Transitions For Direct Quotes

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Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.
Osamu Dazai (The Setting Sun (New Directions Book))
Perfectly Imperfect We have all heard that no two snowflakes are alike. Each snowflake takes the perfect form for the maximum efficiency and effectiveness for its journey. And while the universal force of gravity gives them a shared destination, the expansive space in the air gives each snowflake the opportunity to take their own path. They are on the same journey, but each takes a different path. Along this gravity-driven journey, some snowflakes collide and damage each other, some collide and join together, some are influenced by wind... there are so many transitions and changes that take place along the journey of the snowflake. But, no matter what the transition, the snowflake always finds itself perfectly shaped for its journey. I find parallels in nature to be a beautiful reflection of grand orchestration. One of these parallels is of snowflakes and us. We, too, are all headed in the same direction. We are being driven by a universal force to the same destination. We are all individuals taking different journeys and along our journey, we sometimes bump into each other, we cross paths, we become altered... we take different physical forms. But at all times we too are 100% perfectly imperfect. At every given moment we are absolutely perfect for what is required for our journey. I’m not perfect for your journey and you’re not perfect for my journey, but I’m perfect for my journey and you’re perfect for your journey. We’re heading to the same place, we’re taking different routes, but we’re both exactly perfect the way we are. Think of what understanding this great orchestration could mean for relationships. Imagine interacting with others knowing that they too each share this parallel with the snowflake. Like you, they are headed to the same place and no matter what they may appear like to you, they have taken the perfect form for their journey. How strong our relationships would be if we could see and respect that we are all perfectly imperfect for our journey.
Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)
We proceeded to make way across the mighty Hooghly River, a monstrous offshoot of the Ganges, where we contemplated for a moment, our thoughts seemingly caught in the roaring southward current; there we gazed, toward where the city transitions into mangrove jungle, and somewhere a bit further to the southwest where all the rivers split infinitely like capillaries, where those famous Bengal tigers trod among the sunderbans. Peering in that direction, Bajju gripped the vertical bars just above the horizontal pedestrian railing, breathing slowly and silently, knees locked, still, despite being on arguably the busiest and loudest bridge in the world.
Colin Phelan (The Local School)
Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future, but to shape it...to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.
Alvin Toffler
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
That men of this kind despise women, though a not uncommon belief, is one which hardly appears to be justified. Indeed, though naturally not inclined to 'fall in love' in this direction, such men are by their nature drawn rather near to women, and it would seem that they often feel a singular appreciation and understanding of the emotional needs and destinies of the other sex, leading in many cases to a genuine though what is called 'Platonic' friendship. There is little doubt that they are often instinctively sought after by women, who, without suspecting the real cause, are conscious of a sympathetic chord in the homogenic which they miss in the normal man.
Edward Carpenter (The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women)
Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.
Vladimir Lenin (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition (Illustrated))
When it comes to the subject it's best to understand that white people do not recognize public transit as a viable option until a subway line is built that runs directly from their house to their work.
Christian Lander (Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions)
sublime 1. (adjective) transcendent; complete, absolute 2. (transitive verb) to cause to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state
Christina Lauren (Sublime)
The riff-raff that exists in every society rises to the surface in any time of transition, and is utterly devoid not only of any goal, but even the slightest indication of an idea, and merely gives expression to restlessness and impatience as forcefully as it can. Meanwhile, the riff-raff, without being aware of it, almost always falls under the sway of that small band of ‘advanced people’ which acts with a definite goal, and which points all this rabble in whatever direction they please, provided that they in turn don’t consist of utter idiots as well, which, however, also happens.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Demons)
...his life was dominating by conflicting ideas, as often happens in periods of transition. The turbulence of the times makes some people feel a need to bestir themselves, but in the opposite direction, backwards rather than forwards;
Italo Calvino (The Baron in the Trees)
I agree that it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point we’ll start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends and lovers and so on. But we’ll be waiting, in my opinion, a long time. And, in fact, we’ll die first. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So, in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call “breaking up and staying together,” because at the end of our lives, when there is nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know and to go on loving and worrying, even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it -- in a way -- a nice reason to die out? The nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much, and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity. And in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive -- because we are so stupid about each other.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
From the study of the development of human intelligence, in all directions, and through all times, the discovery arises of a great fundamental law, to which it is necessarily subject, and which has a solid foundation of proof, both in the facts of our organization and in our historical experience. The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions -- each branch of our knowledge -- passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive. In other words, the human mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different, and even radically opposed: namely, the theological method, the metaphysical, and the positive. Hence arise three philosophies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of which excludes the others. The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding, and the third is its fixed and definitive state. The second is merely a state of transition.
Auguste Comte (Cours de philosophie positive 1/6 (French Edition))
everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
We are starving for spiritual nourishment. We are starving for a life that is personal, connected, and meaningful. By choice, that is where we will direct our energy. When we do so, community will arise anew because this spiritual nourishment can only come to us as a gift, as part of a web of gifts in which we participate as giver and receiver. Whether or not it rides the vehicle of something bought, it is irreducibly personal and unique.
Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition)
Transition and change - guaranteed to cause anxiety. That anxiety shows itself in physical and behavioral ways, but also with thoughts (sometimes really crazy ones). This is the (primitive/automatic) brain's way of keeping us safe from the danger of change. We end up getting so involved with the feeling and thoughts of anxiety, we get distracted from the "danger". If we trust the anxiety then our primitive brain has succeeded in "protecting" us from the danger. I suggest not believing, trusting, or taking direction from the anxiety and continue your pursuits forward. Then, you will be amazed at your ability to attract and reveal your true capabilities, your light, your magic.
Charles F. Glassman (Brain Drain - The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life)
The A is agency—autonomy, freedom, creativity, mastery; the belief that you can impact the world around you. The B is belonging—relationships, community, friends, family; the people that surround and nurture you. The C is cause—a calling, a mission, a direction, a purpose; a transcendent commitment beyond yourself that makes your life worthwhile.
Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
A “roadmap” is simply a plan for moving or transitioning, from one state to another. A roadmap provides the direction to the future.
Pearl Zhu (Digital Capability: Building Lego Like Capability Into Business Competency)
The satisfaction to Christian in withholding compassion from Caro had sprung directly from her need, her poverty.
Shirley Hazzard (The Transit of Venus)
Before success can truly become routine, there must be that transition from that wanting/hoping to have success toward honestly knowing you can earn success with your talents and work ethic.
George M. Gilbert (Team Of One: We Believe)
What in effect unites the socialists of the Left and the Right is this common hostility to competition and their common desire to replace it by a directed economy. Though the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” are still generally used to describe the past and the future forms of society, they conceal rather than elucidate the nature of the transition through which we are passing.
Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. This is what we both certainly are. The revolution must be taking place somewhere, but the old morality persists unchanged in the world around us and lies athwart our way. However much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water at the bottom, far from experiencing a revolution, lies motionless, awake but feigning sleep.
Osamu Dazai (The Setting Sun (New Directions Book))
When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.
Chuck Klosterman (But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past)
Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life. Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system. Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits. The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.
Lewis Mumford
So, when diplomacy failed, Lakshmibai chose a different tactic: aggressive negotiations. Twenty-something Lakshmibai declared open revolt, attacked the British fort at Jhansi, recaptured her city, and massacred the British invaders. Sources aren't totally clear on her direct involvement in the massacre, but it's universally agreed that this is where she transitions from queen mother into full-on Boss Bitch Rebel Queen hellbent on kicking the British out of India by their colonialist asses.
