Urgent Calls Only Quotes

This can only be an urgent call at this late hour.

The choice we face is not, as many imagine, between heaven and hell. Rather, the choice is between heaven and this world. Even a fool would exchange hell for heaven; but only the wise will exchange this world for heaven.

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant— which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer." Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will [ This conception of "freedom of the will" ( alias, autonomy) does not involve any belief in what Nietzsche called "the superstition of free will" in section 345 ( alias, the exemption of human actions from an otherwise universal determinism).] that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

In little countries and big countries, capitalist countries and communist countries, Catholic countries and Moslem countries, Western countries and Eastern countries—in almost all these cases, exponential population growth slows down or stops when grinding poverty disappears. This is called the demographic transition. It is in the urgent long-term interest of the human species that every place on Earth achieves this demographic transition. This is why helping other countries to become self-sufficient is not only elementary human decency, but is also in the self-interest of those richer nations able to help.

here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally bought an answering machine, and she steadfastly refused to have a mobile, to the incredulity of all those around her, who didn’t believe that people could actually function without one. But Frieda wanted to be able to escape from incessant communications and demands. She didn’t want to be at anyone’s beck and call, and she liked cutting herself off from the urgent inanities of the world. When she was on her own, she liked to be truly alone. Out of contact and adrift.

We call it a grain of sand, but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine, without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt. Our glance, our touch means nothing to it. It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched. And that it fell on the windowsill is only our experience, not its. For it, it is not different from falling on anything else with no assurance that it has finished falling or that it is falling still. The window has a wonderful view of a lake, but the view doesn’t view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless. The lake’s floor exists floorlessly, and its shore exists shorelessly. The water feels itself neither wet nor dry and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural. They splash deaf to their own noise on pebbles neither large nor small. And all this beheath a sky by nature skyless in which the sun sets without setting at all and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud. The wind ruffles it, its only reason being that it blows. A second passes. A second second. A third. But they’re three seconds only for us. Time has passed like courier with urgent news. But that’s just our simile. The character is inverted, his hasts is make believe, his news inhuman.

It’s just like Kiernan Kane to send an urgent message hidden in an indecipherable mess of prophetic rhyme. By the time we’ve figured out what the thing means, we’ll be in the middle of danger only to realize that every assumption we made was completely wrong.

Ultimately, injustice isn’t a social problem. It is a moral problem. Injustice exists because we are all fallen, sinful, selfish people. The only solution is a personal, heart-level transformation, not just for a particular group of so-called “oppressors,” but for everyone.

Philosophical theories can in this way become a destructive venture, confusing matters with false choices and sterile power schemes the cruel are only too happy to accept. In hostile hands, they become a pretext for doing nothing, for brushing off real and urgent moral duties in the care of animals.

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called “soldier's heart.”8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions.

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.

Even Diotima and Amheim were shy of using it without a modifier, for it is still possible to speak of having a great, noble, craven, daring, or debased soul, but to come right out with "my soul" is something one simply cannot bring oneself to do. It is distinctly an older person's word, and this can only be understood by assuming that in the course of life people become more and more aware of something for which they urgently need a name they cannot find until they finally resort, reluctantly, to the name they had originally despised. How to describe it, then? Whether one is at rest or in motion, what matters is not what lies ahead, what one sees, hears, wants, takes, masters. It forms a horizon, a semicircle before one, but the ends of this semicircle are joined by a string, and the plane of this string goes right through·the middle of the world. In front, the face and hands look out of it; sensations and strivings run ahead of it, and no one doubts that whatever one does·is always reasonable, or at least passionate. In other words, outer circumstances call for us to act in a way everyone can understand; and if, in the toils of passion, we do something incomprehensible, that too is, in its own way, understandable.

In an equally counterintuitive fashion, affect’s distinctive function of amplifying the awareness and effects of other functions is based on its ability to “simulate” them. Affect produces “urgent analogs” not only of the rate and duration of its “external activator” (the pistol shot, for instance, that activates surprise), but of the abstract profiles of “neural firing” generated by the external activator, profiles which Tomkins calls “innate activators.

Pete says you should listen out for times when you need to explain your feelings to other people and ask yourself why you are doing it. He calls it 'protesting too much,' like you only sait because you really really want it to be true, even if it isn't.

Zardari mentioned that once, his presidential plane wasn’t airworthy and he had an urgent trip to make. “The only person I could call was I.S.I. And I said, ‘Ahmed, I’m going to ask for your airplane, but only on one condition, which is that you have to fly with me.

I was backed against the sink; Emile was close, warm, his eyes glittering, his mouth sensuous and lovely. "You," I said deliberately, "don't give a damn about me except physically." Any boy would deny that; any gallant boy; any gallant lier. But Emile shook me, his voice was urgent, "You know, you shouldn't have said that. You know? You know? The truth always hurts." (Even clichés can come in handy.) He grinned, "Don't be bitter; I'm not. Come away from the sink, and watch." He stepped back, drawing me toward him, slapping my stomach away, he kissed me long and sweetly. At last he let go. "There," he said with a quiet smile. "The truth doesn't always hurt, does it?" And so we left. It was pouring rain. In the car he put his arm around me, his head against mine, and we watched the streetlights coming at us, blurred and fluid in the watery dark. As we ran up the walk in the rain, as he came in and had a drink of water, as he kissed me goodnight, I knew that something in me wanted him, for what I'm not sure: He drinks, he smokes, he's Catholic, he runs around with one girl after another, and yet... I wanted him. "I don't have to tell you it's been nice," I said at the door. "It's been marvelous," he smiled. "I'll call you. Take care." And he was gone. So the rain comes down hard outside my room, and like Eddie Cohen," I say, "... fifteen thousand years - - - of what? We're still nothing but animals." Somewhere, in his room, Emile lies, about to sleep, listening to the rain. God only knows what he's thinking.

Had he not had a greater purpose, the saving not of his life but of his soul, the resolve to become a good and honourable man and upright man as the bishop required him - had not that been his true a deepest intention? Now he talked of closing the door on the past when, God help him, he would be reopening the door by committing an infamous act, not merely that of a thief but of the most odious of thieves. He would be robbing a man of his life, his peace, his place in the sun, morally murdering him by condemning him to the living death that is called a convict prison. But if, on the other hand, he saved the man by repairing the blunder, by proclaiming himself Jean Valjean the felon, this would be to achieve his own true resurrection and firmly close the door on the hell from which he sought to escape. To return to it in appearance would be to escape from it in reality. This was what he must do, and without it he would have accomplished nothing, his life would be wasted, his repentance meaningless, and there would be nothing left for him to say except, 'Who cares?' He felt the presence of the bishop, more urgent than in life; he felt the old priest's eyes upon him and knew that henceforth Monsieur Madeleine the mayor, with all his virtues, would seem to him abominable, whereas Jean Valjean the felon would be admirable and pure. Other men would see the mask, but the bishop would see the face; others would see the life, but he would see his soul. So there was nothing for it but to go to Arras and rescue the false Jean Valjean by proclaiming the true one. The most heartrending of sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the ultimate, irretrievable step - but it had to be done. It was his most melancholy destiny that he could achieve sanctity in the eyes of God only by returning to degradation in the eyes of men.

There can be no more urgent question at this present time than just this: What is Christianity? I say that because this Gospel is the only hope in the world today. Everything else has been tried and found wanting. Everything else has failed. You will not find hope with the philosophers or with the statesmen, and you will not find it in the so-called religions of the world. Here is hope, and here alone.

Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop. That’s the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice—maybe the only advice—any of us should ever give.

Since the local church is “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15b), its leaders must be rock-solid pillars of biblical doctrine or the house will crumble. Since the local church is also a small flock traveling over treacherous terrain that is infested with “savage wolves,” only those shepherds who know the way and see the wolves can lead the flock to its safe destination. An elder, then, must be characterized by doctrinal integrity.

You have to be intrinsically changed by God in order for justice to be done. In other words, justice doesn’t come by legislation, because you can legislate things and nothing changes. We can go to the executive branch. We can go to the legislative branch. We can go to the judicial branch. We can put whatever kind of Supreme Court justices we want to put in place. But at the end of the day legislation doesn’t change hearts … only the gospel does.

The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers. Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage. We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers. When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.

Walking was a habit he'd been unwilling to give up. He couldn't see the point in shutting himself up in a vehivle any more often than he had to, doing damage to the earth and the air in order to avoid using his body. People did just that all the time, though. Most claimed they needed to save time. It was true they had little enough of that-- their lives were so soon ended. But Nathan didn't see them treating time as precious otherwise. They'd sit in their cars at a fast-food place for fifteen minutes when it would be quicker to park and go inside. No, he blamed the modern culture of urgency. Only the most urgent sensations, emotions, and situations were considered important. They called it living life to the fullest. Not surprisingly, many sought numbness in alcohol or the pervasive voyeurism of reality TV while others tried to live a perpetual peak experience through drugs, sex, or celebrity. Ordinary lives, ordinary living had little value. Nathan thought people needed to wash dishes by hand sometimes. Prepare their own meals more often. And take walks.

One admires Christ according to aesthetic categories as an aesthetic genius, calls him the greatest ethicist; one admires his going to his death as a heroic sacrifice for his ideas. Only one thing one doesn’t do: one doesn’t take him seriously. That is, one doesn’t bring the center of his or her own life into contact with the claim of Christ to speak the revelation of God and to be that revelation. One maintains a distance between himself or herself and the word of Christ, and allows no serious encounter to take place. I can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist, as a gentleman—just as, after all, I can also live without Plato and Kant. . . . Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ has not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me. . . . Understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously. Understanding this claim means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment. And it is now of importance for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment.

