our own, with no way to prove who we are." "Yes." "And a stranger, a very likely dangerous highlander, is pursuing us." "Hmm." She should feel frightened. She should be seriously worried. Instead, she closed her eyes, and with her cheek pillowed on Breckenridge's chest, his arm like warm steel around her, smoothly and serenely fell asleep. Breckenridge held her against him, and through senses far more attuned than he wished, followed the incremental falling away of her tension...until she slept. Softly, silently, in his arms, with the gentle huff of her breathing ruffling his senses, the seductive weight of her slender body stretched out against his the subtlest of tortures. Why had he done it? She might have slept close to him, but she would never have pushed to sleep in his arms. That had been entirely his doing, and he hadn't even stopped to think. What worried him most was that even if he had thought, had reasoned and debated, the result would have been the same. When it came to her, whatever the situation, there never was any question, no doubt in his mind as to what he should do. Her protection, her safety-caring for her. From the first instant he'd laid eyes on her four years ago, that had been his mind's fixation. Its decision. Nothing he'd done, nothing she'd done, had ever succeeded in altering that. But as to the why of that, the reason behind it...even now he didn't, was quite certain and absolutely sure he didn't, need to consciously know.

I hear two female voices around the corner and creep toward the end of the hallway to hear better. “…just can’t handle her being here,” one of them sobs. Christina. “I can’t stop picturing it…what she did…I don’t understand how she could have done that!” Christina’s sobs make me feel like I am about to crack open. Cara takes her time responding. “Well, I do,” she says. “What?” Christina says with a hiccup. “You have to understand; we’re trained to see things as logically as possible,” says Cara. “So don’t think that I’m callous. But that girl was probably scared out of her mind, certainly not capable of assessing situations cleverly at the time, if she was ever able to do so.” My eyes fly open. What a--I run through a short list of insults in my mind before listening to her continue. “And the simulation made her incapable of reasoning with him, so when he threatened her life, she reacted as she had been trained by the Dauntless to react: Shoot to kill.” “So what are you saying?” says Christina bitterly. “We should just forget about it, because it makes perfect sense?” “Of course not,” says Cara. Her voice wobbles, just a little, and she repeats herself, quietly this time. “Of course not.” She clears her throat. “It’s just that you have to be around her, and I want to make it easier for you. You don’t have to forgive her. Actually, I’m not sure why you were friends with her in the first place; she always seemed a bit erratic to me.” I tense up as I wait for Christina to agree with her, but to my surprise--and relief--she doesn’t. Cara continues. “Anyway. You don’t have to forgive her, but you should try to understand that what she did was not out of malice; it was out of panic. That way, you can look at her without wanting to punch her in her exceptionally long nose.” My and moves automatically to my nose. Christina laughs a little, which feels like a hard poke to the stomach. I back up through the door to the Gathering Place. Even though Cara was rude--and the nose comment was a low blow--I am grateful for what she said.

The best way to let go of stored pockets of pain is to practice. Just as you practice scales to learn the piano or practice a sport to get good at it, so you practice letting go to learn how to do it. You start with simple things. We call these the low-hanging fruit. There are many situations each day when you create inner disturbance for absolutely no good reason. Bothering yourself about the car in front of you does no good at all. It only makes you tense and uptight. The cost-benefit analysis is one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. Letting go of that tendency should be easy, but it’s not. You will find that you’re in the habit of insisting and demanding that things should be the way you want, even if it’s irrational. Things are the way they are because of all the influences that made them that way. You are not going to change the weather by complaining about it. If you are wise, you will start to change your reactions to reality instead of fighting with reality. By doing so, you will change your relationship with yourself and with everything else.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

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.

Are you wondering what to write? Let’s start with some general statements that are useful each and every day. Then we’ll create statements that address specific emotional states like depression, anxiety, and feelings of stress. We’ll also create statements that pertain to specific situations such as sleep, relationships, parenting, job, school, health, skills, talents, and leisure activities. GENERAL STATEMENTS Here are some useful statements to write each and every day. Select two or three that resonate with you. You are not limited to these examples. You can write whatever you wish as long as it is a POSITIVE statement in the PRESENT TENSE that begins with ‘I AM’ and uses the PROGRESSIVE ‘ing’ form of the verb. At first, while learning the technique, you might want to use the statements suggested in this book. REMEMBER: Each POSITIVE, PRESENT TENSE, PROGRESSIVE statement is something you would like to be true. But you are writing it as if it already is true. In other words: I am writing positive statements. I am wanting them to be true. I am noticing that they are becoming true. I recommend writing at least two general statements every day. Here are some examples: I am embracing each and every day. I am enjoying today. I am living in the present moment. I am looking forward to today. I am having a productive day. I am staying focused. I am handling things well. I am taking things as they come. I am coping well with problems. I am focusing on the positives. I am moving smoothly through the day. I am confidently coping with challenges. I am noticing how well the day is going. I am feeling fully and deeply alive. Select two or three statements from the above list and write them here.

Cam closed the door and leaned back against it, letting his caressing gaze fall on the small, tense form of his wife. He knew little of these matters. In both Romany and gadjo cultures, pregnancy and childbirth were a strictly female domain. But he did know that his wife was uneasy in situations she had no control over. He also knew that women in her condition needed reassurance and tenderness. And he had an inexhaustible supply of both for her. “Nervous?” Cam asked softly, approaching her. “Oh no, not in the slightest; it’s an ordinary circumstance, and only to be expected after—” Amelia broke off with a little gasp as he sat beside her and pulled her into his arms. “Yes, I’m a bit nervous. I wish … I wish I could talk to my mother. I’m not exactly certain how to do this.” Of course. Amelia liked to manage everything, to be authoritative and competent no matter what she did. But the entire process of childbearing would be one of increasing dependence and helplessness, until the final stage, when nature took over entirely. Cam pressed his lips into her gleaming dark hair, which smelled like sweetbriar. He began to rub her back in the way he knew she liked best. “We’ll find some experienced women for you to talk to. Lady Westcliff, perhaps. You like her, and God knows she would be forthright. And regarding what you’re going to do … you’ll let me take care of you, and spoil you, and give you anything you want.” He felt her relax a little. “Amelia, love,” he murmured, “I’ve wanted this for so long.” “Have you?” She smiled and snuggled tightly against him. “So have I. Although I had hoped it would happen at a more convenient time, when Ramsay House was finished, and Poppy was betrothed, and the family was settled—” “Trust me, with your family there will never be a convenient time.” Cam eased her back to lie on the bed with him. “What a pretty little mother you’ll be,” he whispered, cuddling her. “With your blue eyes, and your pink cheeks, and your belly all round with my child …” “When I grow large, I hope you won’t strut and swagger, and point to me as an example of your virility.” “I do that already, monisha.” Amelia looked up into his smiling eyes. “I can’t imagine how this happened.” “Didn’t I explain that on our wedding night?” She chuckled and put her arms around his neck. “I was referring to the fact that I’ve been taking preventative measures. All those cups of nasty-tasting tea. And I still ended up conceiving.” “Rom,” he said by way of explanation, and kissed her passionately.