Mackenzi Lee (Bygone Badass Broads: 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World)
The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children. In total, Walmart benefits from more than $7 billion in subsidies each year from taxpayers like you. Those “low, low prices” are made possible by low, low wages—and by the taxes you pay to keep those workers alive on their low, low pay. As I said earlier, I don’t think that anyone who works full-time should live in poverty. I also don’t think that bazillion-dollar companies like Walmart ought to funnel profits to shareholders while paying such low wages that taxpayers must pick up the ticket for their employees’ food, shelter, and medical care. I listen to right-wing loudmouths sound off about what an outrage welfare is and I think, “Yeah, it stinks that Walmart has been sucking up so much government assistance for so long.” But somehow I suspect that these guys aren’t talking about Walmart the Welfare Queen. Walmart isn’t alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That’s $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child—and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development—everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes. Yeah, the point I’m making is blindingly obvious. America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don’t pay a living wage. Of course, giant corporations know they have a sweet deal—and they plan to keep it, thank you very much. They have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to fight off any efforts to give workers a chance to organize or fight for a higher wage. Giant corporations have used their mouthpiece, the national Chamber of Commerce, to oppose any increase in the minimum wage, calling it a “distraction” and a “cynical effort” to increase union membership. Lobbyists grow rich making sure that people like Gina don’t get paid more. The
Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
Sheikh Abdullah held an unrivaled place in the history of Kashmir and in the historic transition from tradition to modernity. He left an indelible impact on the political landscape of Kashmir. He was a Charismatic leader having a magnetic quality to change the mood of the public and drove them in the direction he desired.
Tarif Naaz (SHEIKH MOHAMMAD ABDULLAH : A VICTIM OF BETRAYAL)
She nodded. “In the ship, the pilot’s nervous system is connected directly with the controls. The whole hyperstasis transit consists of him literally wrestling the stasis shifts. You judge by his reflexes, his ability to control his artificial body. An experienced Transporter can tell exactly how he’ll work with hyperstasis currents.
Samuel R. Delany (Babel-17)
Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality......The revolution must be taking place somewhere, but the old morality persists unchanged in the world around us and lies athwart our way. However much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water at the bottom, far from experiencing a revolu- tion, lies motionless, awake but feigning sleep.
Osamu Dazai (The Setting Sun (New Directions Book))
CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
them the ABCs of meaning. The A is agency—autonomy, freedom, creativity, mastery; the belief that you can impact the world around you. The B is belonging—relationships, community, friends, family; the people that surround and nurture you. The C is cause—a calling, a mission, a direction, a purpose; a transcendent commitment beyond yourself that makes your life worthwhile.
Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
Realize that everyone cannot see and understand as you do. Many times when God begins to lead you in a particular direction, He has been preparing you for a change for quite some time. You will perceive what He is doing and where He wants to take you in a deeply personal way. You may be able to see how the place you are going is exactly the right next step for you, and you may have the wisdom you need to go through the various steps of the journey. But because this is something God is doing in your life, the people around you cannot always sense or discern where and how God is leading you. They may not even recognize the general direction in which He is moving you during this particular time. When these dynamics enter into a relationship, I believe they are huge indicators of a need for transition.
Van Moody (The People Factor: How Building Great Relationships and Ending Bad Ones Unlocks Your God-Given Purpose)
Now directly above her, transiting the meridian, was the new crescent moon. No longer a chalky white, it was as silver as a piece of polished jewelry, somehow shining and sparkling despite the fact that it should have been nearly invisible that close to the sun, traveling through his bright day. "Oh, how pret---" Rapunzel started to say, but then she was distracted because her hair began to glow. Just like when she killed the chickens-- but more. Brilliantly, with the white light of the diamonds of her (Flynn's) crown, with the whiteness she imagined the foam of a midnight sea would look like. She picked up a hank of hair and let it hang from her hands; it was like holding molten silver chains or all the distant rivers seen from her tower, gathered up together by some unimaginable fairy-tale giant.
Liz Braswell (What Once Was Mine)
Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both - I'm quoting direct from Neil's memo here - if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in transit.
David Foster Wallace
In the same vein, the problem in economic life is supposedly greed, both outside ourselves in the form of all those greedy people and within ourselves in the form of our own greedy tendencies. We like to imagine that we ourselves are not so greedy—maybe we have greedy impulses, but we keep them under control. Unlike some people! Some people don’t keep their greed in check. They are lacking in something fundamental that you and I have, some basic decency, basic goodness. They are, in a word, Bad. If they can’t learn to restrain their desires, to make do with less, then we’ll have to force them to. Clearly, the paradigm of greed is rife with judgment of others, and with self-judgment as well. Our self-righteous anger and hatred of the greedy harbor the secret fear that we are no better than they are. It is the hypocrite who is the most zealous in the persecution of evil. Externalizing the enemy gives expression to unresolved feelings of anger. In a way, this is a necessity: the consequences of keeping them bottled up or directed inward are horrific. But there came a time in my life when I was through hating, through with the war against the self, through with the struggle to be good, and through with the pretense that I was any better than anyone else. I believe humanity, collectively, is nearing such a time as well. Ultimately, greed is a red herring, itself a symptom and not a cause of a deeper problem. To blame greed and to fight it by intensifying the program of self-control is to intensify the war against the self, which is just another expression of the war against nature and the war against the other that lies at the base of the present crisis of civilization.
Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition)
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
Stalin’s teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another’… The slide away from truth-directed science had disastrous results in agriculture. It was also humanly disastrous. Biologists who disagreed were shot or imprisoned.
Jonathan Glover (Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century)
But the moan this time is not simply a moan of will and pain but a call into the emptiness: Is anyone there? There is a blackness spreading into her vision and she feels herself spinning in an unlit sky. Empty, empty, her moan cries. The moan goes on, spiraling deeper into space, and at the end of it Lore falls directly into sleep, with no sense of transition, into a dream of gray waters, of swimming with weary arms and trying to spy the shore.
Pamela Erens (Eleven Hours)
The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies. The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb. For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow. Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.
John Maynard Keynes (The Economic Consequences of the Peace)
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.
John Maynard Keynes (The Economic Consequences of Peace)
War stories. That was what remained: a few stupid war stories, hackneyed and unprofound. Even the lessons were commonplace. It hurts to be shot. Dead men are heavy. Don't seek trouble, it'll find you soon enough. You hear the shot that gets you. Scared to death on the field of battle. Life after death. These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance; ignorant men, trite truths. What remained was simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any war. No new messages. Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or direction. No order.
Tim O'Brien (Going After Cacciato)
Ware forever in transition-continually moving, changing direction, doing differently than we imagined. If we were to stop and analyze the past and what lies ahead, we would know that ifanything is required of us, it is to be flexible. Not flexible in seeing everything one color, one ideal, one belief-but bending without breaking, able to see the chaos and not fall down under it. It is our duty, our a da du da lv ne di, obligation, to move and bend without creating a rift in our own spirit. A house cut in two cannot stand. However far we move in any direction, we must get it back together, we must bond with the law of our own spiritual being-which is to love others
Joyce Sequichie Hifler (Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations (Cherokee Feast of Days (Paperback) Book 1))
Friedrich Hayek, who has become an iconic figure among today’s conservatives, was a strong proponent of the idea. In his three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty, published between 1973 and 1979, Hayek suggested that a guaranteed income would be a legitimate government policy designed to provide insurance against adversity, and that the need for this type of safety net is the direct result of the transition to a more open and mobile society where many individuals can no longer rely on traditional support systems: There is, however, yet another class of common risks with regard to which the need for government action has until recently not been generally admitted. . . .
Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future)
PLACEMENT The Physical Transference of Care and Saying Good-bye "A toddler cannot participate in a discussion of the transition process or be expected o understand a verbal explanation. [They benefit] tremendously by experiencing the physical transference of care, and by witnessing the former caregiver's permission and support for [their new guardians] to assume their role. The toddler pays careful attention to the former caregiver's face and voice, listening and watching as [they talk] to [their new guardians] and invites the [guardians'] assumption of the caregiver's role. The attached toddler is very perceptive of [their] caregiver's emotions and will pick up on nonverbal cues from that person as to how [they] should respond to [their] new family. Children who do not have he chance to exchange good-byes or to receive permission to move on are more likely to have an extended period of grieving and to sustain additional damage to their basic sense of trust and security, to their self-esteem, and to their ability to initiate and sustain strong relationships as they grow up. The younger the child, the more important it is that there be direct contact between parents and past caregiveres. A toddler is going to feel conflicting loyalties if [they] are made to feel on some level that [they] must choose between [their] former caregiver and [their] new guardians ...
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft)
As masculine self-consciousness grows stronger, the stage of matriarchy is followed by that of division. Symptomatic of this transition period is the twin-brother motif in mythology, which expresses the mutual affinity of opposites. This division turns destructively against itself in self-mutilation and suicide. As we saw, in uroboric and matriarchal castration the will of the Great Mother was paramount. But the centroversion tendency which underlies the ego-hero’s struggle for self-preservation and which first takes the form of anxiety, advances beyond the passive, narcissistic stage and turns into resistance, defiance, and aggression directed against the Great Mother, as illustrated mythologically in the story of Hippolytus.
Erich Neumann (The Origins and History of Consciousness (Maresfield Library))
Have you ever just laid down on the grass and watch as the day slowly transitions to evening? The sky flows through hues of orange and slowly fades to greys, the incredible palette of dusk. This is where the magic begins to happen. First the planets reveal themselves as bright pinpoints of light against the bleak canvas, and for a few moments they are the only thing you can focus on - they’re so bright that they draw away from anything else. When you stare at only one, when there is so much distance between it and anything else, it almost seems to be dancing back and forth in space, playing mind tricks on you. However, as you emerge from its hypnotic trance, you begin to see the less significant stars awaken from what seems like nowhere. They too earn your attention, but in a different way. You can’t look at them directly because otherwise you won’t see their beauty. You have to glance at them from the side, from the corner of your eye to really see them in their fullness. The sky is not yet completely in darkness and the universe is already showing off. Distant stars even further light years away and planets orbiting from afar being to emerge and before you know it you almost don’t know where to look, there are little grains of sand lighting up the sky from everywhere. This happens every night - a spectacular natural light show but so many people miss it. It’s sad to think that, but it makes viewing it that much more special when you get to experience it. Just you and the universe, watching itself through your own very eyes.
Madeleine Jane Hall
If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
In conjunction with his colleagues, Frantisek Baluska from the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany at the University of Bonn is of the opinion that brain-like structures can be found at root tips. In addition to signaling pathways, there are also numerous systems and molecules similar to those found in animals. When a root feels its way forward in the ground, it is aware of stimuli. The researchers measured electrical signals that led to changes in behavior after they were processed in a "transition zone." If the root encounters toxic substances, impenetrable stones, or saturated soil, it analyzes the situation and transmits the necessary adjustments to the growing tip. The root tip changes direction as a result of this communication and steers the growing root around the critical areas. Right now, the majority of plant researchers are skeptical about whether such behavior points to a repository for intelligence, the faculty of memory, and emotions. Among other things, they get worked up about carrying over findings in similar situations with animals and, at the end of the day, about how this threatens to blur the boundary between plants and animals. And so what? What would be so awful about that? The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings. Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track? Sometimes I suspect we would pay more attention to trees and other vegetation if we could establish beyond a doubt just how similar they are in many ways to animals.
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
I would put How Green Was My Valley in the same class as Uncle Tom’s Cabin: a work that leaves an ineradicable “scratch on the mind,” to borrow Harold Isaacs’s useful phrase. There was another element as well. At a certain point, on some springy-turfed Welsh hillside far above the scenes of alienation and exploitation that lay below, young Huw contrived to part with his irksome virginity. Richard Llewellyn handled this transition with very slightly too much quasi-poetic euphemism, his crucial error being (to my fevered imagining) the idea that the inflamed heat of young manhood could be assuaged only by the relative “coolness” of a feminine interior. One had had a vague hope that the ardency would be appeased by an even greater heat, rather than sizzled like a red-hot horseshoe dipped in water, but at this stage I would have been willing to settle for anything that offered incandescence in either direction.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed he had proved beyond doubt that 'it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.' His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that 'if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn't need elevators.
Zachary M. Schrag (The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape))
As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.’ But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in another ceremonial reburial: this time of Imre Nagy and his colleagues. One of the speakers over Nagy’s grave was the young Viktor Orbán, future Prime Minister of his country. ‘It is a direct consequence of the bloody repression of the Revolution,’ he told the assembled crowds, ‘that we have had to assume the burden of insolvency and reach for a way out of the Asiatic dead end into which we were pushed. Truly, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party robbed today’s youth of its future in 1956.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
The Sorceress is the 'madwoman' linked chronologically to the transition of menopause: she is highly introspective yet surging with energy. The Priestess yields to the Mystery, but the Sorceress takes command as medicine woman or shamaness, wielding power rather than seeking it.  One of the Sorceress's best-known goddess representatives is Medusa, considered crazed, and fearsome for her power to turn men to stone. Yet Medusa's head teems with the serpents of wisdom; she is revered in ancient traditions as 'mother of all gods, whom she bore before childbirth existed.' She represents the Sorceress's ability to tap the forces of creation in her communications and actions. Far from being wild or out of control, she is highly directed and serious about her work. Her pathway narrows, her choices become limited. When we see with the eyes of the Sorceress we are in synch with the Mystery; we know exactly what to do in any given situation.
Elizabeth Davis (The women's wheel of life)
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens' Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
The moon: in that luminous face one can behold those tired phases that bring only disappointment and no satisfaction; the impulses governing its expression remain patternistic, its cycles of transition easily predictable. With moderated temperament it commands the capricious sea: its diametric opponent, in whose helpless defiance, arises an empty, albeit elegant promise, an ever-changing flicker of reflected light, a simultaneous opening and closing of paths to be traversed, a vacillating hope and disillusionment in whose unsettling direction emerges something one might wish to call, even under the hardened visage of sky, a marginal sense of freedom. To walk upon the decks of ramshackle vessels rising and descending in patterns indeterminate, to lean in ecstasy over their shaky rails to witness the splendor of that which transforms immediately upon being witnessed and which transforms thereby the witness in question: it was these flights of reverie that appealed better to one’s imagination than the lean pragmatism of predictable transition.
Ashim Shanker (Inward and Toward (Migrations, #3))
Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided—already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order—by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by what Poincaré called the (experimental) group of displacement. But it goes without saying that, at this elementary level, which precedes all thought, we cannot regard this grouping as an operational system, since it is a system of responses actually effected; the fact is therefore that it is undifferentiated, the displacements in question being at the same time and in every case responses directed towards a goal serving some practical purpose. We might therefore say that at this level spatio-temporal, logico-arithmetical and practical (means and ends) groupings form a global whole and that, in the absence of differentiation, this complex system is incapable of constituting an operational mechanism. At the end of this period and at the beginning of representative thought, on the other hand, the appearance of the symbol makes possible the first form of differentiation: practical groupings (means and ends) on the one hand, and representation on the other. But this latter is still undifferentiated, logico-arithmetical operations not being distinguished from spatio-temporal operations. In fact, at the intuitive level there are no genuine classes or relations because both are still spatial collections as well as spatio-temporal relationships: hence their intuitive and pre-operational character. At 7–8 years, however, the appearance of operational groupings is characterized precisely by a clear differentiation between logico-arithmetical operations that have become independent (classes, relations and despatialized numbers) and spatio-temporal or infra-logical operations. Lastly, the level of formal operations marks a final differentiation between operations tied to real action and hypothetico-deductive operations concerning pure implications from propositions stated as postulates.