Go take a shower. Use cold water, it will help.” It took him a moment to control the urgent demands of his body. As he stepped away from her, the pad of his finger slipped down her throat and trailed over the swell of her breast before he dropped his hand to his side. Dahlia shivered at his touch. She remained still, only inches from him, refusing to back away . . . or move forward. “Fortunately, Jesse stashed some clothes here for me. He’s a thoughtful man.” “Is that what you call him? I think interfering busybody would just about say it all. I like you without clothes.” “Nicolas,” she cautioned. “I’m hanging on by a thread. You’re supposed to help.” “Tell me why again, and I’ll work on it.

They liked to drink: it was their hobby, or—said one of us—maybe a form of worship. They drank wine and beer and whiskey and gin. Also tequila, rum, and vodka. At midday they called it the hair of the dog. It seemed to keep them contented. Or going, at least. In the evenings they assembled to eat food and drink more. Dinner was the only meal we had to attend, and even that we resented. They sat us down and talked about nothing. They aimed their conversation like a dull gray beam. It hit us and lulled us into a stupor. What they said was so boring it filled us with frustration, and after more minutes, rage. Didn’t they know there were urgent subjects? Questions that needed to be asked? If one of us said something serious, they dismissed it. MayIpleasebeexcused. Later the talk grew louder. Freed of our influence, some of them emitted sudden, harsh barks.

What happens when insatiability dominates a person's emotional functioning? The process of maturation is preempted by an obsession or an addiction, in this case for peer connection. Peer contact whets the appetite without nourishing. It titillates without satisfying. The end result of peer contact is usually an urgent desire for more. The more the child gets, the more he craves. The mother of an eight-year-old girl mused, “I don't get it — the more time my daughter spends with her friends, the more demanding she becomes to get together with them. How much time does she really need for social interaction, anyway?” Likewise, the parents of a young adolescent complained that “as soon as our son comes home from camp, he gets on the phone right away to call the kids he's just been with. Yet it's the family he hasn't seen for two weeks.” The obsession with peer contact is always worse after exposure to peers, whether it is at school or in playtimes, sleepovers, class retreats, outings, or camps. If peer contact satiated, times of peer interaction would lead automatically to increased self-generated play, creative solitude, or individual reflection. Many parents confuse this insatiable behavior with a valid need for peer interaction. Over and over I hear some variation of “but my child is absolutely obsessed with getting together with friends. It would be cruel to deprive him.” Actually, it would be more cruel and irresponsible to indulge what so clearly fuels the obsession. The only attachment that children truly need is the kind that nurtures and satisfies them and can bring them to rest. The more demanding the child is, the more he is indicating a runaway obsession. It is not strength that the child manifests but the desperation of a hunger that only increases with more peer contact.

The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing - the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.

The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous increase in the sum total of the first. So the question now ran: Was such an operation justified? Obviously it was, if one spoke in the abstract of “mankind”; but, applied to “man” in the singular, to the cipher 2—4, the real human being of bone and flesh and blood and skin, the principle led to absurdity. As a boy, he had believed that in working for the Party he would find an answer to all questions of this sort. The work had lasted forty years, and right at the start he had forgotten the question for whose sake he had embarked on it. Now the forty years were over, and he returned to the boy’s original perplexity. The Party had taken all he had to give and never supplied him with the answer. And neither did the silent partner, whose magic name he had tapped on the wall of the empty cell. He was deaf to direct questions, however urgent and desperate they might be. And yet there were ways of approach to him. Sometimes he would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pietà, or of certain scenes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called “ecstasy” and saints “contemplation”; the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this state as a fact and called it the “oceanic sense”. And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness.

It is only the highest intellectual power what we may call genius, that attains to this degree of intensity, making all time and existence its theme, and striving to express its peculiar conception of the world, whether it contemplates life as the subject of poetry or of philosophy. Hence undisturbed occupation with himself, his own thoughts and works, is a matter of urgent necessity to such a man; solitude is welcome, leisure is the highest good, and everything else is unnecessary, nay, even burdensome. This is the only type of man of whom it can be said that his centre of gravity is entirely in himself; which explains why it is that people of this sort—and they are very rare—, no matter how excellent their character may be, do not show that warm and unlimited interest in friends, family, and the community in general, of which others are so often capable; for if they have only themselves they are not inconsolable for the loss of everything else. This gives an isolation to their character, which is all the more effective since other people never really quite satisfy them, as being, on the whole, of a different nature: more, since this difference is constantly forcing itself upon their notice, they get accustomed to move about amongst mankind as alien beings, and in thinking of humanity in general, they say they instead of we.

In 2008, employees at an office for the accounting firm Deloitte were troubled by the behavior of a new recruit. In the midst of a bustling work environment, she didn’t seem to be doing anything except sitting at an empty desk and staring into space. Whenever someone would ask what she was doing, she would reply that she was “doing thought work” or “working on [her] thesis.” Then there was the day that she spent riding the elevators up and down repeatedly. When a coworker saw this and asked if she was “thinking again,” she replied: “It helps to see things from a different perspective.”2 The employees became uneasy. Urgent inter-office emails were sent. It turned out that the staff had unwittingly taken part in a performance piece called The Trainee. The silent employee was Pilvi Takala, a Finnish artist who is known for videos in which she quietly threatens social norms with simple actions. In a piece called Bag Lady, for instance, she spent days roaming a mall in Berlin while carrying a clear plastic bag full of euro bills. Christy Lange describes the piece in Frieze: “While this obvious display of wealth should have made her the ‘perfect customer,’ she only aroused suspicion from security guards and disdain from shopkeepers. Others urged her to accept a more discreet bag for her money.”3 The Trainee epitomized Takala’s method. As observed by a writer at Pumphouse Gallery, which showed her work in 2017, there is nothing inherently unusual about the notion of not working while at work; people commonly look at Facebook on their phones or seek other distractions during work hours. It was the image of utter inactivity that so galled Takala’s colleagues. “Appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company, creating a sense of the unknown,” they wrote, adding solemnly, “The potential of nothing is everything.

So he could talk to Jane and find out what had happened between her and Blakeborough after he left. He could finally get an answer to his marriage proposal. Proposal? Jane would probably call it a marriage command. He groaned. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to talk to her while he waited. He could always pack her off in another hackney before it was time for Meredith to return home. Yes, that would be best. Climbing inside the hackney, he doffed his hat and shrugged out of his box coat. But all of his perfectly logical reasons for being there went right out of his head the moment he saw her looking so luscious and lovely in her sunny gown. Because he desired only one thing. Jane. In his arms. Now. She must have seen the feral need flare in his face, for her eyes went wide. That was the only reaction she had time for, however, before he dragged her into his embrace so he could take her mouth in a hard, urgent kiss. God, he wanted her. He would never stop wanting her. Fisting his hands in her puffy sleeves to hold her still, he plundered her mouth the way he ached to plunder her body. Suddenly she shoved him back. “What are you doing? That’s not why--” He clasped her head in his hands, dislodging her bonnet, which tumbled to the floor. Then he kissed her again, demanding her to kiss him back, to need him back. It took her a moment, but then she moaned low in her throat and melted against him. And he exulted. She was soft, so wonderfully soft, his Jane. So wonderfully giving. Surely she wouldn’t be responding to him this way if she had cemented her engagement to Blakeborough. But then, he’d thought that last night. He jerked back, gratified to see from her flushed cheeks, reddened lips, and bright eyes that she was now as eager and aroused as he. Indeed, she was already looping her arms about his neck to draw him close once more. Stopping just short of her mouth, he rasped, “Are you still engaged to Blakeborough?” Her gorgeous eyes narrowed. “My engagement didn’t stop you last night.” “It would now.” A coy smile broke over her lips, and she tightened her grip on his neck. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing I am not.” With a growl of triumph, he kissed her once more. She was here. She was his. Nothing else mattered.

Out of 1,016 study subjects who’d been involved with the Moonies, 90 percent of those who’d been interested enough to attend one of the workshops where this so-called brainwashing occurred decided that the whole thing wasn’t really their cup of tea and quickly ended their Moonie careers. They couldn’t be converted. Of the remaining 10 percent who joined, half left on their own steam within a couple of years. So what made the other 5 percent stay? Prevailing wisdom would tell you that only the intellectually deficient or psychologically unstable would stick by a “cult” that long. But scholars have disproven this, too. In Barker’s studies, she compared the most committed Moonie converts with a control group—the latter had gone through life experiences that might make them very “suggestive” (“Like having an unhappy childhood or being rather low-intelligence,” she said). But in the end, the control group either didn’t join at all or left after a week or two. A common belief is that cult indoctrinators look for individuals who have “psychological problems” because they are easier to deceive. But former cult recruiters say their ideal candidates were actually good-natured, service-minded, and sharp. Steven Hassan, an ex-Moonie himself, used to recruit people to the Unification Church, so he knows a little something about the type of individual cults go for. “When I was a leader in the Moonies we selectively recruited . . . those who were strong, caring, and motivated,” he wrote in his 1998 book Combatting Cult Mind Control. Because it took so much time and money to enlist a new member, they avoided wasting resources on someone who seemed liable to break down right away. (Similarly, multilevel marketing higher-ups agree that their most profitable recruits aren’t those in urgent need of cash but instead folks determined and upbeat enough to play the long game. More on that in part 4.) Eileen Barker’s studies of the Moonies confirmed that their most obedient members were intelligent, chin-up folks. They were the children of activists, educators, and public servants (as opposed to wary scientists, like my parents). They were raised to see the good in people, even to their own detriment. In this way, it’s not desperation or mental illness that consistently suckers people into exploitative groups—instead, it’s an overabundance of optimism.