Christopher entered the room, having to bend his head to pass through the small medieval doorway. Straightening, he surveyed their surroundings briefly before his piercing gaze found Beatrix. He stared at her with the barely suppressed wrath of a man to whom entirely too much had happened. Beatrix wished she were a swooning sort of female. It seemed the only appropriate response to the situation. Unfortunately, no matter how she tried to summon a swoon, her mind remained intractably conscious. “I’m so sorry,” she croaked. No reply. Christopher approached her slowly, as if he thought she might try to bolt again. Reaching her, he took her upper arms in a hard grip that allowed no chance of escape. “Tell me why you did it,” he said, his voice low and vibrant with…hatred? Fury? “No, damn you, don’t cry. Was it a game? Was it only to help Prudence?” Beatrix looked away with a wretched sob. “No, it wasn’t a game…Pru showed me your letter, and she said she wasn’t going to answer it. And I had to. I felt as if it had been written for me. It was only supposed to be once. But then you wrote back, and I let myself answer just once more…and then one more time, and another…” “How much of it was the truth?” “All of it,” Beatrix burst out. “Except for signing Pru’s name. The rest of it was real. If you believe nothing else, please believe that.” Christopher was quiet for a long moment. He had begun to breathe heavily. “Why did you stop?” She sensed how difficult it was for him to ask. But God help her, it was infinitely worse to have to answer. “Because it hurt too much. The words meant too much.” She forced herself to go on, even though she was crying. “I fell in love with you, and I knew I could never have you. I couldn’t pretend to be Pru any longer. I loved you so much, and I couldn’t--” Her words were abruptly smothered. He was kissing her, she realized dazedly. What did it mean? What did he want? What…but her thoughts dissolved, and she stopped trying to make sense of anything. His arms had closed around her, one hand gripping the back of her neck. Shaken to her soul, she molded against him. Taking her sobs into his mouth, he licked deep, his kiss strong and savage. It had to be a dream, and yet her senses insisted it was real, the scent and warmth and toughness of him engulfing her. He pulled her even more tightly against him, making it difficult to breathe. She didn’t care. The pleasure of the kiss suffused her, drugged her, and when he pulled his head back, she protested with a bewildered moan. Christopher forced her to look back at him. “Loved?” he asked hoarsely. “Past tense?” “Present tense,” she managed to say. “You told me to find you.” “I didn’t mean to send you that note.” “But you did. You wanted me.” “Yes.” More tears escaped her stinging eyes. He bent and pressed his mouth to them, tasting the salt of grief. Those gray eyes looked into hers, no longer bright as hellfrost, but soft as smoke. “I love you, Beatrix.” Maybe she was capable of swooning after all.

Know Yourself: Are You a Freezer, Flyer, or Fighter? How avoidance coping manifests for you will depend on what your dominant response type is when you’re facing something you’d rather avoid. There are three possible responses: freezing, fleeing, or fighting. We’ve evolved these reactions because they’re useful for encounters with predators. Like other animals, when we encounter a predator, we’re wired to freeze to avoid provoking attention, run away, or fight. Most people are prone to one of the three responses more so than the other two. Therefore, you can think of yourself as having a “type,” like a personality type. Identify your type using the descriptions in the paragraphs that follow. Bear in mind that your type is just your most dominant pattern. Sometimes you’ll respond in one of the other two ways. Freezers virtually freeze when they don’t want to do something. They don’t move forward or backward; they just stop in their tracks. If a coworker or loved one nags a freezer to do something the freezer doesn’t want to do, the freezer will tend not to answer. Freezers may be prone to stonewalling in relationships, which is a term used to describe when people flat-out refuse to discuss certain topics that their partner wants to talk about, such as a decision to have another baby or move to a new home. Flyers are people who are prone to fleeing when they don’t want to do something. They might physically leave the house if a relationship argument gets too tense and they’d rather not continue the discussion. Flyers can be prone to serial relationships because they’d rather escape than work through tricky issues. When flyers want to avoid doing something, they tend to busy themselves with too much activity as a way to justify their avoidance. For example, instead of dealing with their own issues, flyers may overfill their children’s schedules so that they’re always on the run, taking their kids from activity to activity. Fighters tend to respond to anxiety by working harder. Fighters are the anxiety type that is least prone to avoidance coping: however, they still do it in their own way. When fighters have something that they’d rather not deal with, they will often work themselves into the ground but avoid dealing with the crux of the problem. When a strategy isn’t working, fighters don’t like to admit it and will keep hammering away. They tend to avoid getting the outside input they need to move forward. They may avoid acting on others’ advice if doing so is anxiety provoking, even when deep down they know that taking the advice is necessary. Instead, they will keep trying things their own way. A person’s dominant anxiety type—freezer, flyer, or fighter—will often be consistent for both work and personal relationships, but not always. Experiment: Once you’ve identified your type, think about a situation you’re facing currently in which you’re acting to type. What’s an alternative coping strategy you could try? For example, your spouse is nagging you to do a task involving the computer. You feel anxious about it due to your general lack of confidence with all things computer related. If you’re a freezer, you’d normally just avoid answering when asked when you’re going to do the task. How could you change your reaction?

Luca reached up with his free hand again. Cass felt certain he was going to angle her mouth toward his. Her eyelids started to flutter closed, but then stopped when she felt a point of pressure against her throat. She realized her cloak had fallen open, and that her lily pendant was exposed. Luca was touching it. “I’m so glad you’re wearing it,” he whispered, his voice growing hoarse. “It’ll be something for you to remember me by.” Cass swallowed down a lump in her throat. She touched her lips to the corner of his jaw, exhaling hard against his skin. “Stop it this instant. I will not give up on you, Luca da Peraga.” Luca turned his mouth so his lips barely brushed against hers, so quickly her mouth formed an O of surprise. Her legs wavered and her body threatened to crumple to the floor. She didn’t know if it was the unbearable heat or her uncomfortable position. Or the kiss. She closed her eyes for a second, holding fast to Luca’s hand until her bones went steady again. He chuckled, an actual laugh. “Now, no matter what happens, I’ll have that to remember you by.” Cass leaned forward and felt the metal bars of the grate digging into her skin. She didn’t care. Suddenly she wanted to be as close as she could to Luca. Luca, who now wanted her to forget his death and find someone else with whom she could be happy. Cass had never known such selflessness before. She pressed her mouth hard against his, ignoring his sweat and the stubble of his beard digging into her skin. His whole body tensed in response. For one sweet moment, the filth and the stench and the grimness of the situation dissipated. All Cass felt was herself and Luca, connected. When they broke apart, she struggled to catch her breath. “Now stop talking of remembrances and tell me where to find this book.” Luca touched his free hand to his lips. His face was flushed and his eyes were bright.

Pray for me, Arathis signed. But not to Lolth! Despite the tense situation, Jarlaxle managed a smile at that, a saying that was becoming litany for his band of mercenaries, all of them outcasts from the matriarchal society of Menzoberranzan and the misandry of the Spider Queen.