Jean Piaget (The Psychology of Intelligence)
MT: But you are. You are justifying it. RG: I'm trying to show that there's meaning at precisely the point where the nihilistic temptation is strongest today. I'm saying: there's a Revelation, and people are free to do with it what they will. But it too will keep reemerging. It's stronger than them. And, as we have seen, it's even capable of putting mimetic phenomena to work on its behalf, since today everyone is competing to see who is the most “victimized.” Revelation is dangerous. It's the spiritual equivalent of nuclear power. What's most pathetic is the insipidly modernized brand of Christianity that bows down before everything that's most ephemeral in contemporary thought. Christians don't see that they have at their disposal an instrument that is incomparably superior to the whole mishmash of psychoanalysis and sociology that they conscientiously feed themselves. It's the old story of Esau sacrificing his inheritance for a plate of lentils. All the modes of thought that once served to demolish Christianity are being discredited in turn by more “radical” versions of the same critique. There's no need to refute modern thought because, as each new trend one-ups its predecessors, it's liquidating itself at high speed. The students are becoming more and more skeptical, but, and above all in America, the people in power, the department chairs, the “chairpersons,” as they say, are fervent believers. They're often former sixties' radicals who've made the transition to administrative jobs in academia, the media, and the church. For a long time, Christians were protected from this insane downward spiral, and, when they finally dive in, you can recognize them by their naïve modernist faith. They're always one lap behind. They always choose the ships that the rats are in the midst of abandoning. They're hoping to tap into the hordes of people who have deserted their churches. They don't understand that the last thing that can attract the masses is a Christian version of the demagogic laxity in which they're already immersed. Today, it's thought that playing the social game, whether on the individual or the group level, is more indispensable than thinking…it's thought that there are truths that shouldn't be spoken. In America, it's become impossible to be unapologetically Christian, white, or European without running the risk of being accused of “ethnocentrism.” To which I reply that the eulogists of “multiculturalism” place themselves, to the contrary, in the purest of Western traditions. The West is the only civilization ever to have directed such criticisms against itself. The capital of the Incas had a name that I believe meant “the navel of the world.
René Girard (When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer (Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture))
If dimensions are virtual like the particles in quantum foam are virtual then, entanglement is information that is in more than one location (hologram). There are no particles, they may be wave packets but the idea of quantum is, a precise ratio of action in relationship to the environment. Feynman's path integral is not infinite, it is fractal. If you look at a star many light years away, the photon that hits your eye leaves the star precisely when the timing for the journey will end at your eye because the virtual dimension of the journey is zero distance or zero time. Wheeler said that if your eye is not there to receive the photon then it won't leave the star in the distant past. If the dimension in the direction of travel is zero, you have a different relationship then if it is zero time in terms of the property of the virtual dimensions. Is a particle really a wave packet? Could something like a "phase transition" involve dimensions that are more transitory then we imagined. Example; a photon as a two dimensional sheet is absorbed by an electron so that the photon becomes a part of the geometry of the electron in which the electrons dimensions change in some manner. Could "scale" have more variation and influence on space and time that our models currently predict? Could information, scale, and gravity be intimately related?
R.A. Delmonico
The one thing that seemed to be on our side, however, was the reality on the streets of Egypt. Day after day, the protests spread and Mubarak’s regime seemed to crumble around him. On February 11, I woke to the news that Mubarak had fled to the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh and resigned. It was, it seemed, a happy ending. Jubilant crowds celebrated in the streets of Cairo. I drafted a statement for Obama that drew comparisons between what had just taken place and some of the iconic movements of the past several decades—Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesians upending a dictatorship, Indians marching nonviolently for independence. I went up to the Oval Office that morning to review the statement with Obama. “You should feel good about this,” he said. “I do,” I replied. “Though I’m not sure all of the principals do.” “You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak[…] “for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an “extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.” As Obama delivered a statement to a smattering of press, it seemed that history might at last be breaking in a positive direction in the Middle East. His tribute to the protests was unabashed. Yet our own government was still wired to defer to the Egyptian military, and ill equipped to support a transition to democracy once the president had spoken.
Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House)
About a month before the handover of sovereignty, Joshua Paul, a young CPA staffer, typed up a joke on his computer and sent it to a few friends in the palace. The recipients forwarded it to their friends, who did the same thing. In less than a week, almost everyone in the Green Zone had seen it. QUESTION: Why did the Iraqi chicken cross the road? CPA: The fact that the chicken crossed the road shows that decision-making authority has switched to the chicken in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on, the chicken is responsible for its own decisions. HALLIBURTON: We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost $326,004. SHIITE CLERIC MOQTADA AL-SADR: The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed. U.S. ARMY MILITARY POLICE: We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken-rights violations. PESHMERGA: The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in the future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill. AL-JAZEERA: The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens. CIA: We cannot confirm or deny any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident. TRANSLATORS: Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (National Book Award Finalist))
The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On
Kevin Fedarko
Nothing in life stands still. Movement and change are the very essence of life and yet our normal tendency is to believe that everything is fixed and solid. We wish to believe that all we see is real and secure, even though our ordinary experience tells us that nothing remains unchanged and nothing lasts forever. On the contrary, everything in the world around us is constantly falling apart and requires a great deal of maintenance on our part if we wish to hold it together. What happens during this process of change is the great mystery revealed in symbolic form within this book. The state called here the "transitional phase" (Tibetan: "bardo") is the actual moment of change, occurring at the end of one phase and the beginning of the next. It is the state of flux itself, the only state that can really be called "real." It is a condition of great power and potential within which anything could happen. It is the moment between moments. It may seem to span an entire lifetime, like the moment between being born and dying, or it may be imperceptibly short and fleeting, like the moment between one thought and the next. Whatever its duration, however, it is a moment of great opportunity for those who perceive it. Anyone who can do this is called a yogin. Such a person has the power of destiny in their hands. He or she has no need of a priest to guide him towards the clear light of truth, for he sees already the clear light of truth in the intermediate phases that occur between all other states. Refusing to become trapped in the false belief that all about him is fixed and solid, the yogin moves with calm and graceful ease through life, confident that changes are now under his own direction. He becomes the master of change instead of its slave.....Similarly, between any encounter and one's reaction to it, there is an intermediate space that offers choice to those who can see it. One is not obliged to react on the basis of habit or prejudice. The opportunity for a fresh approach is always there in the intermediate state for those who have learned to recognize it. Such recognition is the essential message of this ancient and profound book.
