American news is dominated these days with stories of AI encroachment into more intellectual pursuits beyond the mindless mechanical exercises robots have been assigned to for year, American police brutality, and mass shootings. Less attention is given to an increasing number of countries giving flexible visas to highly-skilled foreigners, often with advanced degrees, to come into their countries for a length of time without having a job offer in hand.
As ChatGPT writes papers for humans and is able to pass law school and business school exams, an AI sculptor flawlessly recreated a marble masterpiece in a fraction of the time it took the master to create the original, and human-lead 3D printers build a two-story building and fabricate a seaworthy vessel, we must give thought to what the future looks like in terms of human endeavors and job prospects. The advent of computers were supposed to make life easier for us and give us more leisure time. That turned out not to be the case.
If anything, hi-technology drove mankind in the opposite direction. Sorting machines at the post office, for example, forced workers to work adjust to the greater speed and volume of mail being scanned and sorted. Reportedly, at Amazon fulfillment centers, workers are forced to urinate in bottles to keep up with demands and quotas. Where fast food restaurants were once the domain of teenage workers picking up their first work experience on regular after-school shifts, those jobs are now most often filled with adults who reportedly cannot make plans for their off-hours since computers actively track customer flow and call in workers as the need arise, supposedly with little notice. Robots and AI can now pick fruits that are easily bruised, can wash and fold your clothes, can cook your food, order your groceries for other robots to deliver, review insurance claims, etc.
For a long time, workers who are low-skilled and who engaged in manual labor are at risk of being replaced by robots. Today, that bar has been raised. In the near future, mid-level skilled manual and intellectual workers will be at risk of replacement. What will happen to them? What will happen to you?
Thus, it is imperative that you gain critical thinking and other intellectual skills during these schooling years and keep your brain and mind in good health. Read voraciously and engage in intellectual exercises. Do physical exercises. Eat healthy and hydrate. Avoid drinking alcohol to excess. Socialize. Sleep.
The importance of physical exercises cannot be overstated. For example, read the excerpt below of an article about a recent study.
One type of physical activity protects the brain more than others, study finds
What if you could look at all the things you do daily — walking from room to room, preparing a presentation at your desk, running up and down stairs to deliver folded laundry or taking a jog around the block — and know which ones will best help or hurt your brain?
A new study attempted to answer that question by strapping activity monitors to the thighs of nearly 4,500 people in the United Kingdom and tracking their 24-hour movements for seven days. Researchers then examined how participants’ behavior affected their short-term memory, problem-solving and processing skills.
Here’s the good news: People who spent “even small amounts of time in more vigorous activities — as little as 6 to 9 minutes — compared to sitting, sleeping or gentle activities had higher cognition scores,” said study author John Mitchell, a Medical Research Council doctoral training student at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health at University College London, in an email.
Moderate physical activity is typically defined as brisk walking or bicycling or running up and down stairs. Vigorous movement, such as aerobic dancing, jogging, running, swimming and biking up a hill, will boost your heart rate and breathing.
The study, published Monday in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, found doing just under 10 minutes of moderate to vigorous exertion each day improved study participants’ working memory but had its biggest impact on executive processes such as planning and organization.
You are not a sponge, but a sieve. Never swallow whole the shit you’re fed.
People are biased. People lie. They lie to make themselves look good, to make excuses for their failures, to grow their bases of power, etc.
Your job, as free-thinking human beings, is to sift through the garbage and get as close as you can to the truth. It’s an endless and lifelong task, so choose your battles wisely.
In the U.S., for example, we often say the children are our future. We — the people as well as the public servants paid to act on our behalf — make much hay of our great love for our children. We are a bunch of liars.
More than 190 countries around the world have paid maternity leave for working women to care for their infants. More than 190. The U.S. is not one of them. We have no paid maternity leave. Zero.
Are we Americans simply stupider than the people and governments of Bulgaria, the U.K., Poland and Chile, and unable to figure out what they have long figured out? That can’t be. For example, of the top 50 best universities in the world, nearly a third are found in the U.S. If we were by nature stupid, there would have been no support for great institutions of higher learning in the U.S.
No, the answer lies elsewhere: it lies in the fact that we don’t mean what we say. We say we value our women and children — the fairer sex and the most vulnerable — yet America has tens of thousands of rape kits that go untested and hundreds of our school children die in mass school shootings every year.
If we truly cared about protecting our women from sexual assaults — WHICH OCCURS ONCE 67 SECONDS IN THE UNITED STATES — we would religiously test every single sexual assault victim for rape and run lab tests on those rape kits immediately in order to apprehend the rapist and ensure they don’t rape anyone else. We should execute rapists. They forfeit their lives when they willfully and forcefully destroyed the lives and futures of others. I bet if rapists were held to account for the full destruction of their selfish acts, the number of sexual assaults will fall precipitously.