I beg your pardon, my lord,” the valet said. With an overdone respect that hinted at sarcasm, he added, “I’ve never known you to be modest before.” “I’m an aristocrat now,” Devon said. “We prefer not to flaunt our assets.” He was wedged against her so tightly that Kathleen could feel his voice resonate through her. The vital, potent maleness of him surrounded her. The sensation was foreign and frightening…and bewilderingly pleasant. The motion of his breathing and the heat of him along her back sent little flames dancing through her tummy. “…there is some confusion as to the location of your luggage,” Sutton was explaining. “One of the footmen carried it inside the house, as I directed, but Mrs. Church told him not to bring it to the master bedroom, as Lady Trenear has taken up temporary residence.” “Has she? Did Mrs. Church enlighten you as to why Lady Trenear has invaded my room?” “The plumbers are installing pipe beneath the floor in her bedroom. I’m told that Lady Trenear was none too pleased by the situation. One of the footmen said he heard her vow to do you bodily harm.” “How unfortunate.” Subtle amusement wove through Devon’s voice. She felt his jaw nudge against her hair as he grinned. “I’m sorry to have inconvenienced her.” “It wasn’t merely an inconvenience, my lord. Lady Trenear quitted the master bedroom immediately after the late earl’s passing, and hasn’t spent a night there since. Until now. According to one of the servants--” Kathleen stiffened. “I don’t need to know why,” Devon interrupted. “That is Lady Trenear’s concern, and none of ours.” “Yes, sir,” the valet said. “More to the point, the footman conveyed your luggage to one of the upstairs rooms, but no one seems to know which one.” “Has anyone thought of asking him?” Devon suggested dryly. “At present the man is nowhere to be found. Lady Pandora and Lady Cassandra recruited him to assist them in searching for their pig, which has gone missing.” Devon’s body tensed. “Did you say ‘pig’?” “Yes, my lord. A new family pet.

We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life. Here’s one way to think about the distinction between the two concepts. Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making, every second of every day. You are choosing to read this. You are choosing to think about the concepts. You are choosing to accept or reject the concepts. It may be my fault that you think my ideas are lame, but you are responsible for coming to your own conclusions. It’s not your fault that I chose to write this sentence, but you are still responsible for choosing to read it (or not). There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.

See, that’s what I don’t get. The Iyo let others settle in Iyun Bel, but it’s still their land. How do you declare a province on top of it?” Tiernan shrugged. “With fundamental disregard for others’ rights, I suppose. The political situation is . . . tense.” “I’d be tense if someone moved into my yard and expected me to obey their dumb laws.

You will get thru it because you have no choice, really . . . it just happens . . . no matter what you may feel now. There’s something built-in that enables most human beings . . . not all, to be sure . . . but most, to get thru this . . . like feeling very tense and tight and getting into a hot tub and finding there is no way not to be relaxed in the hot water because the water does wonderful physiological stuff to you and emotionally too that you cannot avoid. It is built-in to enable us to get thru, to enable us, force us, to survive, to stay alive. The question then becomes, after you’ve understood that it will be different, less raw, that the death can not be undone, that you will continue to live and that you will return, a different person, to the life other people define as “normal”: “What shall I do with the rest of my life?” 1. the situation is real and will remain so. 2. there’s nothing you can do about it, nothing at all. 3. now what happens to you? 4. who do you want to be? As

Aeryn was confused. "On three," he said. "One, two, three." He let the scalpel slip from his fingers. As it fell, Aeryn did all she could to move her leg. She tried to tense the muscle, tried to pull away. When she felt the sting of the blade striking her skin, she knew she had failed. "At least now he’ll know that’s not me. No one would let themselves get stabbed," she thought. He sat across from Aeryn and shined a light in her eyes. He looked closely, then leaned back and removed the blade from her skin. He took out a suture kit and tied two small stitches. "I’m pleased to inform you that the transfer is complete," he said. "What?" Aeryn thought. "When will she be gone?" NIA asked. The doctor leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. As he did, Aeryn caught a glimpse of a flashing light behind his ear. She hadn’t known that he was augmented. "In time.  As your network continues to become stronger than hers, the mind will reject the old personality.  It took almost a year for the original Dr. Barnes to shut up. But luckily we now have a code that we can update you with to silence her." Aeryn felt panicked.  She wanted to claw her way out of her head, but she had no means to do so.  "I almost feel bad for her," NIA said.  "But she knew that she was handing over control of her body. She just didn’t realize it’d be permanent.  Maybe she didn’t care.  She gave me more and more control before she gave it completely. While she exercised, while she thought she was sleeping, while she was writing or relaxing. She was always retreating inside of herself. It was like she didn’t even want this body." "How is Aeryn 2.0 coming along?" "Copulation was easy at first.  With Aeryn’s loose instructions of ‘burn some calories’ I was able to take her body and use it for attempted reproduction.  So far, it has been a failure. The neglect of the body has made finding partners more difficult." Aeryn shuddered at the realization that the dreams weren’t dreams, they were repressed memories. "Well, you’d better start taking care of that body. It’s the only one you’ve got until you get it to reproduce.  I believe that it’ll be easier to appropriate a child’s mind, seeing as how their personalities are not fully formed yet." Aeryn felt sick at the idea.  As if stealing people’s bodies wasn’t enough, these artificial intelligences were going for immortality by passing themselves along to their host’s offspring. "I’m glad we’ve had another success," Dr. Barnes said. "And with such a quick turn around." "As I said, she was willing." Aeryn watched in disbelief as the two finished up.  She wondered how much time she had left and tried to imagine any situation that didn’t end in her death.  She couldn’t think of a way out.  She wanted to flinch as NIA shook the doctor’s hand, but couldn’t.  She loathed him for convincing her to get the technology, she hated NIA for tricking her, but mostly, she hated herself.  For as much as she didn’t want to admit it, her Assistant had a point. She had handed her life over to technology long before she received the implant. Now, she had lost herself to it.     *

Anxiety is a fact of life! Everyone experiences it. It began in our cave-dweller days as a fight-or-flight response. Think of it this way: If you were walking through the woods and you ran into a bear, it would be normal for your body to activate the fight-or-flight response. Your heart would race, your muscles would tense up, your pupils would dilate, you would breathe more rapidly. The same thing would happen today if you were walking down the street and ran into a mugger. There is a simple, scientific explanation of this response: Your mind and body are preparing to protect you—whether you can feel it happening or not. Let us briefly examine this process. Your nervous system is divided into two basic parts: The voluntary nervous system controls actions that require thought, such as using the different parts of your body to drive a car; the autonomic nervous system, among its many functions, suspends all nonessential activity of the body and increases the physiological activity needed to confront the situation—either by fighting or by fleeing the external threat. Here is what it is responsible for: -increase muscle tension -accelerated heartbeat -rapid breathing -constriction of peripheral blood vessels (this is what causes cold hands) -dilation of the pupils -suspension of the digestive process -dry mouth -a voiding of bladder and bowels In addition, the fight-or-flight response causes a marked increase in the flow of adrenaline through the bloodstream and therefore added strength.

After facing a life or death situation, they'll either expect us to be stronger, or broken. If we are confident and raring to go, we hold far more value regardless of our place. If we are broken by the experience, nervous and tense... regardless of how far our [achievements] take us, no one would want to take one such a liability.

Thus, by 1758, the situation in Saint Domingue was tense and volatile. That year, new laws were passed by the colonial government that aimed to consolidate power at the top for whites and control the populations below, both free and slave. This new system was more heavily based on race than on class, unlike what had reigned previously.

Release. Engage in rejuvenating activities like yoga and meditation to release stressful emotions and to relax and reset your body, especially if it is tense. Trauma tends to get trapped within the body. Yoga and meditation can be useful outlets to “detox” from the impact of negative situations.