An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish. “How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked. “Only a little while,” the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English. “Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked. “I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket. “But… What do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican looked up and smiled. “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.” The American laughed and stood tall. “Sir, I’m a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.” He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, where you could run your expanded enterprise with proper management. The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, señor, how long will all this take?” To which the American replied, “15-20 years, 25 tops.” “But what then, señor?” The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.” “Millions señor? Then what?" “Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll in to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.

It’s a long, slow process. And it has a couple of component pieces. The core attitude that the Christian tradition works with is the piece called ‘surrender’ or ‘kenosis’. Kenosis is the word in Greek which Saint Paul used to depict ‘putting on the mind of Christ’. And it, basically, is pretty close to what the Buddhists mean by non-clinging. Doesn’t hang on, doesn’t insist, doesn’t assert, doesn’t grab, doesn’t brace, doesn’t defend, you know. It’s the mind that [she sighs and relaxes outwards]. We try to put that mind on. In one of those ancient early Christian writings, the Gospel of Thomas, the students asked Jesus, “What are your students like, how would you describe them?” and He said, “They are like small children, playing in a field not their own. When the landlords come and demand, “Give us back our field!” the children return it by stripping themselves and standing naked before them.” So that’s the description from Jesus of this process. So it’s the lifelong practice, the core practice, of learning to recognise when you’ve gotten into one of these postures: tightened, urgent, angry, self-important, and in that moment… Open to Him. So that’s the hang of it, that’s the heart of it combined with a couple of complementary practices which come from the mindfulness sector. The one being – the piece that I learned from the Gurdjieff Work – is to learn how to even notice when you’re getting into these states of constriction, and smaller-self urgency, and automaticity, because we don’t notice that automatically. It’s like you don’t notice the moment you fall asleep at night. So you sink into these lower, unfree, ugly states of being automatically. So you have to learn to even notice when that happens. And the second – Interviewer: There is this point… where you see you could go both ways, you could serve the ego or you can surrender. And you can decide. Cynthia: Yeah. There is definitely that point. What makes it difficult though is that for a long, long time in the practice you can see that point. You can see yourself going over the waterfall, but you don’t have the power to swim away yet. So what you have to do is live in the gap and say, “Oh my God, look at what’s happening to me, I can see that I’m sinking but I don’t have the force to stop.” And it takes a long time until we have the force. And to be able to see that you’re falling into a bad state doesn’t, for a long time, mean you can do anything about it. I think that’s a truism that disappoints many people, so the even more painful penance is you just have to sit there and watch it. Your only real choice is can you just see it, and the horror and remorse and helplessness, or do you just pretend, “Oh well, I’m really right! I’m going to fight for this for all…” Can you just go with the lower state or can you wait in the gap? So for me that’s brought a whole new meaning to that whole British cliché ‘mind the gap’!

A third assumption: a commitment to monogamy is an admirable consequence of love, stemming from a deep-seated generosity and an intimate interest in the other’s flourishing and well-being. A call for monogamy is a sure indication that one partner has the other’s best interests at heart. To Rabih’s new way of thinking, it seems anything but kind or considerate to insist that a spouse return to his room alone to watch CNN and eat yet another club sandwich while perched on the edge of his bed, when he has perhaps only a few more decades of life left on the planet, an increasingly dishevelled physique, an at best intermittent track record with the opposite sex, and a young woman from California standing before him who sincerely wishes to remove her dress in his honour. If love is to be defined as a genuine concern for the well-being of another person, then it must surely be deemed compatible with granting permission for an often harassed and rather browbeaten husband to step off the elevator on the eighteenth floor, in order to enjoy ten minutes of rejuvenating cunnilingus with a near-stranger. Otherwise it may seem that what we are dealing with is not really love at all but rather a kind of small-minded and hypocritical possessiveness, a desire to make one’s partner happy if, but only if, that happiness involves oneself. It’s past midnight already, yet Rabih is just hitting his stride, knowing there might be objections but sidestepping them nimbly and, in the process, acquiring an ever more brittle sense of self-righteousness. A fourth assumption: monogamy is the natural state of love. A sane person can only ever want to love one other person. Monogamy is the bellwether of emotional health. Is there not, wonders Rabih, an infantile idealism in our wish to find everything in one other being – someone who will be simultaneously a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a co-chauffeur and a business partner? What a recipe for disappointment and resentment in this notion, upon which millions of otherwise perfectly good marriages regularly founder. What could be more natural than to feel an occasional desire for another person? How can anyone be expected to grow up in hedonistic, liberated circles, experience the sweat and excitement of nightclubs and summer parks, listen to music full of longing and lust and then, immediately upon signing a piece of paper, renounce all outside sexual interest, not in the name of any particular god or higher commandment but merely from an unexplored supposition that it must be very wrong? Is there not instead something inhuman, indeed ‘wrong’, in failing to be tempted, in failing to realize just how short of time we all are and therefore with what urgent curiosity we should want to explore the unique fleshly individuality of more than one of our contemporaries? To moralize against adultery is to deny the legitimacy of a range of sensory high points – Rabih thinks of Lauren’s shoulder blades – in their own way just as worthy of reverence as more acceptable attractions such as the last moments of ‘Hey Jude’ or the ceilings of the Alhambra Palace. Isn’t the rejection of adulterous possibilities tantamount to an infidelity towards the richness of life itself? To turn the equation on its head: would it be rational to trust anyone who wasn’t, under certain circumstances, really pretty interested in being unfaithful?

That black horse we used for packin’ up here is the most cantankerous beast alive,” Jake grumbled, rubbing his arm. Ian lifted his gaze from the initials on the tabletop and turned to Jake, making no attempt to hide his amusement. “Bit you, did he?” “Damn right he bit me!” the older man said bitterly. “He’s been after a chuck of me since we left the coach at Hayborn and loaded those sacks on his back to bring up here.” “I warned you he bites anything he can reach. Keep your arm out of his way when you’re saddling him.” “It weren’t my arm he was after, it was my arse! Opened his mouth and went for it, only I saw him outter the corner of my eye and swung around, so he missed.” Jakes’s frown darkened when he saw the amusement in Ian’s expression. “Can’t see why you’ve bothered to feed him all these years. He doesn’t deserve to share a stable with your other horses-beauties they are, every one but him.” “Try slinging packs over the backs of one of those and you’ll see why I took him. He was suitable for using as a pack mule; none of my other cattle would have been,” ian said, frowning as he lifted his head and looked about at the months of accumulated dirt covering everything. “He’s slower’n a pack mule,” Jake replied. “Mean and stubborn and slow,” he concluded, but he, too, was frowning a little as he looked around at the thick layers of dust coating every surface. “Thought you said you’d arranged for some village wenches to come up here and clean and cook fer us. This place is a mess.” “I did. I dictated a message to Peters for the caretaker, asking him to stock the place with food and to have two women come up here to clean and cook. The food is here, and there are chickens out in the barn. He must be having difficulty finding two women to stay up here.” “Comely women, I hope,” Jake said. “Did you tell him to make the wenches comely?” Ian paused in his study of the spiderwebs strewn across the ceiling and cast him an amused look. “You wanted me to tell a seventy-year-old caretaker who’s half-blind to make certain the wenches were comely?” “Couldn’ta hurt ‘t mention it,” Jake grumbled, but he looked chastened. “The village is only twelve miles away. You can always stroll down there if you’ve urgent need of a woman while we’re here. Of course, the trip back up here may kill you,” he joked referring to the winding path up the cliff that seemed to be almost vertical. “Never mind women,” Jake said in an abrupt change of heart, his tanned, weathered face breaking into a broad grin. “I’m here for a fortnight of fishin’ and relaxin’, and that’s enough for any man. It’ll be like the old days, Ian-peace and quiet and naught else. No hoity-toity servants hearin’ every word what’s spoke, no carriages and barouches and matchmaking mamas arrivin’ at your house. I tell you, my boy, though I’ve not wanted to complain about the way you’ve been livin’ the past year, I don’t like these servents o’ yours above half. That’s why I didn’t come t’visit you very often. Yer butler at Montmayne holds his nose so far in t’air, it’s amazin’ he gets any oxhegen, and that French chef o’ yers practically threw me out of his kitchens. That what he called ‘em-his kitchens, and-“ The old seaman abruptly broke off, his expression going from irate to crestfallen, “Ian,” he said anxiously, “did you ever learn t’ cook while we was apart?” “No, did you?” “Hell and damnation, no!” Jake said, appalled at the prospect of having to eat anything he fixed himself.