Stephen Hodge (The Illustrated Tibetan Book of the Dead: A New Reference Manual for the Soul)
Are you a reservoir or are you a canal or a swamp? The distinction is literal. The function of a canal is to channel water; it is a device by which water may move from one place to another in an orderly and direct manner. It holds water in a temporary sense only; it holds it in transit from one point to another. The function of the reservoir is to contain, to hold water. It is a large receptacle designed for the purpose, whether it is merely an excavation in the earth or some vessel especially designed. It is a place in which water is stored in order that it may be available when needed. In it provisions are made for outflow and inflow. A swamp differs from either. A swamp has an inlet but no outlet. Water flows into it but there is no provision make for water to flow out. The result? The water rots and many living things die. Often there is a strange and deathlike odor that pervades the atmosphere. The water is alive but apt to be rotten. There is life in a swamp but it is stale. The dominant trend of a man's life may take on the characteristics of a canal, reservoir or swamp. The important accent is on the dominant trend. There are some lives that seem ever to be channels, canals through which things flow. They are connecting links between other people, movements, purposes. They make the network by which all kinds of communications are possible. They seem to be adept at relating needs to sources of help, friendlessness to friendliness. Of course, the peddler of gossip is also a canal. If you are a canal, what kind of things do you connect? Or are you a reservoir? Are you a resource which may be drawn upon in times of others' needs and your own as well? Have you developed a method for keeping your inlet and your outlet in good working order so that the cup which you give is never empty? As a reservoir, you are a trustee of all the gifts God has shared with you. You know they are not your own. Are you a swamp? Are you always reaching for more and more, hoarding whatever comes your way as your special belongings? If so, do you wonder why you are friendless, why the things you touch seem ever to decay? A swamp is a place where living things often sicken and die. The water in a swamp has no outlet. Canal, reservoir or swamp-- WHICH?
Howard Thurman (Meditations of the Heart)
Lenin, therefore, begins from the firm and definite principle that the State dies as soon as the socialization of the means of production is achieved and the exploiting class has consequently been suppressed. Yet, in the same pamphlet, he ends by justifying the preservation, even after the socialization of the means of production and, without any predictable end, of the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people. The pamphlet, which makes continual reference to the experiences of the Commune, flatly contradicts the contemporary federalist and anti-authoritarian ideas that produced the Commune; and it is equally opposed to the optimistic forecasts of Marx and Engels. The reason for this is clear; Lenin had not forgotten that the Commune failed. As for the means of such a surprising demonstration, they were even more simple: with each new difficulty encountered by the revolution, the State as described by Marx is endowed with a supplementary prerogative. Ten pages farther on, without any kind of transition, Lenin in effect affirms that power is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters "and also to direct the great mass of the population, peasantry, lower middle classes, and semi-proletariat, in the management of the socialist economy." The shift here is undeniable; the provisional State of Marx and Engels is charged with a new mission, which risks prolonging its life indefinitely. Already we can perceive the contradiction of the Stalinist regime in conflict with its official philosophy. Either this regime has realized the classless socialist society, and the maintenance of a formidable apparatus of repression is not justified in Marxist terms, or it has not realized the classless society and has therefore proved that Marxist doctrine is erroneous and, in particular, that the socialization of the means of production does not mean the disappearance of classes. Confronted with its official doctrine, the regime is forced to choose: the doctrine is false, or the regime has betrayed it. In fact, together with Nechaiev and Tkachev, it is Lassalle, the inventor of State socialism, whom Lenin has caused to triumph in Russia, to the detriment of Marx. From this moment on, the history of the interior struggles of the party, from Lenin to Stalin, is summed up in the struggle between the workers' democracy and military and bureaucratic dictatorship; in other words, between justice and expediency.
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife. Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.” Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities. The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts. Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.” One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.” That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
Day 4 Jehovah-Nissi __________, I call your spirit to attention in the name of Jehovah-Nissi, God who promised to be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation. The context of the story is of Moses having to lead his people into battle when they weren’t ready to go to war. They were attacked by the Amalekites. As he lifted his hands to the Lord, the Lord warred on behalf of Israel. __________, I bless your spirit with knowing when to war and when to lift your hands to the Lord. There will be seasons when God calls you to use the greatest of your strength. There will be seasons when God presses you to the wall and yet expects you to work hard, like Israel had to make bricks; then they had to make bricks in a harder way without straw. Then they had to march during the middle of the night to escape from Egypt. There will be times when God will celebrate the gifts that He has placed in you, when He will celebrate your strength. At times God will place you in a context where every talent and ability that you possess can be brought to the front and be used to make changes in the kingdom. That is good. That is fine. That is excellent. That is the will of God. But there will be times, __________, when God will very specifically put you in a place where everything that you have is not good enough, where you have to do something you have never done before. Enemies that you have never irritated will seek to attack you just because they are opportunistic. I bless you, __________, with having the courage not to depend on a skillset that is inadequate but to have the courage to lift your hands up to God on the mountaintop and ask Jehovah-Nissi to war for you. Because where you are inexperienced against any enemy, Jehovah-Nissi has the experience of the ages. Where you don’t know how to do it, Jehovah-Nissi has done it endless times. Where you have not walked that way before, Jehovah-Nissi has worn a path with the mighty tread of His feet. __________, Jehovah-Nissi has promised and recorded in Scripture that He cannot lie, that He will be at war against the opportunistic coyote, the spirit of Amalek that prowls around. It never attacks directly but takes advantage of your vulnerabilities, takes advantage of the opportune times of transition when you are not ready for war. Jehovah-Nissi has promised to war on your behalf. __________, I bless you with finding profound security in Jehovah-Nissi, celebrating your giftedness while always knowing that Jehovah-Nissi is there for those battles that He permits which you don’t anticipate. He anticipates the battles that blindside you on a path that you’ve never walked before. Israel did not know the desert area. The Amalekites lived there. Israel didn’t know the safe places, the high places, the hidden places. They didn’t know how to craft an effective war strategy. They just went out and bumbled around while Moses stood on the mountain with his hands lifted high. __________, celebrate your areas of strength, but when you are in a new area and the enemy attacks you and you don’t know what to do or how to do or where to do it, go to the mountaintop. Lift your hands and let Jehovah-Nissi war on your behalf. I bless you with knowing Jehovah-Nissi experientially in your generation. I bless you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Sylvia Gunter (Blessing Your Spirit)
Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.
Lyssa Adkins (Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition)
Develop a rapid cadence. Ideal running requires a cadence that may be much quicker than you’re used to. Shoot for 180 footfalls per minute. Developing the proper cadence will help you achieve more speed because it increases the number of push-offs per minute. It will also help prevent injury, as you avoid overstriding and placing impact force on your heel. To practice, get an electronic metronome (or download an app for this), set it for 90+ beats per minute, and time the pull of your left foot to the chirp of the metronome. Develop a proper forward lean. With core muscles slightly engaged to generate a bracing effect, the runner leans forward—from the ankles, not from the waist. Land underneath your center of gravity. MacKenzie drills his athletes to make contact with the ground as their midfoot or forefoot passes directly under their center of gravity, rather than having their heels strike out in front of the body. When runners become proficient at this, the pounding stops, and the movement of their legs begins to more closely resemble that of a spinning wheel. Keep contact time brief. “The runner skims over the ground with a slithering motion that does not make the pounding noise heard by the plodder who runs at one speed,” the legendary coach Percy Cerutty once said.7 MacKenzie drills runners to practice a foot pull that spends as little time as possible on the ground. His runners aim to touch down with a light sort of tap that creates little or no sound. The theory is that with less time spent on the ground, the foot has less time to get into the kind of trouble caused by the sheering forces of excessive inward foot rolling, known as “overpronation.” Pull with the hamstring. To create a rapid, piston-like running form, the CFE runner, after the light, quick impact of the foot, pulls the ankle and foot up with the hamstring. Imagine that you had to confine your running stride to the space of a phone booth—you would naturally develop an extremely quick, compact form to gain optimal efficiency. Practice this skill by standing barefoot and raising one leg by sliding your ankle up along the opposite leg. Perform up to 20 repetitions on each leg. Maintain proper posture and position. Proper posture, MacKenzie says, shifts the impact stress of running from the knees to larger muscles in the trunk, namely, the hips and hamstrings. The runner’s head remains up and the eyes focused down the road. With the core muscles engaged, power flows from the larger muscles through to the extremities. Practice proper position by standing with your body weight balanced on the ball of one foot. Keep the knee of your planted leg slightly bent and your lifted foot relaxed as you hold your ankle directly below your hip. In this position, your body is in proper alignment. Practice holding this position for up to 1 minute on each leg. Be patient. Choose one day a week for practicing form drills and technique. MacKenzie recommends wearing minimalist shoes to encourage proper form, but not without taking care of the other necessary work. A quick changeover from motion-control shoes to minimalist shoes is a recipe for tendon problems. Instead of making a rapid transition, ease into minimalist shoes by wearing them just one day per week, during skill work. Then slowly integrate them into your training runs as your feet and legs adapt. Your patience will pay off.