An Indirect quote - Some visitors came to a planet to see its resources and available benefits for them. They knew the universal secrets, but when they visited this planet, only primitive humans were living and there were dark in nature. So they tried to utilize them and to rule them, but as days and minutes passed these visitors started loving those dark people, and then they started teaching them about morality, perseverance, how to talk, how to walk and everything about utopian or high life style but some of these dark people misused it and some love stories became harassing stories and these visitors got tensed as they were teachers, they wanted to be respectful. But their main motive was to use the resources on this planet, because their planet already dead. And guy from those dark people asked a serious question after getting taught from them, you people came to utilize us and now you guys are enslaving us, just like you people we are also organisms of universe, and that sentence was a damn shocking for them then there was rain, a heavy rain or Indra. These dark people prayed a lot to preserve their culture with the knowledge they got from these visitors which in turn gave births of visitors souls to their children. Some of these dark people were used to build a plan against enemies as it was their psychology against thrests, and then there was manu smiriti or psychology given by visitors to not to give high positions to to these dark skinned people as they build a plan to destroy threats, they may turn violent people against universe. And then there was a girl in these dark people who said that, destruction is also another creation , and she was shakthi. Finally these visitors lost with their intention because these dark people started speaking truths, and still they had bad motives to kill these visitors those were called asuras, and this indra made his clans to protect humanity from these asuras. And people those who were interested in love and too much love to utilize these situations were given business opportunities on daily needs, people that were interested in extreme love I e - harassing people from these visitors were given protection duties. souls turned into another sex called trans, other than man and women to find out divergent i e mixed people. languages evolves, teaching evolved, business evolved, education evolved, there was silent guy who seems to be creator of these visitors, were given no duties at all other than science. But he himself was not a creator because for creating something new , he needs destruction or shiv and for protecting he needed another visitor called krishna, but what he forgot was this creator himself was a visitor from another planet were diamonds harvested and so called fairy tales and beautiful life was there but that planet was destroyed because of greediness. Because these visitors destroyed lots of planets already and with greedy, too much sex there were completely tired on this beautiful planet. and so finally they had no other planets to visit and whomever been sent did not return. So they finally found this is the final planet to survive. The unmentioned people are from west, and completely north and they were given important tasks to protect the planet which is the only available right now. These manu smiriti or visitors psychology did not enclose the details of creator but only said about who designed it - Bram. The god was born on west, north, south and down earth to find out what is the actual problem and when to end it for recreation. He found that there is no need of re creation as far as now because he loves all. But the problem is these visitors are from another planet or heaven or hell , and so they were greedy to enough to utilise all they had and sent their clans to search more but they did not return at all. And in between time frame, some visited but couldnt enter properly and those entered were affected much because of completely dynamic atmosphere.

Basically, you’re not alone in there. There are two distinct aspects of your inner being. The first is you, the awareness, the witness, the center of your willful intentions; and the other is that which you watch. The problem is, the part that you watch never shuts up. If you could get rid of that part, even for a moment, the peace and serenity would be the nicest vacation you’ve ever had. Imagine what it would be like if you didn’t have to bring this thing with you everywhere you go. Real spiritual growth is about getting out of this predicament. But first you have to realize that you’ve been locked in there with a maniac. In any situation or circumstance, your roommate could suddenly decide, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to talk to this person.” You would immediately feel tense and uncomfortable. Your roommate can ruin anything you’re doing without a moment’s notice. It could ruin your wedding day, or even your wedding night! That part of you can ruin anything and everything, and it generally does.

I dislike that kind of man. He has the Chaplin Disease; that particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge. Like all people with timid personalities his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he loves himself; a very tense situation. It's people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it's the most embarrassing thing in the world - a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups.

For an entire year after we broke up, he dated one woman after another in close succession. They were all smart, sweet, beautiful girls from the communities around us, and any one of them would have had all her dreams come true to have Mack become her man for good. I hated it. Every one of them. But I made myself accept the situation since I knew so absolutely that it was best for Mack to find someone who could make him happy. “What?” I choke out. “You think I wasn’t jealous every time you were with all those women?” He’s breathing even faster now, sucking in thick inhalations as he stares at me. “You never acted jealous.” “Of course I didn’t act jealous! I was trying to be good! Trying to do the right thing. Giving you what was… what was best for you. I knew it could never be me, but I wanted it to be me. I wanted to claw the face off every single woman you ever put your hands on!” I can’t believe I just said that. I’ve worked so hard for so long to make sure he’s completely free. We stare at each other, both of us breathless and tense, for way too long. Until finally I can’t stand it anymore. “Can we just drop this? I’m sorry I was acting petty. It doesn’t mean you’ve ever done anything wrong. You can see anyone you want. You can fuck anyone you want. You can fall in love and get married and have dozens of babies with anyone you want. And I’ll… I’ll

Col 2:12), and (2) this event goes beyond the bounds of historical chronology and is an ever-present reality. Paul uses the verb in the perfect tense, which in Greek expresses the enduring result of a past action: I was crucified, and I still am. This corresponds to the concrete situation of believers. As we continue to †live on earth, Christ’s passion is being actualized in our lives, which in turn affects our participation in the life of the risen Christ.

Milton knew how well he had been trained—he would have gone through the same programme as he had, after all—and he was able to anticipate all of the variables that he would be considering. First, he would assess the threat that Milton posed: significant, but limited as it stood. Second, he would confirm that the surroundings were suitable for an elimination: perfect. Once those quick assessments had been made to his satisfaction, he would carry out his orders. It would be quick and efficient. Milton guessed that he had a handful of seconds. A minute if he was lucky and could muddy the waters. He would not go down without a fight. If there was a chance, a half-chance, he would take it. He assessed the situation himself. Six feet separated him from Twelve. Another indication that the agent was good; not enough to compromise his aim but enough to make sure that Milton could not attack before he could fire. Milton explored his own body, his posture, tensing his muscles and assessing how quickly he might be able to move. The position of his feet. The angle of his hips, of his shoulders. He would need to be decisive, but even then, he knew that his chances were slim. He would certainly be shot before he could reach him, and even if he was not, he did not fancy his chances in unarmed combat with Twelve. He was younger, his muscles more pliant and less damaged and scarred than Milton’s.

Sharko took a swallow of beer. The atmosphere was like the situation: tense.

NOVEMBER 15 APPROACH PROBLEMS with a light touch. When your mind moves toward a problem area, you tend to focus on that situation so intensely that you lose sight of Me. You pit yourself against the difficulty as if you had to conquer it immediately. Your mind gears up for battle, and your body becomes tense and anxious. Unless you achieve total victory, you feel defeated. There is a better way. When a problem starts to overshadow your thoughts, bring this matter to Me. Talk with Me about it and look at it in the Light of My Presence. This puts some much-needed space between you and your concern, enabling you to see from My perspective. You will be surprised at the results. Sometimes you may even laugh at yourself for being so serious about something so insignificant. You will always face trouble in this life. But more importantly, you will always have Me with you, helping you to handle whatever you encounter. Approach problems with a light touch by viewing them in My revealing Light. Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence, O LORD. —PSALM 89:15 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” —JOHN 16:33

The more difficult the situation the less time there will be to issue a long order, and the less time your men will have to understand it. Moreover, the men will be high-strung and tense. Only the simplest order can be executed under such conditions.