On the first day of the meeting that would become known as the United States Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the proceedings. Addressing his great fellow Virginian General George Washington, victorious hero of the War of Independence, who sat in the chair, Randolph hoped to convince delegates sent by seven, so far, of the thirteen states, with more on the way, to abandon the confederation formed by the states that had sent them—the union that had declared American independence from England and won the war—and to replace it with another form of government. “Our chief danger,” Randolph announced, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” This was in May of 1787, in Philadelphia, in the same ground-floor room of the Pennsylvania State House, borrowed from the Pennsylvania assembly, where in 1776 the Continental Congress had declared independence. Others in the room already agreed with Randolph: James Madison, also of Virginia; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; Gouverneur Morris of New York and Pennsylvania; Alexander Hamilton of New York; Washington. They wanted the convention to institute a national government. As we know, their effort was a success. We often say the confederation was a weak government, the national government stronger. But the more important difference has to do with whom those governments acted on. The confederation acted on thirteen state legislatures. The nation would act on all American citizens, throughout all the states. That would be a mighty change. To persuade his fellow delegates to make it, Randolph was reeling off a list of what he said were potentially fatal problems, urgently in need, he said, of immediate repair. He reiterated what he called the chief threat to the country. “None of the constitutions”—he meant those of the states’ governments—“have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” The term “democracy” could mean different things, sometimes even contradictory things, in 1787. People used it to mean “the mob,” which historians today would call “the crowd,” a movement of people denied other access to power, involving protest, riot, what recently has been called occupation, and often violence against people and property. But sometimes “democracy” just meant assertive lawmaking by a legislative body staffed by gentlemen highly sensitive to the desires of their genteel constituents. Men who condemned the working-class mob as a democracy sometimes prided themselves on being “democratical” in their own representative bodies. What Randolph meant that morning by “democracy” is clear. When he said “our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions,” and “none of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy,” he was speaking in a context of social and economic turmoil, pervading all thirteen states, which the other delegates were not only aware of but also had good reason to be urgently worried about. So familiar was the problem that Randolph would barely have had to explain it, and he didn’t explain it in detail. Yet he did say things whose context everyone there would already have understood.

Patty snaps, “That’s crap, and you know it. Your people routinely break the rules. Like, say, when everyone marks all their change requests as an ‘urgent’ or ‘emergency change’. That field is only for actual emergencies!” Wes retorts, “We have to do that, because marking them urgent is the only way to get your team to look at it! Who can wait three weeks for an approval?” One of the lead engineers suggests, “Maybe we make another field called ‘extremely urgent?

where am I going? This society? The whole human race?” These are questions which many of us today are asking urgently, deeply troubled about what we see happening in our world Our concerns may be quite personal ones, centered around our own particular life situation. They may be general ones, related to the state of things as a whole or both. For this is a strange and difficult time, a time when all the old values and traditions seem to have been cut out from under us without anything clear and definitive having been substituted for them. From every direction and every possible source, we’re being bombarded by the newfangled ideas, values and behaviors of the New Age in which we live. The New Age is an age with many interesting features. One of these is confusion. Great numbers of us no longer seem to have a clear sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Under the impact of too much personal freedom and the flood of new ideas and values, we’re falling apart, frightened, uncertain, lost. After all, how is it possible to have certainty about anything when even the most basic, time-honored values are being called into question? In comparison to earlier times, everything around us today seems upside-down and backwards. A great deal of what was previously considered right is now looked upon as outmoded, irrelevant or just plain dumb. At the same time, much of what used to be considered wrong is now accepted as right, normal and okay. Members of the older generation, like myself, still maintain our vision of what things were like in an earlier, simpler, less perplexing period. But when our generation goes, apart from people of strong religious faith, who will be left that still retains a clear vision of a saner, more stable society? That vision will have gone with the winds of change. This turn-about in basic human values and morals has led to a steady unraveling of civilized standards and behavior, not only in the country but worldwide. Brutality, lust and all manner of other evils flourish around the globe; violence, vice and exploitation seem to have become the new order of the day. And fear hangs over the whole world. Those of us who are even slightly sensitive to the currents and energies around us realize that something is wrong-deeply, awfully wrong. And we carry the collective burden of humanity’s pain and turmoil deep within our hearts. Day by day the fear and uneasiness increases. Often we sense that we’re at the edge of a terrible and dangerous abyss, surrounded by intense darkness. As the end of this millennium approaches, predictions of a worldwide Armageddon-like catastrophe haunt our minds. And how can it be otherwise when we sense deep within ourselves that things have gone so wrong that such a crisis is due? For each day, new and deeper holes appear in the social and moral fabric of mankind, and it seem obvious that when the holes become more than the fabric itself, it’s past repair.” source: Suzanne Haneef, Islam: The Path of God, pages 11-12 (PDF Version) Written by an American Muslim, this work presents a brief yet comprehensive survey of the basic teachings on the significance of Islam's central concept, faith in and submission to God. It introduces the reader to how Muslims feel about various aspects of life, how they worship, and how Muslims living in the West practice their religion. Perhaps you have been hearing a lot about Islam and Muslims in the news and are interested in knowing, justifiably, just what this religion is all about. This is the classic English-language book for introducing Islam to non-Muslims in the West. It is a well-balanced book that does an excellent job of covering the basics of belief, practice, and culture, without overwhelming the reader in minutia. This is generally the first book that I recommend to people who are interested in learning about Islam. read her other book: What Everyone Should Know About Islam and Muslims

There was no doubt where this would lead: One did not share a bed with a naked adult in his robust masculine prime and expect to leave it a virgin. But she also knew where it would not lead. She had seen Devon’s face on Christmas Eve as she had held the tenant’s infant daughter. His expression had frozen for a brief, brutal instant of dread. If she chose to let this go any farther, she would have to accept that whatever his plans were for the estate, they did not include marrying and siring children. “This isn’t an affair,” she said, more to herself than to him. “It’s only one night.” Devon lay on his side, a lock of hair falling over his forehead as he looked down at her. “What if you want more than that?” he asked huskily. “It still won’t be an affair.” His hand caressed her over the covers, charting the shape of her hips and stomach. “Why does the word matter?” “Because affairs always end. So calling it that would make it more difficult when one of us wants to leave.” Devon’s hand stilled. He looked down at her, his blue eyes as dark as pitch. Candlelight flickered over the hard, high planes of his cheeks. “I’m not going anywhere.” He took her jaw in his hand, his mouth covering hers in a strong, urgent kiss--a kiss of ownership. She opened to him, letting him do as he wished, while he searched her with aggressive ardor.

narrow his eyes. But his face changed in the subtlest of ways — it was as if his cheekbones had become more prominent, and his eyes turned cold. It was enough for her to know for sure that she would never want to be questioned by this man for a crime — whether she was guilty or innocent. It also made him more intriguing. As a result of her self-enforced eviction Leo wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself, until she remembered that the wine bar opened early to serve breakfast. Maybe she could set up her office there for an hour or so. She had calls to make and meetings to set up for next week. A few of her clients were going on family holidays this week, and she had a dreadful suspicion that on their return they might be in need of urgent appointments. Unhappy relationships and holidays were not often a good match. Ordering an almond croissant and the ubiquitous cappuccino, she settled down in the corner away from other customers so that she wouldn’t disturb them by speaking on the

no more stolen moments, let alone hours, in which to discover each other . . . from now on, they were formally betrothed, and that betrothal had its own rules. Maddening, perhaps intentionally so. Luci filched another stuffed date from the tray a sleepy maidservant was carrying back to the kitchen, and followed her father into the library. Her uncle and grandfather, already relaxed in chairs by the fireplace, looked up as she came in. "Luci, you should be in bed." "Papa, I'm not sleepy." He raised his eyebrows at her, but she didn't move. "Papa, I had a message cube from Esmay today." Her uncle Casimir sighed. "Esmay . . . now there's another problem. Berthold, did you get anywhere in the Landsmen's Guild?" "Nowhere. Oh, Vicarios won't oppose us, but that's because of Luci, and his support is half-hearted. It would be different if she hadn't left so young, I think. They don't really remember her, and even though they awarded her the Starmount, and consider her a hero, they do not want a Landbride—any Landbride but especially our Landbride—connected to an outlander family. Cosca told me frankly that even if she moved here, and also her husband, he would oppose it. Nothing good ever came from the stars, he insisted." "And the votes?" "Enough for a challenge, Casi, I'm sure of it. No, the only way out of this is for Esmaya to come and talk to them herself." "Or resign." "Or resign, but—will she?" Luci spoke up. "She mentioned that in her cube." "What—resigning? Why?" "Her precious Fleet seems to think about us the way the Landsmen's Guild thinks about them. She says they have some kind of regulation forbidding officers to marry Landbrides." Her father snorted. "Do they have one forbidding officers to be Landbrides? How ridiculous!" "Are you serious?" Casimir asked. "They have something specific about Landbrides? How would they know?" "I don't know," Luci said. "That's just what she said. And she said why didn't we take in all those women brought back from Our Texas—she was sure they'd fit in." A stunned silence, satisfying by its depth and length. "She what?" Casimir said finally. "Aren't those women—" "Free-birthers and religious cultists," Luci said, with satisfaction. "Exactly." "But—but the priests will object," Berthold said. "Not as badly as the Landsmen's Guild, if they hear of it. Dear God, I thought she had more sense than that!" "She is in love," Luci pointed out, willing now to be magnanimous. "Apparently Fleet is taking Barin's salary to pay for their upkeep—at least some of it—and Esmay's trying to help him out. Nineteen of them, after all, and all those children." "At our expense." Casimir shook his head. "Well, that settles it. She'll have to resign, as soon as I can get word to her. The Trustees will certainly not approve this, if I were willing to let it be known." He gave Luci a hard look. "You didn't tell Philip, I hope." "Of course not." Luci glared at her uncle. Esmay might not have any sense, but she knew what the family honor required. "I hope she does name you Landbride, Luci," Casimir said. "You'll be a good one." Luci had a sudden spasm of doubt. Was she being fair to Esmay, who after all had had so many bad things happen to her? But underneath the doubt, the same exultation she had felt when Esmay gave her the brown mare . . . mine, it's mine, I can take care of it, nobody can hurt it . . . "I wonder if we could place an ansible call," Casimir said. "Surely it's not that urgent,