T.J. Murphy (Unbreakable Runner: Unleash the Power of Strength & Conditioning for a Lifetime of Running Strong)
In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they'll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluation options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant: it's common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.
Peter Hessler (Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory)
During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed. Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes. The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see. To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.
Robert H. Scales
From a stratification perspective, we want to understand both immobility and mobility. For immobility, the issue is how status is inherited across generations. Not inheritance in the sense of offices or titles passing directly from parent
Karl Alexander (The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (The American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology))
For example, parent support could be most important in the early grades, when children's academic self-image is just beginning to coalesce, but over time, as children become more self-directive, the immediate influence of parent support might wane.
Karl Alexander (The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (The American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology))
Piaget-....A stage then, we may say, is an integrated set of operational structures that constitute the thought processes of a person at a given time. Development involves the transformation of such " structures of the whole" in the direction of greater internal differentiation, complexity, flexibility and stability. A stage represents a kind of balanced relationship between a knowing subject and his or her environment. In this balanced or equilibrated position the person assimilates what is to be "known" in the environment into her or his existing structures of thought. When a novelty or challenge emerges that cannot be assimilated into the present structures of knowing then, if possible, the person accommmodates, that is , generates new structures of knowing. A stage transition has occured when enough accommodation has been undertaken to require ( and make possible) a transformation in the operational pattern of the structural whole of intellectual operations.
James W. Fowler (Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning)
There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb, everything depends on the direct object. 'I LOVE' could be virtuous or not - you could love ice cream, Jesus, child porn, my country, hurting people, the lust of the flesh. Love is not an automatic virtue. Hatred is not an automatic vice. What's the direct object? from Debate In The Age Of The Glitter-Bomb in The City, Fall 2013.
Douglas Wilson
These mortgages, which typically cost less per month than paying rent, were directed at new single-family suburban construction.c Intentionally or not, the FHA and VA programs discouraged the renovation of existing housing stock, while turning their back on the construction of row houses, mixed-use buildings, and other urban housing types. Simultaneously, a 41,000-mile interstate highway program, coupled with federal and local subsidies for road improvement and the neglect of mass transit, helped make automotive commuting affordable and convenient for the average citizen.
Andrés Duany (Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream)
Short-term thinking – Focusing on what matters at the moment, rather than on potential consequences over the long term. Socialization – An element of a monologue that is designed to encourage a person to share truthful information by suggesting that the activity under investigation is one that is regularly engaged in by others. Stimulus – The question that prompts a behavioral response. Throat-clearing/swallowing – A nonverbal deceptive behavior in which a person clears his throat or performs a significant swallow prior to answering the question. Timing – The guideline in our deception detection model dictating that the initial deceptive behavior must begin within the first five seconds after the stimulus. Transition statement – Statement made by the questioner to allow for a transparent transition from an interview to an interrogation. It is the first sentence or two of the monologue, and takes the form of a direct observation of concern (DOC) or a direct observation of guilt (DOG). Unintended message – A truthful statement made by a deceptive person that, when the literal meaning of the statement is analyzed, conveys information that the person does not realize he’s conveying. We also refer to this as “truth in the lie.” Vague question – A question to be avoided because it allows for excessive latitude in
Philip Houston (Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All)
There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction. At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. […] At such moments, however, a person becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great new poem, which endeavors to achieve a stable form in brilliant colors that still merge into one another. Nevertheless, we should like to erect a memorial to what we have once lived through in order that this experience may regain in our emotions the place it has lost in our actions.
Karl Marx
Dear Rebecca— You may have picked up on my growing disappointment with you this afternoon as our first meeting progressed. I have to say that though you seem quite personable in your electronic communications, in person your behavior is a little lacking in some of the traits that would let you get from a first to a second date with regularity. If Lovability had a rating system, I would award you 2.5 out of 5 stars; however, if it used a scale that only allowed for integral values, I would unfortunately be forced to round down to two. Here are some suggestions for what you could do to improve the initial impression you make. I am speaking here as a veteran of the online dating scene in LA, which is MUCH more intense than New Jersey’s—there, you are competing with aspiring actors and actresses, and a professionally produced headshot and a warm demeanor are the bare minimum necessary to get in the game. By the end of my first year in LA my askback rate (the rate at which my first dates with women led to second dates) was a remarkable 68%. So I know what I’m talking about. I hope you take this constructive criticism in the manner in which it is intended. 1. Vary your responses to inquiries. When our conversation began, you seemed quite cheerful and animated, but as it progressed you became much less so. I asked you a series of questions that were intended to give you opportunities to reveal more about yourself, but you offered only binary answers, and then, troublingly, no answers at all. If you want your date to go well, you need to display more interest. 2. Direct the flow of conversation. Dialogue is collaborative! One consequence of your reticence was that I was forced to propose all of the topics of discussion, both before and after the transition to more personal subjects. If you contribute topics of your own then it will make you appear more engaged: you should aim to bring up one new subject for every one introduced by your date. 3. Take control of the path of the date. If you want the initial meeting to extend beyond the planned drinks, there are many ways you can go about doing this. You can directly say, for instance, “So I wasn’t thinking about this when you showed up, but…do you have any plans for dinner? I’m starving, and I could really go for some pad thai.” Or you can make a vaguer, more general statement such as “After this, I’m up for whatever,” or “Hey, I don’t really want to go home yet, Bradley: I’m having a lot of fun.” Again, this comes down to a general lack of engagement on your part. Without your feedback I was left to offer a game of Scrabble, which was not the best way to end the meeting. 4. Don’t lie about your ability in Scrabble. I won’t go into an analysis of your strategic and tactical errors here, in the interest of brevity, but your amateurish playing style was quite evident. Now, despite my reservations as expressed above, I really do feel that we had some chemistry. So I would like to give things another chance. Would you respond to this message within the next three days, with a suggestion of a place you’d like us to visit together, or an activity that you believe we would both enjoy? I would be forced to construe a delay of more than three days as an unfortunate sign of indifference. I hope to hear from you soon. Best, Bradley
Dexter Palmer (Version Control)
In transitional astrology, aspects to the Earth both natally and by direction are not considered. In soul-centered astrology, the position of the Earth in the natal chart (always 180˚ from the position of the natal Sun) is quite an important facet of destiny.
Anonymous
Death will be the direct result of merits and demerits earned by living creatures in their lifetime. You will merely oversee the transition. The burden of death shall be borne by those who live.’ Thus all creatures die not because of external factors but because of their own karma.