When you find yourself in an explosive situation—one of those “tense situations” that seems likely to get out of hand at almost any minute—deliberatly lower the tone of your voice and keep it soft. This will literally force the other fellow to keep his own voice soft. And he can’t become angry and emotional as long as he keeps his voice pitched in a soft tone. If you wait until the other person becomes angry, it won’t work—but you can turn anger away before it arrives by using this technique.

Mayfield Realties was situated on the sixtieth floor of Trump Tower in the bourgeoning business district of New York City. A little after eight a.m. Jett Mayfield sat in his office overlooking the busy street below. The people and yellow taxis looked like ants in constant motion: always hurried, always tense. Like the city, Jett had once been abuzz with life—or his former interpretation of it: live hard, work even harder. Until he met her. There was something about Brooke Stewart that had changed something inside him. It wasn’t her beautiful chestnut eyes, nor the way she moved—confident and yet reserved. She had talked to him on a deeper level, touching something he had thought untouchable. His initial intention had been different though. His agenda had been to make her fall for him, not through words, but through actions and sex, lots of the latter, because he had wanted something she had. Not for himself, but for the man and for the company to which he owed everything. But events

The answer is the answer to so many of our questions about how best to act in an emotionally tense situation: Withdraw from the conflict.

As Lucetta continued going on and on about what he should do, in that rather bossy manner he’d never imagined she possessed, he found himself having a bit of a difficult time concentrating on what she was saying. Her lips were moving rapidly, and while he was certain she was probably giving him sound advice, he found himself more concerned with the idea that it seemed to him as if she’d done something to her lips—something that made them seem quite spinster-looking, as if their very plumpness had been squeezed right out of them. The lips he was looking at now truly did seem to belong to a woman who’d sport a wart on her face, but . . . how had she managed to make them appear so unattractive, so . . . Taking a step closer to her, he leaned forward, trying to puzzle out the mystery behind her lips. They looked thin, which was very peculiar, although . . . perhaps it was the wart she’d so cleverly put right above the upper lip that was . . . “Why are you staring at me like that? Has the wart moved?” Dragging his attention away from the wart in question, he looked up and caught her eye through the smudged lenses that he had no idea how she could see out of. Instead of answering her, though, his hand rose, almost of its own accord it seemed, and the next thing he knew, he’d plucked the phony wart straight off her face. “What has gotten into you?” she demanded. “I need that wart, and . . . did you just throw that over your shoulder?” “It was disgusting,” he said, dusting his hands together, pleased with himself over taking control of the wart even though Lucetta looked about ready to strangle him. “It was meant to be disgusting.” “Well, now it’s gone.” Lucetta let out a grunt before she tried to scoot around him, seemingly intent on looking for the wart he’d just tossed aside. Before she could pass him, though, he reached out, took hold of her shoulders and felt her tense. “What are you doing?” Instead of answering her, he drew her closer, smiling just a touch when he heard her take a swift intake of breath. “Bram . . . really . . . what are you doing?” “Trying to figure something out,” he said as he moved one of his hands from her shoulder and used a single finger to take a poke at her lip. “It’s still full,” he said, more to himself than to her. He poked it again before he pulled at her lower lip, exposing her teeth in the process. “You no longer appear to be missing your teeth.” “Stop that.” She smacked his hand away. “I knew I shouldn’t have snuck that second cookie backstage. It must have knocked the gum off.” “You used gum?” Lucetta nodded. “I did, Black Jack gum, created by Mr. Thomas Adams, who opened the first gum factory with his sons in 1870, although I suppose now is not actually the time to recite history when faced with such a concerning situation.” She blew out a breath. “I’m normally very careful when I use gum to make it appear as if I’m missing teeth, but I must have swallowed it when I ate that cookie.” “Do you think that’ll hurt you?” Bram asked slowly. “Hard to know at this point.” She closed her eyes and shook her head a mere moment later. “No, I haven’t read anything regarding a medical condition one can expect after swallowing gum.” Bram frowned as Lucetta opened her eyes. “You know it’s really not a normal occurrence for people to be able to summon up random tidbits like that at will, don’t you?” A ghost of a smile played around Lucetta’s mouth. “I’ve never claimed to be normal, Bram.” That smile struck him straight through his heart. It was a genuine smile, with a bit of a self-deprecating edge to it, and . . . Without allowing himself a second to reconsider, he leaned toward her as his hand moved from her shoulder to her waist, and pulling her ever so slowly against him, he lowered his lips to hers.

Sean walked over to her, so close she wondered if he was going to try to shake some sense into her. “Then there’s just one more thing to do.” “Oh, crap. What did I forget?” Considering how much time she’d spent going over everything in her mind instead of sleeping, she couldn’t imagine what it would be. When he rested his hand at her waist for a few seconds before sliding it around to the small of her back, she felt her muscles tense and her cheeks burn. “You can’t be doing that,” he said in the same low, husky kind of voice a man would use to tell a woman he wanted to take off her clothes. Her mind was frozen, all of her attention on that warm pressure against her T-shirt, and it took a few seconds to form a coherent sentence. “Doing what?” “You’re as jumpy as a virgin at a frat party.” He ran his fingers up over her spine until he reached the small bump of her bra strap, and then back down to her waist. “We’ve been dating a year and a half, and living together for a year of it, but you still blush and tense up when I touch you?” He had a point, but there was no way to fix that before Gram got off her plane. “Maybe you’re just that good.” It was the worst thing to say if she was trying to back him off and settle her overheating nerves. The grin he gave her would have been potent enough to get her out of her clothes if the situation was different. “That’s a story I can get behind,” he said. “Thought we were trying to keep the lies to a minimum.” The grin only widened. “Who says it’s a lie?

Today my friend Julie let me bring her dinner. Her husband, Doug, had two very scary seizures in the last two days, and a zillion tests and scans and appointments with neurologists. They had just come home from the hospital, and they were sitting on the front porch when I drove up, and Lilly, their three-year-old, was riding her big-girl bike on the sidewalk in her pink underpants. It was ninety-four degrees today, and they were exhausted. Being with them made me think about the idea that everything is okay. That idea is cruel in its untruth. The bottom just falls out sometimes, and nobody is exempt. I can’t take away the seizures or tell Lilly that it’s never going to happen again, although I would if I could. But I can be there, and I can feed them, and I can listen to their stories, of funny things the doctors said, and the strange and infuriating things family members invariably say in tense situations. I can sit in silence in the heat and stillness of a sticky June night, knowing that everything is not okay, but that this tiny moment is.

myself in, cradling Violet the entire time, arranging her limbs gently until she was situated on my lap with her head on my shoulder. Owen carefully closed the door and then came around to the driver’s side, opening it up. “Let’s hope the doctor we got for Henrik is still there when we get back,” he said tensely, as he adjusted the rearview mirror and checked the area around us. I shook my head. “No—need one closer. Too far.” Owen nodded tightly and turned the engine over. It sputtered a few times, but caught,