If we truly cared about protecting our school children from gun violence — CHILDREN, BY THE WAY, WHO ARE FORCED TO BE IN SCHOOL OR FACE GOVERNMENT PUNISHMENT UNDER TRUANCY LAWS — then the increasing number of mass school shootings would never have happened!!! If we truly cared about protecting our children, more than 100 law enforcement officers who took our tax dollars and swore an oath in exchange to protect the community would never have stood around for hours while nearly two-dozen young school children bled out and died in their classrooms from gun shot wounds!!!
As Hannibal famously said, “I shall either find a way or make one.”
Are you telling me that the United States of America, the country which put people on the moon using computer technology a thousand time less sophisticated than the cell phones in our pockets today, cannot figure out how to protect our women and children from grotesque and near-daily sexual assaults and school shootings?
We are a nation of liars. It is your job to teach people how to treat you; thus, it is your job not to let people lie to you, particularly public servants who live off your tax dollars but who shirk their sworn duties to protect and serve you.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. It’s as simple as that. Those who say they can’t simply lack the will to accomplish what they said they would accomplish. Cast not your lot with them.
All my love, always and forever,
Dad
P.S., we all make mistakes, but character matters. Truth matters. It upsets me greatly that the United States Congress, the People’s House where I once worked, has accepted among its august body and has permitted onto its hallowed ground a proven and unrepentant liar. Shame on us as a country and as a people! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!
As someone who has worked in and around HR and HR-related issues since 1995, I can tell countless horror stories about workplace abuses inflicted upon American workers, most of whom dare not speak up for fear of losing their jobs … which would mean the loss of their health insurance and the potential loss of their homes and future job opportunities since future employers would contact their previous employers and they would end up with the short end of the stick no matter how abusive their previous boss might have been or hostile the workplace. And, as Gerry Spence — lawyer extraordinaire — said about the myth of our Constitutional rights, the same is true of the myth about laws protecting employees in the workplace. For example, a top-ranked employment law firm I know once had a law partner who actively discriminated against a pregnant lawyer/associate. Who is the latter going to call? Who is going to believe her? Another organization I know which is famous for being employee-friendly had nearly 100% staff turn over several times due to the abusive department head, which the company protected. Staff would literally break down in tears at the office and eventually quit.
People always think they can hire a lawyer to defend their employee rights. Right. Good luck with that. That’s part of the myth.
When I blew the whistle against the corporate giant that had been defrauding consumers for years — with full knowledge of the violations by government regulators, by the way, as evidenced by the numerous emails and other communications going back and forth between the spanning years in which the former promised to come into compliance yet would not year after year after year — I had a very difficult time finding plaintiff lawyers who would be willing to take on the behemoth. In the end, an out-of-state lawyer came to my rescue at the 11th hour or else I would have lost everything — my career, my family, my lawsuit.
The entire system is stacked against employees from the get-go. For example, plaintiff lawyers in such cases are paid on a contingency fee basis — meaning they get paid only if and when they win. If they lose, all the hours sunk into the case would be for nothing. Think about what that means: these often small plaintiff law firms or solo practitioners constantly have to hedge their bets and be ready to walk away to cut their losses if it appears they cannot handle being out-resourced by bigger and wealthier law firms with lawyers who graduated from top law schools. On the flip side, corporate giants hire top-ranked law firms and pay top dollars to top-tier lawyers on a pay-as-you go basis to defend them. These law firms often have a team of lawyers assigned to a case. The more the merrier because that only racks up the bills and enrich the firms. For discovery, for example, the defense firms have teams of lawyers and assistants to review the tens of thousands of pages of documents while plaintiff lawyers rarely do. Worse, the employers often hold all the documents and evidence of violations and rarely provide such evidence to the former employees despite the legal mandates of the discover process. In my case, for example, despite numerous rounds of discovery, the corporate giant NEVER ONCE TURNED OVER A SINGLE INCRIMINATING DOCUMENT OF THE COUNTLESS EMAILS, LETTERS, AND MEMOS that crossed my desk while I worked there because either I wrote them or I received them due to my position. Worse of all, knowing this was most likely given the unethical nature of the organization, before I was forced out, I took copies of such incriminating evidence as proof — only to have my lawyer advised me to give everything back before leaving. Justice? Not so much.
But the work environment can be abusive even without the active oppression of bad bosses. One example is the common and abusive practice used by most employers in the US relating to the noncompete clause employees are forced to sign as a term of employment. NYU business professor Scott Galloway can explain it much better than I. https://www.profgalloway.com/compete/.
In fact, you should read his book and all his blogs. Prof. Galloway is recognized as one of the top 50 business school professors in the US. https://www.profgalloway.com.
This post is animated by news from a friend who was recently berated at work by the supervisor. Unfortunately, my friend was told the company cannot do anything to end the hostile work environment for one reason or another.
That leads to my lesson of the day: you are responsible for teaching people how to treat you. DON’T EVER ALLOW ANYONE TO TREAT YOU POORLY. Speak up for yourself. Seek help from higher ups when appropriate. Walk away if you must.