Devdutt Pattanaik (Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata)
For example, people ask me about Eastman Kodak’s slow disintegration and financial struggle. Let me tell you that people at Kodak knew where the wind was blowing. The decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in transitioning to digital photography was no surprise to anybody who studied it intensively or was directly involved. Listen to your intuition and sell, or even better, don't invest in it at all.   Selling
David Schneider (The 80/20 Investor: How to Simplify Investing with a Powerful Principle to Achieve Superior Returns)
Suffering through hardships doesn’t feel good. It hurts—and it is supposed to hurt! There is a reason for it, just as there is a reason the physical body feels pain: to alert you that something is endangering your well-being, that something isn’t right, so that you can avoid or fix it. So it is with your heart and your spirit: If you hurt, it’s because you are supposed to hurt when your life is moving in the wrong direction.
April Elliott Kent (Astrological Transits: The Beginner's Guide to Using Planetary Cycles to Plan and Predict Your Day, Week, Year (or Destiny))
What is important to notice here is not the exact times or durations, as those will vary with each family, but rather the rhythm that is in place. There is a clear start to the day; a routine that is always followed, then educational time is started with circle time. The child understands that this first circle time marks the beginning of the instructional period. Clear breaks allow the child to transition from one activity to the next. By having a set number of activities before breaks such as snack time, your child begins to understand the concept of time. Eventually, this will become so second nature even to the youngest child that they will begin to transition by themselves. Allow for a range in flexibility in your routine. The exact minutes on the clock do not matter as much as the rhythm. If your child is losing interest in his or her self-directed activity ten minutes early, you may try to keep them interested a bit longer. However, it is acceptable to acknowledge that your child has gained all that they require from that lesson today and it is time to move on to the next phase. The same is true for extending activities. There is no need to interrupt a child that is engrossed in discovery. Simply let the interest and curiosity be satisfied in its own time and then carry on with the day. This is the beauty of Montessori home school, being able to tailor the experience to each child.
Sterling Production (Montessori at Home Guide: A Short Guide to a Practical Montessori Homeschool for Children Ages 2-6)
Compound question – A question type that is to be avoided because it contains more than one question, making behavioral analysis of the response difficult due to potential confusion over what part of the question is causing the deceptive behavior. Example: “How frequently do you go running, and where do you typically run?” Confirmation bias – A cognitive bias in which people search for or interpret information in a way that supports an initial belief or a desired outcome. Convincing statement – A true or irrefutable statement made in an effort to convince the accuser and to influence his perception, rather than to convey information that addresses the facts of the case. Denial behavior – A category of verbal deceptive behavior in which a person appears to have a problem with denying an allegation. This can take the form of failing to deny the allegation altogether; providing a nonspecific denial (Example: “I would never do something like that”); or providing an isolated delivery of the denial by burying it in a long-winded answer. Direct observation of concern (DOC) – A transition statement that lies at the low end of the confidence spectrum. Direct observation of guilt (DOG) – A transition statement that lies at the high end of the confidence spectrum.
Philip Houston (Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All)
Supporting the grieving process The grief associated with a toddler’s separation from caregivers with whom he has had a strong attachment is unavoidable. To try to deny or avoid displays of grief is magical thinking on the part of adults. Acknowledging and supporting their child’s grief is one of the first acts of love adoptive parents can give their new son or daughter. The more directly involved toddlers are in the preparation and transition process, the less confused they will be about what is happening to them and the less they will rely on magical thinking to explain the loss of former caregivers. The more concrete the transition and placement processes are, the more toddlers will be able to process what is happening, and the less they will be fearful. Talking to toddlers during the preparation for and adjustment to a change in placement is intended to support grieving by confronting their magical thinking and assuring them that they are not responsible for the loss. Toddlers need to be told who will take care of them and be assured that someone will be with them at all times during the transition. Other messages that support the toddler’s grieving include: “It was not your fault that you moved. You didn’t do anything bad. It’s OK for you to cry and be mad. I’ll be right here to take care of you.
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
Post-placement Honoring the role of the former caregiver(s) Some toddlers transition directly from a birth family to their adoptive family, while others transition from interim care to their permanent home. If a relationship has formed between a child’s caregiver and the child, regardless of whether that person is a birth relative or not, it is essential to continue to acknowledge the importance of that person in the child’s life.
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
Post-placement visits While the conventional wisdom “out of sight, out of mind” may be true for some things, adoptive parents are wise to rethink this saying as they help their toddler make the transition to her new family. Without contacts to assure them that their former caregiver still exists, toddlers may expend unnecessary energy worrying, wondering, and fantasizing about former caregivers rather than directing their energy toward attaching to new parents. Worse yet, some may resist attachment because they may assume these new caregivers will simply disappear one day, too.
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
If you cry, “Forward,” you must make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely the opposite directions? ANTON CHEKHOV, RUSSIAN WRITER
William Bridges (Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change)
Being responsible front of the other. (part1) We live in a historical period which, without too many difficulties, can be defined as a transition period. In many respects, in fact, the world as it appeared a few decades ago has almost completely disappeared. In its place, however, no paradigm that can be said to be truly new has yet materialized. The era to come, which always seems to be on the verge of a future driven by perhaps too naively acclaimed technological development, is as if it were slowed down by ideas, visions and practices that still belong to the past. Take for example the urgent need to convert industrial production, but also individual consumption, through sustainable, ecological, greener and more aware practices. It is our own planet that requires us to make a change in this sense: climate change is there for all to see, but the political institutions that should deal with the issue are unable to be decided and united to stem the problem. We know that the resources we have are limited but we continue to exploit them even though there are already alternatives, so we squander what nature can offer us in a year well before this year is over because we still believe in the mad and blind race of progress. We also take the incredible technological development that information technology has made possible. We can store an incredible amount of information in devices that we can put in our pockets, we have at our fingertips practically much of all the knowledge that humanity has produced throughout its history, but ignorance continues to spread like a river in full. The areas in which it is possible to recognize that much the current historical period is a period of transition are still many others, from the political one, with the crisis of representative democracies but also with the absence of a real alternative, to the economic one, social, with the giants of the web that increasingly impoverish small businesses, thus contributing to widening the gap, now almost unbridgeable, between the few who have too much and the many who have less and less. Or with the appearance of a new precious commodity: our personal data that is exchanged too lightly, as if they were a traditional market product. In this framework, already quite unstable in itself, the Covid-19 pandemic, directly or indirectly, is also radically changing our sociality. In fact, the spread of the virus has highlighted not only the fragility of the world economic-social system, in which if you break a link in the chain it is the whole chain that breaks, but it has also made clear, by difference, how much the our way of relating to others, even the most banal, even the most everyday. Especially in a country like ours, which has made conviviality its distinctive feature. What seemed natural to us, like hugging and greeting each other with a kiss with an acquaintance or going to a concert piled on top of each other, now that we are discouraged - if not forbidden - takes on even more value. Probably a value that we didn't even know, so obvious and taken for granted, was there before. In other words: we only discover what our social freedom was worth now that it is being restricted to us. And we discover it, precisely, by difference, by comparing what we could have done before with what we must do now. In this regard, I would like to ask a question: why should all of us accept that our way of life, our daily habits and our social freedom are limited? The question is deliberately provocative. His answer, quite obvious. In some cases, however, even the question whose answer seems obvious and obvious must still be formulated. It must be formulated in order to attempt to review the question posed in a clearer and more profound way, that is, to better understand the underlying reasons. Therefore, although the answer is evident as well as common sense, I believe that asking this question can help to better understand some intrinsic reasons.