And I cannot imagine how frustrating such prejudicial suspicion must be. But you cannot make your situation any better by refusing to cooperate with the officer, no matter how unreasonable you may think the police officer is being, or by refusing to disclose two simple things: (1) your name, and (2) whether you have some lawful reason for your curious presence or conduct at that moment at some place where the officer already knows you are, because he or she is standing right there with you. Those are the only two things you should tell the police officer in that context, and they are both in the present tense. (You might as well cooperate with such a request, by the way, because the Fifth Amendment does not normally give you the right to refuse to tell the police your name anyway.2) That is it. But if the police officer tries to strike up a conversation with you about the past, and where you were thirty minutes earlier, and who you were with, and where you had dinner, and with whom—you will not answer those questions. You will not be rude, but you will always firmly decline, with all due respect, to answer those questions.3

Demand delivery actions can be a tense experience for some of our people, especially new folks. As we’re approaching the target’s office or home, the people in front seem to want to walk fast, while the ones in back lag behind. We’ve seen this lead to a situation where the person in front arrives almost alone in the target’s office, and in their nervousness, hands over the demand letter and turns to leave before most of their backup has had a chance to file in through the door. Obviously this squanders a lot of the power of the action. To avoid this, we now make a point of asking the people in front to walk slowly, and the person carrying the demand letter stays in the back of the crowd until after we’ve all gathered in front of the target. Then, once the full presence of the group has been felt, we part like the Red Sea while the letter-bearer passes through and hands over the demand.

Raven scowled at her. 'Fine. But if I accidentally shoot you because my aim is shaky, because I'm too tense, because I wasn't given the chance to relax before going into a potentially very dangerous situation, you'll be happy blaming only yourself?

The Buried Alive Exercise Lie down on the floor and relax. Cross your arms over your chest in the posture of death. Imagine all of the details of your burial, as if it were to be carried out tomorrow, the only difference being that you are being buried alive. As the situation develops in your mind – the chapel, the procession to the cemetery, the lowering of the casket, the worms in the grave – you begin tensing all of your muscles more and more in a desperate attempt to escape. But you cannot do so. Keep trying until you cannot stand it any longer, and then, using a movement that involves your entire body, throw aside the confines of the coffin, breathe deeply, and find yourself free. This movement will have a greater effect if you scream at the same time; it should be a scream that emanates from the depths of your body.

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

Between 1991 and 1993, the militants had virtually taken complete control of Imbaba, replacing the government as the social arbiter. The situation reached a climax in 1992 when the security forces decided to intervene. More than 12,000 troops in more than 100 armed cars descended on the neighbourhood (home to more than a million Cairenes) and sealed it off; by the end of a bloody, tense day,

Normally I laugh at such things, because there is nothing like a fart to lighten up a tense situation.

Emotion interacts with cognition biochemically, bathing the brain with hormones, transmitted either through the bloodstream or through ducts in the brain, modifying the behavior of brain cells. Hormones exert powerful biases on brain operation. Thus, in tense, threatening situations, the emotional system triggers the release of hormones that bias the brain to focus upon relevant parts of the environment. The muscles tense in preparation for action. In calm, nonthreatening situations, the emotional system triggers the release of hormones that relax the muscles and bias the brain toward exploration and creativity.

Aren’t we waiting for Lori?” Jonah asked. Toby didn’t turn around as he answered. “Nah, she isn’t coming. We’ll meet up with her later today.” Great. Lori was too pissed to see him and Toby was like Antarctica. Jonah still wasn’t completely sure why they were so angry, given the fact that Zev hadn’t told anyone back home about their relationship. Well, there was one option; his old friends weren’t comfortable with him being gay. Tough shit. Jonah figured the best way to deal with the situation was to face it head-on. But as soon as they got into Jonah’s car, Toby started fiddling with the radio. Jonah decided to bide his time and wait for Toby to finish what he was doing so they could talk. He almost lost his composure when the other man landed on a Barry Manilow song and kept it there. Toby had to be the only Fanilow under the age of fifty. “So I’m guessing Lori told you about that guy in my apartment last night.” Toby’s posture immediately stiffened. Several long moments passed before he answered. “Yeah, she did.” “Anything you want to ask me about it, Toby? Might as well get it out there. No reason to walk on eggshells around each other.” “Ooookay,” Toby responded, drawing out the word. He took a deep breath and turned to face Jonah. “Did you stumble across a clearance sale on jackass cream or something? Maybe they were running a special on lobotomies?” Well, that was an unexpected response. “Huh? Whatta you mean?” “What I mean, Jonah…,” Toby said in a louder voice, “is that I know we’re all just a couple of bad decisions away from being one of those weirdos who buys fake nuts and hangs them on the back of his pickup truck, but you really managed to win the stupid cake last night.” Okay, this conversation wasn’t going exactly how Jonah had planned, but he still felt the need to defend himself. “Stupid? Why? Because I’m gay? That’s not a bad decision, Toby. It’s not a decision at all.” Jonah pulled into a parking lot of a decent diner, turned off the car, and turned to face Toby. The conversation was tense and awkward, but at least Toby’s atrocious music was no longer making Jonah’s ears bleed. Jonah would have preferred hearing his car engine drop out and drag across the asphalt than another cheesy ballad. “No shit, Sherlock. But cheating on Zev is a decision. A really bad decision.” Jonah’s mouth dropped open, and he snapped his eyes toward Toby in shock. Holy crap. Toby knew about his relationship with Zev. That meant Lori knew. As much as he hated being hidden from Zev’s family and life back in Etzgadol, Jonah didn’t want the man to be forced out against his will. “You know?” “Know what?” “About, um, me and Zev?” Toby rolled his eyes. “Of course I know. Just because I was blessed in the looks department doesn’t mean I was shorted anything upstairs. I’m not an idiot, Jonah.

common situation of visual miscommunication between people and dogs is when owners let their leashed dogs meet each other for the first time. The humans are often anxious about how the dogs will get along, and if you watch them instead of the dogs, you’ll often notice that the humans will hold their breath and round their eyes and mouths in an “on alert” expression. Since these behaviors are expressions of offensive aggression in canine culture, I suspect that the humans are unwittingly signaling tension. If you exaggerate this by tightening the leash, as many owners do, you can actually cause the dogs to attack each other. Think of it: the dogs are in a tense social encounter, surrounded by support from their own pack, with the humans forming a tense, staring, breathless circle around them. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen dogs shift their eyes toward their owners’ frozen faces and then launch growling at the other dog. You can avoid a lot of dogfights by relaxing the muscles in your face, smiling with your eyes, breathing slowly, and turning away from the dogs rather than leaning forward and adding more tension.

