Write it down.

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“She used to say, ‘When there are so many problems in life, I should put myself on the scale?’ ”

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RP Adversity

Diversity and adversity are necessary catalysts for personal development. We all want to grow, to develop, to become more than we are. None of us want the adversity, but it seems that the development cannot be had without the adversity. The same with diversity: there cannot be change and change without pain – birth pangs of a sort.

 

No eruption from a chrysalis comes without pain. And yet we are not masochists.

 

Youth grows through ignorance, but beyond that first flush growth requires courage because we know that it will hurt and we have no joy in pain.

 

To growth and courage; to Life!

http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_the_opportunity_of_adversity.html

RP Opposites

Success in life requires the embodiment of opposites: to be tough and tender, to be focused and exploratory, to be dissatisfied and accepting, to be exacting and ….

 

How does unshakeable conviction allow for fallibility? How is passion reconciled with reason?

 

Are you all of one thing or many things? Do you embrace ambiguity?

 

I realise now that it does no good simply to ask these questions without also attempting personal answers. I think that you are less interested in the questions that I can raise than in the tentative responses I can make. Not to risk failure is to remove the possibility of admiration. So, I should care and not care all at once.

 

I think that I am all of many things; that I know much and understand little and that my certainties diminish with each year. To want to be ordinary takes great courage. I do not know if such a desire is admirable. I do not know my becoming self.

RP My brother's keeper

It is not possible to properly judge people; we lack enough information. Social sanction is effective and necessary: I am my brother's keeper.

 

It is impossible to change another's mind; we lack authority. As with children, example is most persuasive.

 

It is possible to change ourselves. It is also very painful. Why would you do it?

RP Logic

I have seen women present with hugely ulcerated breasts from breast cancer that had been growing for months. Asked why they had not sought medical advice earlier they would respond that they had hoped it would "just go away". Delay guaranteed an early death. I could never understand it.

 

There are people at the opposite spectrum: "I sprained my wrist 3 weeks ago. I am still getting the odd twinge. No, it's not painful really. Yes I can move it fine. No, I haven't hurt it again. Why today? Oh, I just thought that I'd make sure, you know, that it's nothing serious. It's fine? Really? Ok. Thank you so much."

 

People are entirely without logic.

 

School teaches us about science: Newton's laws, organic chemistry, Ptolemy's triangle. School misleadingly teaches us that things are explicable. People are not explicable. Still, we seek to understand others in the hope that they are less muddled than ourselves.

 

Apropos relationships: candour actually does work.

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Rare events are cumulatively common. Most rare events occur once in a lifetime to an individual. Taking steps to avoid repetition after the event is not rational...

"built to build"

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RP Why Me?

"Why me?"

This is an almost universal response to personal disaster. Disaster seeks no desert.

"Why?" questions are very often not useful because they do not admit comprehensible answers. They are intensely circular.

The secret to life is not to get stuck: accept what happens and move on.

RP Obvious Misunderstanding

I have always held that it is not necessary to be obvious. I do so now despite Murphy's Law – clarity is no guarantee of understanding: if you explain something so clearly, so simply, that no-one could possibly misunderstand, someone will. As someone else observed, nothing is foolproof: fools are ingenious.

Of course, I have not been obvious. It is the only consolation for being misunderstood….

RP Good Habits

I am committed to balance, good habits and small wins. Kegan observes, nevertheless, that such agreeable public commitments are often sabotaged by unacknowledged internal commitments. Read that as FEAR.

Success, however defined, can only be achieved through such process: balance, good habits and small wins.

It is no error that lack of balance is associated with insanity and achievement mandates persistence which is habitual and every great object attained must be reached incrementally: Even the greatest journey begins with ….

Knowledge of the desiderata is not enough. Life is lived in deeds not beliefs. The Japanese demand "Fu jen jikko" – "No words, action!" – but actions are powered by meaning and meaning is shaped by words.

So as a gift of meaning, a yardstick and a recipe I offer this: balance, good habits and small wins. 

RP Failure

Failure is not equivalent to incapability. Capable people fail. Successful people fail. Failure like success is dependant on intent and context and perspective.

Court failure.

There can be no learning without the possibility of failure and self-as-learner is a highly efficacious self-concept. Especially today.