Corina Abdulahm Negura
Being responsible front of the other. (part2) The reason that has guided the choice of the institutions to limit our freedom is precisely that of trying to control the spread of the virus with what is possible. Keep the distance between me and my neighbor, use the mask, avoid crowds. At the basis of these personal safety practices, however, there is an ethical principle that not everyone can see or perceive as "normal", but which I personally find very profound, and which I believe is worth making evident. A principle that directly concerns the responsibility that each of us has towards his other. You are never alone, especially in a society like ours, which makes the relationship and exchange with the other its foundation. For this, I have to limit my range of action to safeguard the health of my neighbor. I can also be in excellent health, I can also be infected without having symptoms, however those in front of me may not react in the same way as I do to a possible infection. And who is in front of me can be someone dear to me, of course. But not only. It is not only my affections that I must protect. My neighbor is also who I happen to meet on the street, the person who is next to me on the bus, the neighbor with whom I never even exchange a greeting, the stranger who asks me for alms. It is he too that I must protect. Being responsible means thinking about others while making choices. Being responsible in this particular historical moment means making decisions while holding firm to the principle of caring for my neighbor. It means feeling part of a community of individuals towards whom I must maintain an attitude of respect. This respect must regard diversity in all its forms, that is, it must regard the other as an inexhaustible source of the variety of common life, it must regard all otherness as that wealth that exceeds my little world and that I must never pretend to be able fully understand. Yes, because it is the other unknown to me, the other who exceeds all my understanding, the other who is irreducible to me and to my interpretative schemes, which is the origin of that difference that makes life something varied and colorful. , something that is unique, unrepeatable, surprising at every moment. And it's worth taking care of, before taking care. Being responsible towards the other therefore means recognizing the value of existence, of that sacred principle which is the right to life. Taking care of those I don't know also means taking care of myself and my world; it means helping to safeguard the world as a place with multiple possibilities. Being responsible in the transition period we are experiencing means that it is up to us to choose which world will be born, starting from a simple reflection: do we want a world that helps and respects the other or a world that still tramples on the next?
Corina Abdulahm Negura
To balance your social media budget, vary the types of content you deposit and withdraw. Content should come from different content envelopes, including things like curated content, original content, articles, quotations, statistics, testimonials, direct calls to action, transitional calls to action, impactful images, selfies, video, etc.
Claire Díaz-Ortiz (Social Media Success for Every Brand: The Five StoryBrand Pillars That Turn Posts Into Profits)
QUICK REVIEW OF STAGE TWO PRACTICE The instructions for this Stage are simple. You sit down, finish the Preparation for Practice, make the gradual transition to the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nose, and count ten breaths. Hold the intention to follow and sustain attention on the breath sensations at the nose. Very soon, however, you’ll find yourself forgetting the breath and mind-wandering, sometimes for seconds and sometimes for many minutes. Eventually, you’ll abruptly “wake up” to the fact that, even though you intended to watch the breath, you’ve been thinking about something else. Feel happy and pleased about this “aha!” moment of introspective awareness. Then, gently direct attention back to the breath. To engage more fully with the meditation object, practice following the breath. As long as you appreciate the moment of “waking up” to mind-wandering, diligently return attention to the object, and fully engage with it, you’re on the right track. If you sit through the entire session without getting discouraged and if you keep returning to the breath when your mind wanders, consider your meditation a total
Culadasa (John Yates) (The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness)
Integral to the essence of many if not most extant sijo is a multifaceted encapsulation of symbolic connections between enduring external realities[...]and internal landscapes emotional and philosophical. In this way[...]sijo often bridge and combine direct, arresting observation culled from life's plexus of fluctuating rhythms with emotive subjectivity, giving rise to a template for gentle lyricism that lends itself well to deeply personal, ambivalent introspection during difficult and transitional periods.
Tamara K. Walker (Fabric Heart: A Collection of Contemporary Introspective Sijo)
As the small startup’s size gradually increases, it will eventually reach a breakeven point where the two incentives, pulling in opposing directions, are equal. Above that size, a behavior appears across the organization that favors killing loonshots and supporting franchises. Let’s call that behavior the Invisible Axe. The sudden emergence of that Invisible Axe is a phase transition.
Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established. One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order. Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete. On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation. After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed...What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government? What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the wellborn and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses." Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two non-national poles: class and international pacifism. One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition,” a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
In an emerging consumer learner environment, the faculty member can engage and direct understanding.
Natalie Casale (Bricks to Clicks: Best Practices to Transition From the Classroom to Online)
After the MTA released its $14.4 billion plan in November 1980, a governor’s aide told Ravitch that Carey was not interested in entertaining a fare hike or a tax package for the MTA. Carey preferred holding down the fare rather than financing a multibillion-dollar capital program. The governor also saw Ravitch’s proposal as a threat to Westway. A coalition of thirty-seven civic and environmental groups had filed suit in federal court to stop the highway project. They wanted the state to take the federal transportation funds designated for the project and use them for transit improvements instead. If Carey admitted that the transit system was underfunded and starved for capital, it would have played into the hands of the Westway opponents.48 Faced with resistance in Albany, Ravitch began a lobbying effort that no state official other than Robert Moses at the height of his powers could have undertaken. He started by pleading with the governor and his staff, explaining that without new sources of revenue he would have to dramatically raise the fare. Then he took his case directly to the public. Rather than minimizing the transit system’s problems, Ravitch made sure that reporters learned about all the delays and breakdowns occurring in MTA facilities. He visited editorial boards and told them, “If you don’t pay attention, the politicians won’t.” He talked to every reporter who called. Unlike his predecessors, he admitted that the MTA’s services, particularly during peak hours, were “deteriorating at an accelerated rate.” The newspapers, he said, were “my shield and my sword.
Philip Mark Plotch (Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City)
But then, this treachery is at the heart of love. That two people’s needs are never the same. That while it involves fulfillment through another, you understand more about sovereignty. That your desire and the other’s independence of will would always be in an elusive chase. That some might be transiting through love because they are conditioned to do things at appropriate stages, like other life activities, others might be totally transformed by it. That two in love might be looking in one direction but never at the same thing. This struggle to get the lover to see what you see is futile and yet a deep desire. Much later she was to grow up and she learn more. And even though Nanaki felt bereft of love and heart broken and utterly abandoned, even some seemingly seeped in love could be having a heart break. The desire to be understood is primeval too. It might be forgotten for a while in the euphoria of new love. But it resurfaces like a lost child come home. You can’t shut the door. You got to take it in. The tussle then begins.
Sakoon Singh (In The Land of The Lovers)
I made the transition from a peacetime CEO to a wartime CEO. By virtue of my position and the fact that we were a public company, nobody besides me had the complete picture. I knew we were in deep, deep trouble. Nobody besides me could get us out of the trouble, and I was through listening to advice about what we should do from people who did not understand all the pieces. I wanted all the data and information I could get, but I didn’t need any recommendations about the future direction of the company. This was wartime. The company would live or die by the quality of my decisions, and there was no way to hedge or soften the responsibility. If everybody I had hired—and who gave their lives to the company—could be sent home with little to show for it, then there were no excuses that would help. There would be no: “It was a horrible economic environment”; “I got bad advice”; “Things changed so quickly.” The only choices were survival or total destruction. Yes, most things could still be delegated and most managers would be empowered to make decisions in their areas of expertise, but the fundamental question of whether—and how—Loudcloud could survive was mine and mine alone to answer.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
It is especially important to cross out (or at least approach with serious skepticism) the parentheticals: “pause,” “beat,” and “she takes a moment.” All these kinds of stage directions are adjectives, adverbs, indications of transitions or psychological explanations, or emotional maps (“He cannot look away”; “She makes a decision”). They are not playable. What the writer has done by putting in these abbreviated emotional guideposts is to take a stab at providing the characters’ subtext. This is useful to the producers, executives, distributors, and agents who read a lot of screenplays—dozens per week—and need such time-saving devices. It
Judith Weston (Directing Actors)