What do you hope to accomplish? What do you most want to say? What do you hope to learn? What do you think others hope to say and learn? If we have elucidated goals before a discussion, we’re more likely to achieve them. How will this conversation start? How will you ensure that everyone has a voice and feels they can participate? What is needed to draw everyone in? What obstacles might emerge? Will people get angry? Withdrawn? Will a hesitancy to say something controversial prevent us from saying what’s necessary? How can we make it safer for everyone to air their thoughts? When those obstacles appear, what’s the plan? Research shows that being preemptively aware of situations that make us anxious or fearful can lower the impact of those concerns. How will you calm yourself and others if the conversation gets tense, or encourage someone who has gone quiet to participate more? Finally, what are the benefits of this dialogue

De-escalation De-escalation tactics are an important self-defense strategy used to defuse a potentially dangerous situation. The first and only objective in de-escalation is to reduce the level of anger/agitation so that a calmer discussion becomes possible. Reasoning with an enraged person is not possible. De-escalation skills are an important tool when dealing with people who are highly agitated, frustrated, angry, fearful, or intoxicated. These may ordinarily be peaceful individuals who are responding to an unusual or extreme circumstance; or, they may in fact be individuals with disruptive or potentially violent personalities. By controlling yourself and using tactical communication, you can reduce the increasing threat in a situation. The goal of de-escalation is to reduce the likelihood of the situation transitioning from a verbal altercation to physical violence. De-escalation can be achieved by developing a rapid rapport and a sense of connection with an agitated person. De-escalation, although a verbal tactic, consists not only of verbal techniques, but also psychological (emotions) and nonverbal (body language) techniques. De-escalation is a tactic of altering your demeanor to fit the circumstances. To use de-escalation as a self-defense tactic, you need to adapt your demeanor to the situation at hand and overcome or control your personal emotions. Here are some additional tactics to put into your toolbox: 1. Body Language: Have a confident body posture, but don’t look too aggressive. Pay close attention to your emotions, and be cautious to avoid tensing up your shoulders, neck, hands, or face. If you’re unable to compose your emotions, they can (and likely will) be felt by the aggravated person and may cause your de-escalation efforts to fail, despite using an appropriate tone and words. Stand relatively still, avoiding sudden jerky or excessive movements. Make sure to keep your hand gestures to a minimum. Basically, think similarly to how you would deal with an angry dog. 2. Voice: You generally want to keep your voice calm, firm, and low while speaking slowly and evenly. The tone, inflection, and volume of your voice can increase or decrease the other person’s anxiety and agitation. However, if the person is yelling, you may need to initially speak in a louder tone in order to be heard, and then guide them to a softer and slower pace. • Listen actively. Gather information by asking questions to develop a rapport, if possible under the circumstances, and gather information in order to begin to guide the communication in a less volatile direction. • Acknowledge their feelings. Some agitated people are unable to problem solve until their feelings are dealt with. By acknowledging their feelings, it often lets them know that they’re being heard. • Communicate clearly by explaining your intentions and conveying your expectations. Repeat yourself as much as necessary until you’re heard.

Is Arousal Really Different From Anxiety and Fear? It is important not to confuse arousal with fear. Fear creates arousal, but so do many other emotions, including joy, curiosity, or anger. But we can also be overaroused by semiconscious thoughts or low levels of excitement that create no obvious emotion. Often we are not aware of what is arousing us, such as the newness of a situation or noise or the many things our eyes are seeing. Actually, there are several ways to be aroused and still other ways to feel aroused, and they differ from time to time and from person to person. Arousal may appear as blushing, trembling, heart pounding, hands shaking, foggy thinking, stomach churning, muscles tensing, and hands or other parts of the body perspiring. Often people in such situations are not aware of some or all of these reactions as they occur. On the other hand, some people say they feel aroused, but that arousal shows up very little in any of these ways. Still, the term does describe something that all these experiences and physical states share. Like the word “stress,” arousal is a word that really communicates something we all know about, even if that something varies a lot. And of course stress is closely related to arousal: Our response to stress is to become aroused. Once we do notice arousal, we want to name it and know its source in order to recognize danger. And often we think that our arousal is due to fear. We do not realize that our heart may be pounding from the sheer effort of processing extra stimulation. Or other people assume we are afraid, given our obvious arousal, so we assume it, too. Then, deciding we must be afraid, we become even more aroused. And we avoid the situation in the future when staying in it and getting used to it might have calmed us down. We will discuss again the importance of not confusing fear and arousal in chapter 5 when we talk about “shyness.

strong emotions can seem as if they are part of the environment rather than part of us. It’s not that I was angry, we think, it’s that the situation was tense. But situations are not

All of these amplifiers—our tendency to subtract certain emotions from our self-description, to see missteps as situational rather than personality-driven, and to focus on our good intentions rather than our impact on others—add up. And so we get statistics like this: 37 percent of Americans report being victims of workplace bullies, but fewer than 1 percent report being bullies. It’s true that one bully can have many victims, but it’s unlikely that each averages thirty-seven.11 What’s more likely is that at least some percentage of those feeling bullied are receiving ill treatment from people who are unaware of their impact. They judge themselves by their intentions (“I was just trying to get the job done right!”) and attribute others’ reactions to their hypersensitivity (character) or the context (“Look, it was a tense situation. Anyone would have reacted that way”). Telling this latter group not to bully others is no solution, because they don’t realize that they’re doing so.

I feel uncomfortable and experience building tension or discomfort that seems to come out of the blue when I think about a particular situation. ____ 2. I avoid specific situations that make me feel uncomfortable. ____ 3. I have at least four of the following symptoms at the same time: shortness of breath or feeling smothered; heart palpitations (rapid or irregular heartbeat); trembling or shaking; choking; dizziness or unsteadiness; nausea or abdominal distress; numbness, feeling detached or out of touch with myself; fear of dying; fear of going crazy or out of control; hot flashes or chills; sweating without exertion. ____ 4. I worry excessively, and so I feel restless, keyed up or on edge, irritable, easily fatigued, have trouble falling or staying asleep or I wake up tired, have tense and tight muscles, have difficulty concentrating, and/or find my mind going blank. ____ 5. I have recurring intrusive thoughts such as hurting or harming a close relative, being contaminated by dirt or a toxic substance, fearing I forgot to lock my door or turn off an appliance, and/or have unpleasant fantasies of catastrophe. ____ 6. I perform ritualistic actions such as washing my hands or counting to relieve my discomfort because I have fears that keep entering my mind. ____ 7. I have witnessed or been subjected to a life-threatening experience and have persistent symptoms that have lasted for at least a month, including repetitive and distressing thoughts, nightmares, flashbacks, attempts to reenact the situation, emotional numbness (out of touch with your emotions—feeling no anger, sadness, guilt, or relief), feeling detached from other people, losing interest in activities that once gave me pleasure, sleep or concentration problems, startling easily, irritability and/or have outbursts of anger.

During the team’s flight back home to New York, Scott—who played ten scoreless minutes and was shooting 30 percent and averaging 2.9 points through his first fifteen games—sought to lighten the mood, cracking jokes on the plane. In a way, this was who Scott had always been: a lighthearted person who often looked for ways to laugh in overly tense situations. By contrast, that was not who Van Gundy was. The coach, often miserable in normal circumstances, was far more miserable after losses. Following home defeats, those who traversed the Garden’s hallways knew they might hear Van Gundy shouting, tipping over his desk, or punching a wall in his office. And whenever the Knicks played on the road—win or lose—Van Gundy usually had limited patience for outbursts on the team plane. “We were on a flight coming back from a preseason [win], and I got in trouble for yelling, ‘Yes! Let’s go Mets!’ after they clinched a spot in the World Series [in 2000],” says Hamdan, the club’s assistant trainer. “The next day, he calls me into his office and says I need to have more respect for the sanctity of winning and losing. And I told him: ‘Jeff, the sanctity of winning and losing is why I yelled “Let’s go Mets!” They just made the World Series!’ And he just looks at me and says, ‘Get the fuck outta my office.’ ” Van Gundy let Hamdan slide with a warning. But Scott wouldn’t enjoy that same grace. Seeking to send a message, the coach made a bold, unilateral choice to bypass Grunfeld and cut Scott from the team the morning after the flight.