The P.I. states that if something x has happened in certain particular circumstances n times in the past, we are justified in believing that the same circumstances will produce x on the (n + 1)th occasion. The P.I. is wholly respectable and authoritative, and it seems like a well-lit exit out of the whole problem. Until, that is, it happens to strike you (as can occur only in very abstract moods or when there’s an unusual amount of time before the alarm goes off) that the P.I. is itself merely an abstraction from experience … and so now what exactly is it that justifies our confidence in the P.I.? This latest thought may or may not be accompanied by a concrete memory of several weeks spent on a relative’s farm in childhood (long story). There were four chickens in a wire coop off the garage, the brightest of whom was called Mr. Chicken. Every morning, the farm’s hired man’s appearance in the coop area with a certain burlap sack caused Mr. Chicken to get excited and start doing warmup-pecks at the ground, because he knew it was feeding time. It was always around the same time t every morning, and Mr. Chicken had figured out that t(man + sack) = food, and thus was confidently doing his warmup-pecks on that last Sunday morning when the hired man suddenly reached out and grabbed Mr. Chicken and in one smooth motion wrung his neck and put him in the burlap sack and bore him off to the kitchen. Memories like this tend to remain quite vivid, if you have any. But with the thrust, lying here, being that Mr. Chicken appears now actually to have been correct—according to the Principle of Induction—in expecting nothing but breakfast from that (n + 1)th appearance of man + sack at t. Something about the fact that Mr. Chicken not only didn’t suspect a thing but appears to have been wholly justified in not suspecting a thing—this seems concretely creepy and upsetting. Finding some higher-level justification for your confidence in the P.I. seems much more urgent when you realize that, without this justification, our own situation is basically indistinguishable from that of Mr. Chicken. But the conclusion, abstract as it is, seems inescapable: what justifies our confidence in the Principle of Induction is that it has always worked so well in the past, at least up to now. Meaning that our only real justification for the Principle of Induction is the Principle of Induction, which seems shaky and question-begging in the extreme. The only way out of the potentially bedridden-for-life paralysis of this last conclusion is to pursue further abstract side-inquiries into what exactly ‘justification’ means and whether it’s true that the only valid justifications for certain beliefs and principles are rational and noncircular. For instance, we know that in a certain number of cases every year cars suddenly veer across the centerline into oncoming traffic and crash head-on into people who were driving along not expecting to get killed; and thus we also know, on some level, that whatever confidence lets us drive on two-way roads is not 100% rationally justified by the laws of statistical probability. And yet ‘rational justification’ might not apply here. It might be more the fact that, if you cannot believe your car won’t suddenly get crashed into out of nowhere, you just can’t drive, and thus that your need/desire to be able to drive functions as a kind of ‘justification’ of your confidence.* It would be better not to then start analyzing the various putative ‘justifications’ for your need/desire to be able to drive a car—at some point you realize that the process of abstract justification can, at least in principle, go on forever. The ability to halt a line of abstract thinking once you see it has no end is part of what usually distinguishes sane, functional people—people who when the alarm finally goes off can hit the floor without trepidation and plunge into the concrete business of the real workaday world—from the unhinged.

Motivate the Workforce. Have you identified each person’s “hot button” and focused on it? Do you work personal pride and shared purpose into most communications? Are you keeping your powder dry for those urgent moments when you may need it?   8. Embrace the Front Lines. Have you made your intent clear and empowered those around you to act? Do you regularly meet with those in direct contact with customers? Is everybody able to communicate their ideas and concerns to you?   9. Build Leadership in Others. Are all managers expected to build leadership among their subordinates? Does the company culture foster the effective exercise of leadership? Are leadership development opportunities available to most, if not all, managers? 10. Manage Relations. Is the hierarchy reduced to a minimum, and does bad news travel up? Are managers self-aware and empathetic? Are autocratic, egocentric, and irritable behaviors censured? 11. Identify Personal Implications. Do employees appreciate how the firm’s vision and strategy impact them individually? What private sacrifices will be necessary for achieving the common cause? How will the plan affect people’s personal livelihood and quality of work life? 12. Convey Your Character. Have you communicated your commitment to performance with integrity? Do those in the organization know you as a person, and do they appreciate your aspirations and your agendas? Have you been in the same room or at least on the same call with everybody who works with you during the past year? 13. Dampen Overoptimism and Excessive Pessimism. Have you prepared the organization for unlikely but extremely consequential events? Do you celebrate success but also guard against the by-products of excessive confidence? Have you paved the way not only for quarterly results but for long-term performance?

Fables and Fortune Hunters An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish. “How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked. “Only a little while,” the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English. “Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked. “I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket. “But … What do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican looked up and smiled. “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.” The American laughed and stood tall. “Sir, I’m a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.” He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, señor, how long will all this take?” To which the American replied, “15–20 years. 25 tops.” “But what then, señor?” The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.” “Millions, señor? Then what?” “Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos …

So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy… just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop. That’s the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice—maybe the only advice—any of us should ever give.

I should let you retire.” He held the self-portrait a minute longer, gazing at it as she had sometimes felt him look at her--unblinking, curious, even urgent. She peeped through the keyhole to make sure no one was in the corridor before opening the door and letting him slip out. After a moment, she peered again and could see nothing, then Mr. Nobley’s face dropped into view. He was crouching outside her door, looking back. “Miss Erstwhile?” he whispered. “Yes, Mr. Nobley?” “Tomorrow evening, will you reserve for me the first two dances?” “Yes, Mr. Nobley.” She could hear how her voice was full of smile. “Miss Erstwhile, may I come back in a moment?” She yanked him back in and shut the door. Now he was going to grab her and kiss her and call her Jane, now she’d witness the pent-up passion that explodes behind Regency doors! But…he just stood with his back to the door and looked at her. And smiled in his way, the way that made her stare back and wish she could breathe. “I should not put you in danger of Mrs. Wattlesbrook by staying,” Mr. Nobley said, “but I suddenly had to see you again. I know that seems ridiculous, but I look at you, and I feel sure of something. Things are changing, aren’t they?” “Yes,” she said, and they were, right at that moment. He took her hand and looked at it a moment, then he turned it over. He lifted it to his mouth and kissed her palm. “Tomorrow, then.” And he left. If only he was real! She stood and pressed her palm to her chest and breathed her pulse back into submission and thought she’d rather fancy a swoon. To her self-portrait, Jane whispered, “This is the best therapy ever.

He took his hat off and put it on top of the truck cab, his eyes never leaving hers. “Can I satisfy my curiosity about one last thing?” he asked, his voice gruff in a way she’d never heard it before. Then she noticed his attention, his focus, was on her mouth now. Heat flared through her so fast she couldn’t control it. Like a wildfire fueled by a raging wind, it consumed her, ravaging any hope she had of containing it. “What would that be?” she said on a choked whisper, though she had absolutely no doubt she knew the answer. She blamed a year of not having to manage her defenses around him for not being able to rally them now. Truth was, though, she wasn’t sure she would have, even if she could. “This.” He closed the whisper of a distance between his mouth and hers, only he didn’t go for the alpha-male, take-all, conquering kiss. That might have swept her off her feet, quite literally, for at least the time it took for it to begin and end. No, what he did decimated any chance she had of being simply swept away, able to write off the moment later as nothing more than a mindless, primal response. No, what he did was make love to her mouth. She hadn’t even known it was possible to do such a thing. His kiss wasn’t demanding, it wasn’t desperate, or, worse, a sad good-bye. It was a slow, deliberate, and confident wooing. That last part being the most heady, and the most dangerous. It was a kiss that didn’t ask for her complete and utter participation; it simply, by its most intimate nature, demanded it. He didn’t lay claim. He made love to her mouth with his, like he’d known this, all along, and just hadn’t had the chance to show her yet. He drew her in, sharing with her the experience of utter communion that was the two of them, together. He kissed her slowly, intently, and so utterly sensuously, that she was kissing him back, fully partnering him in this communion of so much more than mere lips, tongues, and breaths, without it even being a conscious decision on her part. His tongue slid in along hers as if it had found its mate and was simply happy to be home, curled up again, sated and content. But that beautiful sweetness was all mixed up with the pulse of something darkly sensual, making her crave the discovery of what every part of him communing in this way with every part of her would be like. So deeply satisfying and urgently primal. She was in trouble here. Real trouble. Because somewhere along the way she’d forgotten he wasn’t a man who called anything quits, and he surely hadn’t come all this way to turn around and head home without making damn sure she knew exactly what she was turning away from.