People who consider themselves successful attend to their successes not their failures despite the fact that their failures outnumber their successes. People who consider themselves failures attend only to their previous failures: belief becomes self-fulfilling.

Easy to say and difficult to do: Court failure; learn; move on.

RP: Comity and Fairness

Comity and fairness go well beyond law and justice. Justice is the impartial application of the law and the law is a matter of legislation. Law gave us Treblinka and apartheid.

It is accepted that good people can do bad things: there is a difference between action and disposition. And circumstances can be extenuating. Life can be harsh; it is certainly and indubitably unjust. However, that does not necessitate that it be unfair. A will to fairness is hard-wired into our brains: we know it when we see it.

Children of 3 and 4 can tell you credibly that something is unfair.

Comity and fairness constitute the essence of the social contract. Cooperation is a superior survival strategy and gifting is both selfish and altruistic: there is a social ecology.

RP If a thing must be done everyday, there is no alternative to doing it everyday. To fall behind is irremediable.

I am reminded of Japanese mothers going to school in place of their children when they are too ill. Life can be unforgiving.

#haiku
Struggle, strife and storm,
Sisyphus with his sarsen
Echoes my absurd life.

Molten metal fierce,
Embryonic-in-furnace,
Mirrors my fancy.

Platinum, proxy
For success fou realized,
Is fantastical.

#haiku Platinum, proxy / For success fou realized, / Is fantastical.

#haiku Molten metal fierce, / Embryonic-in-furnace, / Mirrors my fancy.

#haiku Struggle, strife and storm, / Sisyphus with his sarsen / Echoes my absurd life.

Happy Generous Complex Balanced

My eyes are in need of rest, my brain of myelin, my soul of ambrosia...

174 million book titles? 5000 years writing: I expected more.

Babies are consistent hedonists....

I wrote a letter to my one true love

I wrote a letter to my one true love, my primary, my alpha and omega; 

I wrote a letter to my loves, my moon, my sun, my tides, my firmament; 

I wrote my beloved; I wrote our magic, our music, our mystery; 

I wrote all the things I could not say, all the things she would not hear; 

I wrote my joy, I wrote my fear; 

I wrote my touch, my breath, my heart; 

I wrote her taste, her sighs, her light; 

I wrote my love a letter and put it on my wall; 

I wrote our magic, our music, our mystery; 

and when I was done I found 

I wrote my love in a language I could not read.

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Helen Jaques asks what makes a good doctor? http://ping.fm/jRlhe

I was reminded yesterday of Ready, Fire! Aim.

Action very often precedes consideration and this is not a bad thing. Act. Fail fast.

Bracket creep, slippery slopes and nominal-real confusion...

Risk neutral

"Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die."

The extremist is an edge, an interface with chaos. Given the proper perspective everything has utility.

As a child my perfect world was one in which I had immediate access to the answer, whatever the question. I almost live in that world were I to be asking the same questions I asked as a child.... My questions now are wicked, dynamic, insoluble, tenuous, poetic....

We cannot delegate our feelings, our aspirations, our torments. We cannot delegate meaning, epiphany, presence. We cannot delegate essentials.

"all the harsh and gentle mysteries of life"

Polished intentions...

"Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs"

Happy Valentine's!

Monolithic Truth. Oxymoron.

Given immortality, technology is irrelevant. Mortality then is a spur to technological evolution

Another ***** to Amazon Customer Service!

Charity Generosity Self-indulgence

Charity

Perfect

Relationships predicated on desire rather than obligation are to be preferred giri notwithstanding....

"Database of intentions"

Major Trauma in the UK "is a rare condition". That's good.

http://ping.fm/4YCTb Great Idea!

Repost Conversation

I believe that there are several recurring and continuing tasks that are independent of life-stages and roles. These are:

* Self definition and calibration

* Architecting capability including wisdom

* Educating perspective

In conversations I tend to seek to stretch perspective or challenge prejudice, to aggravate or to inform. The status quo has no intrinsic utility and there can be no change without some agitation. And I need no special license to agitate.

For those who reflect on their responses to me I am useful and for those who do not, I find them useful. Opportunities for growth grow scarcer and more difficult with time. Attitudes and perspectives petrify.

Consciously adjusted brain chemistry. Oxytocin glut!