From 1959 onwards the situation on the border with China became increasingly tense. It soon became a cause for national concern. In the letters Chaudhury received from Jawaharlal Nehru, about China, he had a hunch about the divergence of views between Nehru and Sardar Patel. The NEFA Reverse, which occurred on 20 October 1962, rocked India's political and military foundations. The nation reacted with anger to the absoluteness of this event. In the words of Brig. John Dalvi, "1962 was a national failure of which every Indian is guilty. It was a failure in the Higher Direction of War, a failure of the Opposition, a failure of the General Staff (myself included); it was a failure of responsible public opinion and the Press. For the government of India, it was a Himalayan Blunder at all levels.

Basically, when you are at an interval where your sword can strike the enemy, you should think that the enemy’s sword can also reach you.12 Forget your body when you are set to kill your opponent.13 Examine this carefully. (8) About Mindset (心持之事) One’s mind should neither dwindle nor be in an excited state. It must not be rueful nor afraid. It is straight and expansive, with one’s “heart of intent” faint and one’s “heart of perception” substantial. The mind is like water, able to respond aptly to changing situations. Water can be a sparkling hue of emerald green, it can be a single drop or a blue ocean. This should be carefully studied. (9) To Know the Upper, Middle and Lower Levels of Strategy (兵法上中下の位を知る事) Stances are adopted in combat, but a show of various sword positions in order to appear strong or fast is regarded as lower-level strategy. Further, refined-looking strategy, flaunting an array of techniques and rhythmical mastery to give the impression of beauty and magnificence, is regarded as middle level. Upper-level strategy looks neither strong nor weak, not irregular, not fast, not glorious and not bad. It looks broad, direct and serene. Examine this carefully.14 (10) About the “Cord-Measure” (いとかねと云事) Always hold a cord-measure in your mind. By holding the cord against each opponent to size him up, you will see his strengths, weaknesses, straightness, crookedness, and tense and relaxed points. With your mind’s measure, pull the cord, making it straight so that you can quantify the enemy’s heart. With this measure, you should be able to know the round, uneven, long, short, crooked or straight features of the enemy. This must be studied.

in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over spirited. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.

I left Martina alone with Nico in that club, trusting her, although I'm still not sure today how she got there. Adam and I drove back to Urgell in an odd silence. I wanted to slap him so badly, but he had a point. Adam knew how to defuse tense situations by instinct, out of fear of getting caught in a lie or cheat and getting slapped. We had to maintain a good relationship with Nico because he would bring tourists from his grow shop on Ample Street to our club, Adam said. At the same time, I noticed that Nico had too many friends around town in too many coffeeshops for us to meddle with him in any way, so I had to bow to him being the local; however, it never really happened. I was just respectful to Nico as I was to anyone. Although I didn't tell Adam, I thought he knew that Nico had too many connections for us to try to take over his store in an underhanded way. Adam had apparently been trying to do this not only recently, as if he wanted to buy Nico's grow shop by the time we opened the coffeeshop near it. At least, that was my thought, or what Adam attempted to make me believe. I knew that Adam would eventually have problems with Nico, or by trusting Nico, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I have thought to myself, “Okay, boss buddy, The Prince of Israel, let's see how you're going to burn yourself again with Nico Preson. Let's see how much money you're going to lose this time around trusting this Spaniard or Mallorcan crook again.

People like me occasionally need extreme and tense moments in our lives. Extreme situations make me take a look at myself, I’m always curious how I react to the situation. These kinds of moments really determine my life.

When you walk into a situation that is similar in time or place to one in which you previously had a panic attack, the image of that last time rises up in your mind. This image alone can produce the same muscle tension and the mind can interpret it to mean “trouble.” Instead of paying attention to all of its many problem-solving options, the mind focuses on its negative images of your past failure. In turn, you begin to notice your tense muscles and all of your other disturbing body sensations.

One of the rules in a tense situation: remain nonplussed no matter what. People liked reactions because the more you gave them, the more out of control they could make you.

If you are in a relationship with someone who tends to go round and round, getting stuck on the same points during an argument, here is one of my favorite strategies: When things get tense, simply say you need to go to the bathroom, since no one will likely argue with that. This is an easy way to foster a little distraction and take a breather, which can help the situation.

Their situation is extremely tense, strung like the tautest tightrope, and could be cut with the dullest blade.

When we discipline with threats—whether explicitly through our words or implicitly through scary nonverbals like our tone, posture, and facial expressions—we activate the defensive circuits of our child’s reactive reptilian downstairs brain. We call this “poking the lizard,” and we don’t recommend it because it almost always leads to escalating emotions, for both parent and child. When your five-year-old throws a fit at the grocery store, and you tower over him and point your finger and insist through clenched teeth that he “calm down this instant,” you’re poking the lizard. You’re triggering a downstairs reaction, which is almost never going to lead anywhere productive for anyone involved. Your child’s sensory system takes in your body language and words and detects threat, which biologically sets off the neural circuitry that allows him to survive a threat from his environment—to fight, to flee, to freeze, or to faint. His downstairs brain springs into action, preparing to react quickly rather than fully considering alternatives in a more responsive, receptive state. His muscles might tense as he prepares to defend himself and, if necessary, attack with freeze and fight. Or he may run away in flight, or collapse in a fainting response. Each of these is a pathway of reactivity of the downstairs brain. And his thinking, rational self-control circuitry of the upstairs brain goes off-line, becoming unavailable in that moment. That’s the key—we can’t be in both a reactive downstairs state and a receptive upstairs state at the same time. The downstairs reactivity holds sway. In this situation, you can appeal to your child’s more sophisticated upstairs brain, and allow it to help rein in the more reactive downstairs brain.

This tense situation exploded early one January morning in 1917 when a group of Mexican women mounted an angry revolt against the immigration officials stationed along the El Paso, Texas–Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, border. They earned their living by day cooking and cleaning in the homes of well-to-do Texans, and each night returned to their homes in Ciudad Juárez. But this particular morning, instead of quietly waiting to cross the border so that they could begin their workdays, the women became enraged over a newly established quarantine against the possible entry of typhus fever. The ironclad measure was established by edict of the surgeon general of the United States. It applied to every Mexican— both immigrants and dayworkers each time they crossed the border into the United States—and included physical examinations, mandatory disinfection of all baggage and personal belongings, and delousing baths with a mixture of kerosene, gasoline, and vinegar. Most intolerable to the Mexicans was the inherent danger of bathing in flammable and noxious agents like gasoline and kerosene. Only nine months earlier, a group of twenty-six Mexicans incarcerated in the El Paso jail underwent a similar disinfection procedure and, soon after a newly arrived prisoner lit a cigarette, were burned to death. While this practice offended and frightened those who were to be subjected to the baths, its dangerous nature seemed to be all but lost on the Americans ordering them.

Virginia nevertheless made an instant impression at work, conducting her duties—coding and decoding telegrams, dealing with the mail, processing diplomatic visas, and dispatching reports back to Washington on the increasingly tense political situation—