Listening and Marriage

Since true listening is love in action, nowhere is it more appropriate than in marriage. Yet most couples never truly listen to each other. Couples are often surprised, even horrified, when we suggest to them that among the things they should do is talk to each other by appointment. It seems rigid and unromantic and unspontaneous to them. Yet true listening can occur only when time is set aside for it and conditions are supportive of it. It cannot occur when people are driving, or cooking or tired and anxious to sleep or easily interrupted or in a hurry. Romantic “love” is effortless, and couples are frequently reluctant to shoulder the effort and discipline of true love and listening. But when and if they finally do, the results are superbly gratifying.

M. Scott Peck
The Road Less Traveled

the Way it is

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell. - Harry S Truman

Profanity

Someone once said, “Profanity is a lazy man’s way of trying to be emphatic.” I choose not to swear, not only for religious reasons, but also because it shows a lack of creativity on the speaker's part. Profanity is similar to using "good" to describe everything. The game was good. It's an example of good journalism. Good writing. Good video. What does that mean? It's inexact and lazy. Like the overuse of the word "good," profanity doesn't say much of anything. 

Be more exact or wait until you know what you want to say. At least don't use bland and overworked terms. Profanity is a way to tell others, "See? I really, really mean what I'm saying. I'm stomping my foot and throwing a little fit verbally. What I'm saying is important because I am using these magic words."

Stephen Goforth

Forward and Backward

I learned that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one-way street, isn't it?

Agatha Christie

the Gift of Freedom

Being loving is far more therapeutic that being correct. People need first to believe that you are willing to let them be who they are. If you attempt to direct another person’s every move, you eventually lose your effectiveness, no matter how correct you may be. Freedom for each of us is to be who and what we are, that’s the cornerstone of an influential life.

When you give freedom to others, it doesn’t mean you are lowering your standards or that you don’t care about them. It means you are providing an atmosphere to let others think and feel and act without excessive pressure to fit your mold. The paradox is that when others sense the freedom you offer, they are more attracted to you. They key is to learn how to use this freedom.

Les Carter
Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control

A Revealing Autobiography

When we talk about ourselves, telling others who we are, researchers say the same part of our brain lights up as when we are brainstorming ideas, discussing our dreams, or speaking extraneously. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found this to be the case, even when musicians improvise. The same area of the brain is at work in these off-handed dispatches, putting on display a musical autobiography of sorts.

When we are engaged in these intensely personal pursuits, we not only reveal intimate parts of ourselves, the researchers say a part of the brain involved in self-control and planning is shut down.

Stephen Goforth

answered prayer

I have had prayers answered -  most strangely so sometimes - but I think our heavenly Father's loving kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me. -   Lewis Carroll

Taking Pride in Evil

She was very much ashamed of being in jail—but of being a prostitute, not at all. On the contrary, she seemed rather pleased with herself and proud of her position. Yet, how could it be otherwise?

No man can play an active part in the world unless he believes that his activity is important and good. Therefore, whatever position a man may hold, he is certain to take that view of human life in general which will make his own activity seem important and good.

It is generally supposed that a thief, a murderer, a spy or a prostitute, knowing their occupation to be evil, must be ashamed of it. In point of fact, the case is precisely the reverse. Men who have been placed by fate and their own mistakes (or sins) in a certain position, however false, always adopt a view of life which makes their place in it good an appropriate.

To maintain this idea, men instinctively mix only with those who accept their view of life and of their place in it. This surprises us when thieves boast of their adroitness, prostitutes flaunt their shame, murderers gloat over their cruelty.

We are surprised, however, only because the circle, the sphere, of these men is limited, and principally because we are outside it; but does not the same state of things exist among the rich – who boast of their wealth, i.e., of robbery; the generals—who boast of their victories, i.e., of murder; the rulers—who boast of their power, i.e., of violence?

We do not recognize their ideas of life and of good and evil as perverted, only because the circle of men holding these perverted ideas is wider and because we belong to it ourselves.

Leo Tolstoy
Resurrection

Keep Dancing

I get up. I walk. I falldown. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.