I waited until I was five months pregnant to tell my mother that I was having a baby. "I'm calling with some news," I said. "God, what?" she responded, sounding hopeful for something juicy and terrible. She could be counted on to be sober and in good spirits until late afternoon, and I timed my calls accordingly but always braced myself. The death of her parents and of her brother, my uncle Mike, who had been gone for almost five years now, and the sale of the land had left her in a raw and scattered state that I still hoped she would recover from, eventually. She seemed to want to talk only about tragedies and bad news and would complain to me that my sister never called her and that nobody ever told her anything, or included her in any of their lives. I cut her off as she began to tell me something I did not want to hear. "I'm calling with good news," I said, starting again as though she might not recognize it as such. "What?" she said, her tone urgent, almost desperate. "I'm going to have a baby," I told her. She let out an exhale, then, sounding exhausted from the three seconds of suspense and relived but not happy, she said, "Well, it's nice to hear some good news, because I've been following this massacre? In Arizona? With the congresswoman who was shot in the head by that lunatic? It's just god-awful." I forced myself to give her a few details calmly, including the due date, then got off the phone as quickly as I could. She sent me an email the next day that said, simply, "I don't have any advice for you. Everything is different now than when I had you. I hope that you'll let me see my grandchild sometime. Your sister won't let me see her kids." I spent that whole day in bed, with a hand on my stomach, terrified.

The New England wilderness March 1, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees She had no choice but to go to him. She set Daniel down. Perhaps they would spare Daniel. Perhaps only she was to be burned. She forced herself to keep her chin up, her eyes steady and her steps even. How could she be afraid of going where her five-year-old brother had gone first? O Tommy, she thought, rest in the Lord. Perhaps you are with Mother now. Perhaps I will see you in a moment. She did not want to die. Her footsteps crunched on the snow. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The Indian handed Mercy a slab of cornmeal bread, and then beckoned to Daniel, who cried, “Oh, good, I’m so hungry!” and came running, his happy little face tilted in a smile at the Indian who fed him. “Mercy said we’d eat later,” Daniel confided in the Indian. The English trembled in their relief and the French laughed. The Indian knelt beside Daniel, tossing aside Tommy’s jacket and dressing Daniel in warm clean clothing from another child. Nobody in Deerfield owned many clothes, and if she permitted herself to think about it, Mercy would know whose trousers and shirt these were, but she did not want to think about what dead child did not need clothes, so she said to the Indian, “Who are you? What’s your name?” He understood. Putting the palm of his hand against his chest, he said, “Tannhahorens.” She could just barely separate the syllables. It sounded more like a duck quacking than a real word. “Tannhahorens,” he said again, and she repeated it after him. She wondered what it meant. Indian names had to make a picture. She smiled carefully at the man she had thought was going to burn her alive as an example and said, “I’ll be right back, Tannhahorens.” She took a few steps away, and when he did nothing, she ran to her family. Her uncle swept her into his arms. How wonderful his scratchy beard felt! How strong and comforting his hug! “My brave girl,” he whispered, kissing her hair. “Mercy, they won’t let me help you.” In a voice as childish and puzzled as Daniel’s, he added, “They won’t let me help your aunt Mary, or Will and Little Mary either. I tried to help your brothers and got whipped for it.” He stammered: Uncle Nathaniel, whose reading choices from the Bible were always about war, and whose voice made every battle exciting. He needed her comfort as much as she needed his. “Uncle Nathaniel,” she said, “if I had done better, Tommy and Marah--” “Hush,” said her uncle. “The Lord set a task before you and you obeyed. Daniel is your task. Say your prayers as you march.” In a tight little pack behind Uncle Nathaniel stood her three living brothers. How small and cold they looked. Sam lifted his chin to encourage his sister and said, “At least we’re together. Do the best you can, Mercy. So will we.” They stared at each other, the two closest in age, and Mercy thought how proud their mother would be of Sam. “Mercy,” cried her brother John, panicking, “you have to go! Go fast,” he said urgently. “Your Indian is pointing at you.” Tannhahorens was watching her but not signaling. He isn’t angry, thought Mercy. I don’t have to be afraid, but I do have to return. “Find out your Indian’s name,” she said to her brothers. “It helps. Call him by name.” She took the time to hug and kiss each brother. How narrow their little shoulders; how thin the cloth that must keep them from freezing. She had to go before she wept. Indians did not care for crying. “Be strong, Uncle Nathaniel,” she said, touching the strange collar around his neck. “Don’t tug it,” he said wryly. “It’s lined with porcupine quill tips. If I don’t move at the right speed, the Indians give my leash a twitch and the needles jab my throat.” The boys laughed, pantomiming a hard jerk on the cord, and Mercy said, “You’re all just as mean as you ever were!” “And alive,” said Sam. When they hugged once more, she felt a tremor in him, deep and horrified, but under control.

Ironically, you’ll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team. Instead of spending the entire day dealing with Urgent!!! emails and disruptive phone calls, you’ll have the entire start (or end) of the day to yourself.

Ian knew he had to kiss Elizabeth when he saw that fire in her eyes and heard the passion in her voice. He pulled her against him, and his kiss was urgent, like that of a hungry lover. Licking her lip, he forced her to open her mouth, and she did not resist. How he wanted to devour her softness, her innocence. “Och, Elizabeth.” He clutched her as if he could not get enough. His lips left her mouth, trailing down her neck to her collarbone. She moaned at each touch, her mewling sounds firing his passion even more. Trying to maintain some sense of reason, he pulled back, giving her the opportunity to deny him. But she only looked at him with glazed passion. Ian molded her to him, his arms wrapping around her like a vise. Her breasts flattened against his chest, and he shuddered with desire. She gently pulled away from him, breathless. “Laird Munro…” She placed her hands on his arms, and a chuckle escaped him. “I would think after that kiss, ye’d call me Ian.” Rather than releasing her as he should, he pulled her close. “We will cease, but let me simply hold ye.” Rubbing his hands over her back, he felt her hands on his chest. What the hell was he thinking? He’d almost lost control with Elizabeth. God’s teeth! If the lass would have permitted him, he would’ve taken her standing here. That wasn’t necessarily true. He still had some sense of chivalry left within him. He would have at least thrown her on the bed. Reluctantly, he pulled away from her. “Come. I will escort ye back to your room.” She couldn’t look him in the eye. “That’s not necessary. It’s late. No one will be in the hall.” He placed his hand at the small of her back. “I insist.” Neither spoke as he escorted her to her chamber. He did not know what to say. Besides, he was trying too hard not to fall over his own two feet. Opening her door, he waited as she entered her room. She turned around and gave him a tender smile. “Ian…” She spoke softly, and her eyes never left his. “I don’t understand what just happened between us, but I don’t want to be hurt anymore.” His eyebrows shot up. “What do ye mean? I doona understand all of this either, but I assure ye, my intentions are nae to cause ye pain.” At least he spoke the truth because he wasn’t sure what his purpose was in kissing her. “I don't want you to push me away. My heart couldn't bear it because I’ve loved you from the first time I saw you.” Elizabeth slowly closed the door in his face, and Ian paled.

The complacency of the individual who admires his own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of the man who has no self-esteem because he has not even a superficial self which he can esteem. He is not a person, not an individual, only an atom. This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrifice, some-times it is called obedience, sometimes it is devotion to the dialectic of class war. It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility.

When I finally got back to my family’s winter cabin last night, I went to my amplifying chamber and managed to see a whole hell of a lot of things that my time in the Royal Seer's Chair opened up to me. And there was one prophesy which I can't see any way around but this." "But what?" I asked in concern, frowning at him as he stepped closer to me with his brow furrowing.  "One of my sisters is going to die today. And the only possible chance we have to save them is by me bringing you to the caves of the forgotten." "The what of where?" I demanded, my heart racing at the idea of Roxy or Darcy not making it through the day as I tried to figure out what the fuck was going to happen that could mean they might not. "It's an ancient set of caverns in the far south of Solaria, hidden within a jungle and long since forgotten by our kind. My visions led me there once before and I found a ring which saved my life. The stars won't show me what will happen when we get there or anything at all other than to whisper that it is the only chance there is for both Vega Princesses to survive the day. So are you with me?" he asked urgently and I could see how serious he was about this as I nodded. "You're sure the best thing I can do for Roxy is to go with you now?" I demanded. "And how is Darcy involved in this?" "Your father captured her and Lance last night. I was so lost in the visions the stars had flooded me with that I didn't see him coming for them until after it had already come to pass. I'm more sorry for that than words can express. I called the other Heirs and told them what’s happening. But if you and I don't head to the caves now then I know that one of my sisters will die.

A few years ago, my phone turned into a device for strangers and robots to butt in between me and whatever I’m doing. Any given caller was very likely a financial-verbal intruder. The simple buzzing of a phone began to frighten me. I decided to shun phone calls systematically, with an exception being of course made for Sushila—and even Sushila knows that, unless it’s urgent, a text is optimal. This decision was overdue. The general history of the telephone call, it can safely be said, is a grim one. Who can begin to measure or even grasp the volume of the calamities reported or produced by this sound-transmission system? It was with very good reason, I now understand, that my father invariably commanded me to ignore the ringing beige gadget stationed in the living-room bookcase. Together he and I would wait, all activity put on hold, for the shrill to stop, an interlude of suspense that could last a minute or more, because in those landline days there was nothing to stop a caller from sticking at it indefinitely, and often the house would be filled with that eerie, seemingly infinite electronic cry, and often this cry would be followed by a second, appellate cry undertaken in the hope, perhaps, that the first call had been misdialed or that my father had just stepped through the door or climbed out of the bathtub. Dad refused to get an answering machine. As a concession to me—I was a high school freshman; it was newly important for me and my friends to be in constant discussion—he permitted me to pick up the phone, but only on the condition that, should the caller ask for him, I would declare him to be “not presently available.” This was the formulation he insisted on.

Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

I don't incidentally suggest that the deceit is conscious. Much more likely, it's just the enormous power of conformity to convention, to what Gramsci called hegemonic "common sense." Some ideas are not even rejected; they are unthinkable. Like the idea that US aggression is aggression; it can only be "a mistake," "a tragic error," "a strategic blunder." I also don't want to suggest this is "American exceptionalism." It's hard to find an exception to the practice in the history of imperialism.

It’s me, pet. Vera Stanhope.’ The detective of the night before. He thought he’d answered all her questions and her presence threw him. At one time he’d have been able to take this in his stride. He’d had the confidence to talk himself into any event, out of any bother. Now, it wasn’t so easy. But he couldn’t leave her there, waiting. ‘Come on up.’ Keeping the voice light, to show he had nothing to hide. He checked his appearance in the long mirror. Habit. Reassurance. Like spending a fortune on the right haircut, a decent pair of shoes. Then he opened the door of the flat and stood there, waiting for her to appear. He couldn’t hear the lift and was wondering if she’d been called away on more urgent business, when she appeared at the top of the stairs, wheezing, heaving for breath. ‘I don’t like lifts.’ The words came out in quick accusing pants, as if she was blaming him for living there. ‘I’m never quite sure they’ll carry my weight.’ And he realized her appearance was something she was sensitive about. She’d have been bullied at school and the only way to deal with it would have been to get the jibe in first. Surprised that last night he’d been intimidated by her, he leaned back against the door and let her walk into the flat ahead of him.

While his conscious mind couldn’t possibly track and digest the sea of thoughts coming from multiple sources, his subconscious, behind the scenes, did just this, alerting him only when it identified something he urgently needed to know, a phenomenon researchers called the Cocktail Party Effect.

Of course, Adam was still counting days the old way, as Sunday was the first day of the week, so he was misinforming me as to which day his father actually arrived in Spain, seemingly by accident, by mistake. Perhaps it was a mistake that Adam had confused the European calendar with the Israeli calendar from time to time; perhaps it was not a mistake. Ferran actually arrived the following day, Tuesday, according to the Gregorian calendar and not Monday, when we had all been preparing for his arrival with Martina in vain. I had wanted to introduce her to the old man nicely. However, Tuesday, when he was scheduled to arrive, Mario Larese - Mister Twister - showed up, banging the glass of the store-front door, echoing throughout the entire store and upstairs apartment, as if he was about to break the glass if I did not go down to open it. He was knocking on the plain, large glass of the door with either a lighter or with his metal ring; I don't know which, but it was terrible. I knew Ferran could arrive at any moment, so I told Martina it might be best if she went home to Paola and let me take care of the business. I couldn't ignore Mario, who was almost breaking the glass, seemingly because he had seen my scooter parked in front of the store. I opened the door and he started pushing his way inside, saying, “Let's smoke a joint and drink a coffee.” I replied, “Slow down, cowboy. I've got company, I'm expecting more company, and I just woke up. I have no time now; sorry, Mario.” He kept banging the door because he wanted to smoke somewhere early in the morning, and Canale Vuo was still closed. I was so tempted to slap him. Unintentionally, I let slip that I was expecting Ferran, which only increased his refusal to leave. Theatrical. Dramatic. He wasn't going to get out of my store, my way, my day, my life, my struggle, or my schedule. Meanwhile, the same time, Nico was bugging me on the phone to make sure I delivered a box of 1,000 cones for La Silla because they needed it to make pre-rolled joints for their smokers. They sold 2-3,000 pre-rolled joints a week, ordering two boxes weekly, thus making me waste my time for free. I started to think it had all been planned just to make me lose time every week. They sold 3,000 joints a week and yet couldn't afford more than two boxes of cones to purchase to keep up. Tuesday morning was so urgent for La Silla to get those 1,000 brown cones right then. Just for Nico's 5-euro commission and so he wouldn't be embarrassed in front of his friends at La Silla with his sales performance - no problem. I couldn't kick out Mario, and I didn't want to kick out Martina, who apparently didn't want to leave. I asked them to leave, but Mario was leaning on the kitchen table and unable to look up or turn toward me to meet my gaze. Martina was looking at me angrily. So, I told them both, “OK then, stay here; let the old man inside once he arrives. I have to deliver this box of cones to La Silla right away, but I will be right back. 20 minutes tops.” Adam had also failed to inform me that he had copied a set of keys for his dad at one point, and he had somehow sent them to Israel by mail, I guess. Martina did not need to stay in the store to let Ferran in, but I did not know that. Adam was always secretive and brief with his words, as if it cost him money to say words out of his mouth or dictate to Rachel what to write in an email or what he was supposed to tell me on the phone. I thought that Martina had to stay to let Ferran into the store in case he arrived just when I went to La Mesa to do a favor for Nico. I was on my way back to Urgell from La Silla, when Adam suddenly called me from Amsterdam, screaming on the phone.

No, he’s here. He just doesn’t take appointments or calls on Valentine’s Day. Only urgent cases.

Sifting the real from fake news is a skillset some of us have only recently recognized as urgent. Facts are not only hotly contested in favor of various ideological fictions, but the fictions can be alarmingly persuasive and even harmful to real people on the ground. As a result, we've learned to approach everything with what my theology professor, J. Kameron Carter, called a "hermeneutics of suspicion" - something that communities of color have employed for centuries. Whom does this interpretation of events benefit? Why? What other voices also need amplifying?

In the early days a favored few managed to persuade the sentries at the gates to allow them to get messages through to the outside world. But that was only at the beginning of the epidemic, when the sentries found it natural to obey their feelings of humanity. Later on, when these same sentries had had the gravity of the situation drummed into them, they flatly refused to take responsibilities whose possible after-effects they could not foresee. At first, telephone calls to other towns were allowed, but this led to such crowding of the telephone booths and delays on the lines that for some days they also were prohibited, and thereafter limited to what were called “urgent cases,” such as deaths, marriages, and births. So we had to fall back on telegrams. People linked together by friendship, affection, or physical love found themselves reduced to hunting for tokens of their past communion within the compass of a ten-word telegram. And since, in practice, the phrases one can use in a telegram are quickly exhausted, long lives passed side by side, or passionate yearnings, soon declined to the exchange of such trite formulas as: “Am well. Always thinking of you. Love.

Not only individuals but our whole societies are urgently called to conversion. There are too many innocent victims of our self-centered way of life, in economics and in our life together, not to make us ask some very painful questions about the way we are organized. I pray for my society and for its conversion from what I consider the most obnoxious elements in God’s eyes. I ask for light to see what part I can play as a responsible citizen.

Survivors therefore need something from those of us committed to them. If it is true that survivors are a far wider-ranging group of people than we know, if it is true that incarceration does not consistently deliver safety and almost never delivers healing, if it is true that basic things like validation, control, and a coherent narrative are necessary elements for coming through trauma, if it is true that survivors who are given options almost always choose anything other than prison, if it is true that millions of survivors tell us again and again every time they do not call the police that what the criminal justice system has to offer does not work for them, then it does seem to follow that survivors absolutely, urgently need all of us to end mass incarceration. It may be the only practical thing we can do in their names.

o be, and the present reach out toward each ocher. Time is not. There is, It gives time. The giving that gives time is determined by denying and withholding nearness. It grants the openness of time-space and preserves what remains denied in what has-been, what is withheld in approach. We call the giving which gives true time an extending which opens and conceals. As extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in true time. But where is there time and time-space, where are they given? As urgent as this question may be at tirst sight, we may no longer ask in this manner for a where, for the place for time. For true time itself, the realm ofits threefold extending determined by nearing nearness, is the prespatial region which tirst gives any possible "where." True, from its beginning, whenever it thought about time, philosophy also asked where time belongs. What philosophy primarily had in view was time calculate.d as a sequence of the succession of consecutive nows. It was explained that there could be no numerically measured time with which we calculate without the Psyche, without the animus, without the soul, without consciousness, without spirit. There is no time without man. But what does this "not without" mean? Is man the giver or the receiver of time? Is man tirst of all man, and then after that occasionally-that is, at some time or other -receives time and relates himself to it? True time is the nearness' of presencing out of present, past and future-the nearness that unities time's threefold opening extending. It has already reached man as such so that he can be man only by standing within the threefold extending, perduring the denying, and withholding nearness which determines that extending. Time is not the product of man, man is nOt the product of time. There is no production here. There is only giving in the sense of extending which opens up time-space.