Form Function Purpose

cnnbrk: Medical journal Lancet fully retracts 1998 study linking MMR vaccine to autism. http://ping.fm/C9kNI http://ping.fm/8nIAX

Expertise Requires Time over Talent, So Get Busy [Expertise] http://ping.fm/kD6ck

To be happy, restrict choice....

New Google Books interface - NICE!

Stochastic resonance

Perfection: Satisfaction - Whimsy - Process

Broadcast

http://ping.fm/8MHcN

Murphy's Law of Communication is an argument in favour of silence or brevity....

What is the utility of a peaceful soul?

I believe everything; convincing me then has zero utility. Holding mutually exclusive beliefs is sane; and belief and action are disparate....

Sublimation

http://ping.fm/lB418

Social calibration

Self-realisation - even epiphany - is a consequence

Is poverty contagious?

Authenticity

There is no development without conflict. A soul that has not been marinated in distress has dubious utility...

Sent from my HTC

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Extraordinary. Superlative. Olympic.

"That surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die"

To be entertaining, light and light-hearted; to be lambent, frivolous, comic
and authentic. These are difficult in a medium as tenuous as the written
word.

...The haptic is more granular....

I visited my alma mater today, Johannesburg Hospital: Everything was the
same and very different. None of the faces were familiar - I guess 13 years
is a very long time.

The cases were interesting enough - I was introduced to a new clinical
entity: Abdominal Compartment Syndrome (
emedicine.medscape.com/article/829008-overview) but something was
lacking....

Nostalgia waxes sweet....

Compersion, schadenfreude and viññāna-sota....

Who is an expert on life: the long-lived elderly who lived in interesting times or the author of interesting lives? At what point does reality trump simulation given current technology?

http://ping.fm/M3nNf

How to map EXTRAORDINARY?

Serendipity as process?

"There are no stupid questions" so stupid people (aka the cognitively impaired) consistently do not ask stupid questions - "self-evident" has it's own variable threshold....

A Tribute to Alice Grey's Diaries

Time to reflect is supposed to be a sine qua non of professional practice; it is the fundament of modern reflective practice. [More circular talk.]

I have time now to reflect and I cycle continually through the legacy-happiness tradeoff; is this an imagined tradeoff: is it possible to have it all: a loving, committed relationship; meaningful family time and extraordinary professional practice?

Consideration after consideration says that it is the nature of the beast: an open mind, an open heart, an acceptance bias and all the optimism imaginable cannot transmute hope into reality.

Even not having to rediscover the wheel; even given positive accidents of genetics and compulsions and circumstances, superlatives truly remain rare.

It is frustrating having this brain - this extraordinary machine - and not having the requisite socket for it's optimal performance. Satisficing still leaves a sense of LACK, like having a high calorie meal lacking in essential trace elements....

Extraordinary is possible if somewhat nebulous. I have to map, define, delineate extraordinary before assessing costs and benefits, tradeoffs, collapsed quantum states...

...Anyone there?

The Japanese argue that every man has 3 hearts: one on his sleeve for all the world to see, one in his breast for his close friends & his secret heart sometimes unknown even to himself.

Sent from my HTC

cnnbrk: Miep Gies, Anne Frank protector, dies at 100 http://bit.ly/6IzLxh http://ping.fm/Cxnd2

Here's a tribute to Danielle Steele lives: where everyone close to you dies and you lose all your possessions and suffer displacement and alienation and succeed nevertheless...

If you could write to your past self (10 years ago) what would you say?

New online safety video: Steering Clear of Cyber Tricks http://ping.fm/y1ruL

How Google tells you what men and women want | Technically Incorrect - CNET News http://ping.fm/Bj55d

Jan 1 2010 http://ping.fm/106L0

Fun with Calendars http://ping.fm/wdetM

Asymptote

How elastic is Dunbar's number? Do Social psychologists & their ilk have bigger numbers?

Prune. Prime. Amplify.

Lesson for the day: Multitasking is bad; the more emergent the patient the fewer distractions one should allow....

The general average kinesthetic intelligence level is very low....

Escape from the hormonal stew is escape from the human condition

Art is useless because... http://ping.fm/7vfji

Precision as proxy for intolerance?

If exercising to failure is desirable is "living to failure"? Living cannot be conserved hence Zen's Bonfire....