Love and Death

Love is a reminder of our own mortality. When a friend or member of our family dies, we are vividly impressed by the fact that life is evanescent and irretrievable. But there is also a deeper sense of its meaningful possibilities and an impetus to risk ourselves in taking the leap. Some -perhaps most - human beings never know deep love until they experience, at someone's death, the preciousness of friendship, devotion, loyalty. Abraham Maslow is profoundly right when he wonders whether we could love passionately if we knew we'd never die.

Rollo May
Love and Will

How to tell good people from bad people

Behavior is good or bad. But people cannot be labeled “good” or “bad” because they have the capacity for doing both. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago:

“The line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”

Evil is not a thing you can point at and say, “There it goes!” or “Here it is!” It is a privation. Like rot to a tree, evil is a negation. Not something in itself. Without the tree, the rot wouldn't exist. Without a context of good, evil doesn't exist. So if you want to declare something evil, you must also come to terms with what is good.

How does one tell good people from bad people?  Each of us is both.

Stephen Goforth

It's contagious

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

The strange case of the surveillance cameras

This is the story of a statistic; it is sort of a detective story.

The mystery stat was sitting on one of our Times blogs and read “the average Brit is caught on security cameras some 300 times a day” and, God knows why, I just decided to chase the number down and find out where it came from.

The source was given in a footnote as coming from a book The Maximum Surveillance Society, published in 1999, by two academics, including a C. Norris.

So I set to work trying to find the book. In the meantime I mused on two things. First was how the “300 times” had become viral. It now occurs all over the place, and is the standard statistic used for the number of times Britons may or will be captured by cameras daily.

I managed to find a copy of the Norris book online. The footnoted page was towards the back of a chapter detailing a day in the life of a man called Thomas Reams, as he did various things in and around London. The authors wrote “While this contrived account is, of course, a fictional construction, it is a fiction that increasingly mirrors the reality of routine surveillance.”

What? A fiction!

Imagine, for a moment, that the original paragraph had read “and one hypothetical construction managed to have its fictional hero captured 300 times in a single day”. It wouldn't be quite the same, would it? So I began to wonder how the report's authors had failed to notice that an important factual source was fictional. Had they not checked it?

Professor Norris reminded me that the viral 300 - still based on his book - entered the bloodstream long before 2006. And he was right. For example the BBC website carries a 2002 story stating that “the average citizen in the UK is caught on cameras 300 times a day”.

So, that was the story of one statistic in one study.

Every day we hear of several statistics, and every week of several studies. I have no idea whether the “300 times” case is typical, but I fear that it might be, and that, if only there were more time to scrutinise all the claims made in such “reports” - whatever side they take - we would discover many “truths” that just aren't.

David Aaronovitch
(London) Times

The Geography of Cancer

Chance has a genius for disguise. Frequently it appears in numbers that seem to form a pattern. People feel an overwhelming temptation to deduce that there is more to the events they witness than chance alone. Sometimes we are right. Often, though, we are suckered, and the apparent order merely resembles one.

To see why, take a bag of rice and chuck the contents straight into the air.

Observe the way the rice is scattered on the carpet at your feet. What you have done is create a chance distribution of rice grains. There will be thin patches here, thicker ones there, and every so often a much larger and distinct pile of rice. It has clustered.

Now imagine each grain of rice as a cancer case falling across a map of the United States.

Wherever cases of cancer bunch, people demand an explanation. The rice patterns, however, don’t need an explanation. The rice shows that clustering, as the result of chance alone, is to be expected. The truly weird result would be if the rice had spread itself in a smooth, regular layer. Similarly, the genuinely odd pattern of illness would be an even spread of cases across the population.

This analogy draws no moral equivalence between cancer and rice patterns. Sometimes, certainly, a cancer cluster will point to a shared local cause. Often, though, the explanation lies in the complicated and myriad causes of disease, mingled with the complicated and myriad influences on where we choose to live, combined with accidents of timing, all in a collision of endless possibilities that, just like the endless collisions of those flying rice grains, come together to produce a cluster.

Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
The Numbers Game

The World She Wants

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself. - Anais Nin