Saturday, November 7, 2020

Think Different

 A few nights ago, I got out of bed at 1:11, unable to sleep. I shuffled through the house, found my phone in the dark--that’s where I read my Kindle books--and slipped my “Smart Blanket” over my head, ready to snuggle in and put my feet into the foot holders at the bottom of the fleecy blanket. I was hungry, so I sliced a bit of Dill Havarti cheese, placed a few rice crackers on the cutting board, (see, you can walk around in that Smart Blanket), and poured myself a glass of wine all by the light of the phone. 

 I made it into the living room carrying my stash, sat myself and the cutting board down, and then proceeded to sit the wine glass into mid-air, missing the coffee table altogether.

The carpeting cushioned the glass from breaking and absorbed the wine—a good thing it was white wine, not red.

 I threw a towel over the wine wet spot to absorb it, mashed it around with my foot, and settled into what I intended in the first place.

 “When you grow up,” I read, “you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and you ought to just live your life inside that world. 

 Try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

 That’s a very limited life. It can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you was made up of people that were no smarter than you. And that you can change it. You can build your own things that people can use. - Steve Jobs

 Think Different

 -- Apple’s slogan from 1992 to 2002

I didn’t know that.

 One advantage of a Kindle is that it has links, and that night, although I rarely do, I hit one and found Steve Jobs' commentary. 

 I was reading Building a Brand by David Miller, the best book on copy-writing if you’re into that, or marketing if you have a company or even write a letter. Marketing is something we do whether we know we’re doing it or not. I always run from it, thinking I stunk at it (or is it stank?), and it scares me, 

 Once Jobs wrote a nine-page description of his company, very technical, but after his experience with Pixar and seeing the value of story, he switched from being focused on his company to being focused on his customers. Most customers don’t want to waste calories on reading a lengthy description of your company. They want to know how it will serve them. “Think Different” was born. And Jobs wanted Different to be a noun instead of “differently” which is grammatically correct.

 “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

--Flannery O’Connor

 Yep. I know that one. 

 But if you want a great resolve, think of Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars Movie. He did it with one shot.

  • “Do I have what it takes?” In his case, to be a Jeti.
  • He got the job done--destroyed the Death Star.
  •  Good triumphed over evil.

 

 

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The Heart-Brain Connection

                     Bless the firefighters--this is so cool.

 Heart-Brain Connection

 

I have to know more about this.

 

How long have we believed that the body is controlled by the brain? 

 

Everybody knows that, right?

 

What if we’re wrong?

 

What if we are controlled by the heart, and our poor brain just can’t get the message?

 

What if the heart is trying to make us happy while the poor brain tries to keep us alive?

 

 “Happy? Smappy,” the brain says. “You don’t need to be happy. You need to stay alive as long as you can and reproduce as many offspring as possible. That’s biology. That’s what life is.”

 

But, dear brain, humankind has longed for happiness since it first stepped foot on the planet. Why is there such a yearning for a happy life? Why is there such a search for meaning, for the divine, for transcendental experiences?

 

“Danged if I know,” says the brain.

 

The brain appears intent on suffering. More precisely, it loves the known. And, not only does it want to stay there, it wants our consciousness to stay there as well.

 

 Why do we spend 95% of our waking hours in unconscious reminiscing?

 

Okay, you decide to break the cycle and sit down to meditate.

 

But as you begin to transcend into the unknown, your brain senses a disruption in the force. It ramps up suffering to bring you back down. Suddenly you’re flooded with anxious thoughts: all those bills to pay, you revisit that horrid picture of an animal suffering you saw yesterday, you remember that unkind thing you said. This is normal. Anxiety is a primary human function. Meditation is a way of making peace with your anxiety, and the brain wants nothing to do with it.

 

Dr. Joe Dispenzia calls the brain an artifact of the past, but really the whole body is. It’s a history book written in our cells. And history has seldom been kind, so there we are left with debris in our cells.

 

I have heard the phrase, “Follow your heart,” many times, but I’ve never heard anyone tell me to follow my brain.  

 

Dispenzia says that the heart is mainly magnetic, while the brain is electrical. The poor dears don’t know how to talk to each other. But we’re learning, aren’t we?

 

 

 

Now, dear ones who read my blogs on vision training and were kind enough to ask for more. I wrote the following small book (8,000 words) for you. Some of the material will be familiar to you, some will be new. All will be sent with many thanks for sending me down this trail. 

 

 


Hello Beautiful: The Art and Science of Vision Training Using the Bates Method is available on Amazon Kindle. Free for Kindle Unlimited, $2.99 to buy.

 

For more description and the Introduction, please go to https://jewellshappytrails.com