He is not only motivated to transform the stuff of experience into the beauty of art; as a poet he also bears witness to what he sees and what we have forgotten, calling our attention to the enduring legacies of slavery in our lives; to the impact of systemic discrimination throughout the country that has denied generations of black people access to the so-called American dream; to the willful blindness of so many white Americans to the violence that sustains it all. He laments the suffering that results from our evasions and refusals and passes judgment on what we have done and not done in order to release ourselves into the possibility of becoming different and better people. He bears witness for those who cannot because they did not survive, and he bears witness for those who survived it all, wounded and broken.

yourselves properly.” The tall guy smiled. “What can I do for you?” “You can call someone for me. Sergeant Leach at the 110th. Tell her where I am. She might have a message for me. If she does, you can come and tell me what it is.” “You want me to feed your dog and pick up your dry cleaning, too?” “I don’t have dry cleaning. Or a dog. But you can call Major Sullivan, at JAG, if you like. She’s my lawyer. Tell her I want to see her, here, by the close of business today. Tell her I need a client conference. Tell her it’s extremely important.” “That it?” “No. Next you can call Captain Edmonds, at HRC. She’s my other lawyer. Tell her I want to see her right after Major Sullivan. Tell her I have urgent things to discuss.” “Anything else?” “How many customers do you have today?” “Just you and one other.” “Which would be Major Turner, right?” “Correct.” “Is she nearby?” “This is the only cell block we got.” “She needs to know her lawyer is out of action. She needs to get another one. You need to go see her and make sure she does.” “That’s a weird thing for you to say.” “What happened to Moorcroft was nothing to do with me. You’ll know that soon enough. And the best way of getting the egg off your face is not to get it on in the first place.” “Still a weird thing for you to say. Who died and made you president of the ACLU?” “I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. So did you. Major Turner is entitled to competent representation at all times. That’s the theory. And a gap will look bad, when the appeals kick in. So tell her she needs to meet with someone new. As soon as possible. This afternoon would be good. Make sure she grasps that.” “Anything else?” “We’re all good now,” Reacher said. “Thank you, captain.” “You’re welcome,” the tall

Finally John looks back up at me. “Hi, sorry, I had to mute you back there. They were taping. I missed that. What were you saying?” Un-fucking-believable. I’ve been, quite literally, talking to myself. No wonder Margo wants to leave! I should have listened to my gut and had John reschedule an in-person session, but I got sucked in by his urgent plea. “John,” I say, “I really want to help you with this but I think this is too important to talk about on Skype. Let’s schedule a time for you to come in so there aren’t so many distract—” “Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” he interrupts. “This can’t wait. I just had to give you the background first so you can talk to him.” “To . . .” “The idiot therapist! Clearly he’s only hearing one side of the story, and not a very accurate side at that. But you know me. You can vouch for me. You can give this guy some perspective before Margo really goes nuts.” I noodle this scenario around in my head: John wants me to call my own therapist to discuss why my patient isn’t happy with the therapy my therapist is doing with my patient’s wife. Um, no.

Charlie’s kisses, were, I suppose, in The Book of Kisses. But they’d be in the chapter called Devouring. There was biting and gnawing and teeth-banging in them, an urgent air of mouth-to-mouth combat, wild and violent and driving to an end that was out of reach, and known to be, but only the more pressing for that. And pressing was a big part of it. She pulled me against her in a mime of movie stars, but the three-dimensionality of our bodies made a bumping mockery of blending, elbows and knees proving extra to the parts required and noses on standby with an abashed air of being in the way. Of course, I was lost from the first moment, in a whirl carousel of taste touch sight smell, and sounds (all s’s – squelch,

Skelton asked bluntly. “Um, um… you’ve changed your suit…” Karen offered as she pointed towards him. “Ten out of ten for observation skills, Karen.” Karen waited for an explanation, and when one wasn’t forthcoming, she continued to fill the silence. She updated him on the meeting with DI Morton over in Kingston, and her new focus of attention. Despite sounding positive and encouraged by her visit, Karen couldn’t help notice how Skelton appeared more jittery than usual. His phone rested on the desk, and his eyes kept drifting to it, as if expecting a message or urgent phone call. Come to think of it, Karen thought he looked far worse than normal. His face looked haggard and tired, the slight bruising only adding to his untidy look and his weary frame. He was present, but

Let’s say it’s 10:26 a.m. Monday, and you’re in your office. You’ve just ended a half-hour unexpected phone call with a prospective client. You have three pages of scribbled notes from the conversation. There’s a meeting scheduled with your staff at eleven, about half an hour from now. You were out late last night with your spouse’s parents and are still a little frayed around the edges (you told your father-in-law you’d get back to him about … what?). Your assistant just put two arriving international express packages on your desk, and additionally says he needs to talk with you about three urgent meeting requests he doesn’t know how you want handled. You have a major strategic-planning session coming up in two days, for which you have yet to formulate your ideas. The oil indicator light in your car came on as you drove to work this morning. And your boss hinted as you passed her earlier in the hall that she’d like your thoughts on the e-mail she sent you last night, before this afternoon’s three o’clock meeting. Are your systems set up to maximally support dealing with this reality, at 10:26 on Monday morning? If you’re still keeping things in your head, and if you’re still trying to capture only the “critical” stuff in your lists, I suggest that the answer is no.

More than 43,000 children have visited the multimillion dollar sets of the Reagan Museum, where they can watch reenactments of various Reagan-led military interventions or play an interactive game called "Operation Urgent Fury" in which they decide whether to invade Grenada to save it from communism or not. American and Grenadian children thus continue to be placed in a very different relationship to power, resources, and decision-making. There are thus not only deep silences but also deep asymmetries in the recorded accounts of the Grenada Revolution.

The words of Martin Luther King Jr. help to inspire us and give us much needed hope when we want to quit loving those who wrong us: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

That constant biblical call to cross-shaped dependence is why I’ve changed my mind about “baby dedications” in churches. Many of you will not understand what I’m referencing, especially if you come from a Christian communion that baptizes infants. My communion does not; we baptize only those who profess that they believe the gospel and seek to be disciples. As such, I cynically dismissed “baby dedications,” times in a church service when parents would stand with their newborns to dedicate their lives to the Lord, as just a way to do a “dry baptism” for low-church Protestants. As the years have gone by, though, I have seen that these times of dedication fill an urgent need for families and for the church. This is not so much for the children as for their parents, and for the rest of the congregation. The parents crowding around Jesus wanted a word of blessing upon their little ones. In our hyper-naturalistic time, we tend to lose the sense of what a “blessing” is, other than a rote prayer before a meal or spiritual-sounding language that we use to mean “lucky.” The Bible, though, is filled with blessings, blessings that are sometimes wrestled for, sometimes lied about for, sometimes given on a deathbed. A blessing is to commit another to the good purposes of the Lord. Rightly done, a dedication by parents of their children can be a signal that these children do not in fact “belong” to the parents but to the Lord. Moreover, it can be a sign to the rest of the congregation that the rearing of these children is not simply up to the parents on the platform but to all of the gathered body.

Saint-Étienne concludes, ‘I urgently call for the creation of a parliamentary commission to establish the “balance sheet of skills” of immigration. . . . If this phenomenon were to continue for five or ten years, France would soon become the only major industrialised country “on the path to underdevelopment.”’ He concludes, ‘Refusing to look facts in the face will bring the country to suicide.

At our core, without being conscious in Christ, our souls are still in bondage and can only see things from the natural, fleshly appearance. Our Christ Consciousness gives the double consciousness depth and character. Our Christ Consciousness elevates our awareness to our responsibility to care for and love our brothers—even those who don’t look like us.

In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing. Society is, ultimately, based on trust; as trust broke down, people became alienated not only from those in authority, but from each other. So a terror seeped into the society that prevented one woman from caring for her sister, that prevented volunteers from bringing food to families too ill to feed themselves and who starved to death because of it, that prevented trained nurses from responding to the most urgent calls for their services. The fear, not the disease, threatened to break the society apart. As Victor Vaughan—a careful man, a measured man, a man who did not overstate to make a point—warned, civilization could have disappeared within a few more weeks.

Personally, I suck at efficiency (doing things quickly). To compensate and cope, here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do. Congratulations! That’s it. This is the only way I can create big outcomes despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, nap, and otherwise fritter away days with bullshit. If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, I can usually handle one must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for 2 to 3 hours a day. It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to nearly everyone around you. In fact, you just need one rule: What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important. If you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and doing lots of stuff, put these on a Post-it note: Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

Step 3: Adopt Anti-Procrastination Strategies Procrastination is a habit – a deeply ingrained pattern of behavior. That means that you won’t just break it overnight. Habits only stop being habits when you have persistently stopped practicing them, so use as many approaches as possible to maximize your chances of beating them. Some tips will work better for some people than for others, and for some tasks than others. And, sometimes, you may simply need to try a fresh approach to beat the “procrastination peril”! These general tips will help motivate you to get moving: Make up your own rewards. For example, promise yourself a piece of tasty flapjack at lunchtime if you've completed a certain task. And make sure you notice how good it feels to finish things! Ask someone else to check up on you. Peer pressure works! This is the principle behind slimming and other self-help groups, and it is widely recognized as a highly effective approach. Identify the unpleasant consequences of NOT doing the task. Work out the cost of your time to your employer. As your employers are paying you to do the things that they think are important, you're not delivering value for money if you're not doing those things. Shame yourself into getting going! Aim to “eat an elephant beetle” first thing, every day! If you're procrastinating because you're disorganized, here's how to get organized! Keep to do list so that you can’t “conveniently” forget about unpleasant or overwhelming tasks. Prioritize your To-Do List so that you cannot try to kid yourself that it would be acceptable to put off doing something on the grounds that it is unimportant, or that you have many urgent things which ought to be done first when, in reality, you're procrastinating. Become a master scheduling project planning, so that you know when to start those all-important projects. Set yourself time-bound goals  : that way, you’ll have no time for procrastination! Focus on one task at a time

Captain Kobzar, who had every reason to expect a leisurely refitting of the K-129, was also surprised by the abruptness of the orders. The order to embark on a new mission six months before schedule was completely out of keeping with the Soviet navy’s deployment routine for the missile boats. The sub had been in port only six weeks. What new mission could be so urgent that the normal home port call had to be drastically curtailed? Could replacements be found for the key crew members spread throughout Mother Russia on leave—most of them thousands of miles and many days’ travel away? Even if the furloughed crewmen could be contacted, most would never have time to arrange travel and return for sailing on such short notice.