No job is EVER worth your sanity or health. No supervisor have the right to abuse you. Forget America’s failed legal system. Work is a basic human right as is being treated fairly and decently.
There is no dress rehearsal in life. You get one shot to do the right thing at each and every moment of your life — be it enjoying the beautiful vista you unexpectedly discovered on your stroll, listening attentively to your brother or a friend, reading a good book, studying for class, playing a video game while you are on break, etc.
Try to be mindful not to waste the moment — but know that daydreaming is not a waste of time and is a valuable as well as cherished part of life. And if you do end up wasting an hour doing something unproductive that you hadn’t planned on doing, don’t sweat it. Let it go and get back on track.
I’m sure you’ve heard ad nauseum about the need to exercise for 20-30 minutes each day. Too often, we find it difficult to commit to that block of time in the morning or evening and end up not exercising at all, promising to do better the morrow.
Don’t do that. Studies show a 10-minute walk here and a 10-minute walk there add up and give you similar benefits. See, e.g., https://www.huffpost.com/entry/10-minute-walk-benefits_l_63a0ad0ae4b03e2cc502ba16. So take that walk around the block and climb those stairs. Just try to do that 2-3 times per day. If you can’t, at least you got the 10-minute in and that’s better than nothing. Try to do better next time.
That’s the secret sauce to life, isn’t it — continuous incremental improvement? People are unrealistic when they think they can go from sitting for hours in front of the TV or laptop to running 30 minutes everyday without fail simply because it’s their New Year’s Resolution.
Bad habits are hard to break, and good habits are hard to make. Mistakes will happen. Don’t beat yourself up each time you make a mistake. Learn from the mistake (i.e., what triggered it, what were your thought processes, what were the environmental factors, etc.), then let it go. Only fools repeat mistakes ad nauseum.
Let your tomorrows be better than your yesterdays. Start that journey with a healthier you for without health, you are challenged to accomplish most things.
Be well. Find joy in each moment, be it in the simple fact that you are breathing clean air and have a full stomach when many are deprived of even these comforts.
We’ve lost a decade to fascist thugs who pose as public servants and abuse under color of authority. Such is the state of America today. We cannot be a great nation if we permit to power the very authoritarian government figures our forebears fought against.
No matter what happens, the persecution and destruction of our family by racist government thugs who abuse under color of authority will end this year. Until then, live well, stay healthy, strive to become the best possible version of you. You owe that to yourselves and to the world.
As numerous Bible stories have long foretold, when we meet our Maker, we’ll be judged upon what we have done with our lives and with the gifts we had been given. How will you answer? Will you say, “Here, I did my best with my talents and kicked ass helping the least of my brothers and sisters and making the world a better place” or “I was timid and scared, so I mostly hid from life, going through the motions of living and doing only what I needed to survive”?
In the Bible Story of the Three Servants, the first two who did their best were embraced and rewarded, while the third who wasted his talents was thrown outside the gate where he wailed and gnashed his teeth. (I think that’s the funniest image, by the way: some guy wailing and gnashing his teeth — who gnashes their teeth nowadays?)
The point is, to whom much is given, much is expected. Give back in the service of others. Happiness will ensue. As stated previously, it is a fool’s errand to chase after things or experiences that will supposedly make YOU happy: our brains are hard-wired to adapt, and you’ll soon tire of that having that new watch you’ve always wanted or playing that video game you’ve been eyeing. What’s new and novel becomes normal and routine in very short order. We are bottomless pits, destined to forever by unsatiated, if we pursue adrenaline rushes or material things.
On the other hand, I promise it will bring you immense joy to help others, especially if you do it for the sake of helping as the primary motive, not to make yourself look good, not to pad your resume, not to impress others by putting on a show and a false front for them. The world has more than enough of users masquerading as generous and good people — those who take food off the tables of the poor behind gain superiority over them, etc.
But, in order to be able to fully use your talents in the service of others, you must first take care of yourselves. Feed your body, your mind, and your soul good stuff. Avoid excesses, especially with respect to that which is convenient and devoid of true value e.g., fast food, fair weather “friends” and false gods like fame, online “friends” and money. Note, we need not be zealots and self-flagellate because we ate that entire bag of Doritos (God, I miss those!) or partied with acquaintances, but do not give yourself wholly to such empty pursuits. Aspire for better.
Eat healthy. Eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and eat fish at least once a week. Cut down on ultra-processed foods and sweets, especially things loaded with high-fructose corn syrup.
Feed your mind good stuff. Read the classics and avoid overindulging on junk. Read news from reputable sources from different countries and, again, avoid junk and yellow journalism. Read widely and voraciously. You will never have enough time to make all the possible mistakes in life in order to learn from your mistakes, so learn from the lessons and mistakes of others throughout the ages. Yes, read Ludlum, Rowling, or whoever else you wish as the need for lighter fare arises, but again do not give yourself fully to such empty pursuits.
Pray and feed your soul good stuff. Don’t overburden yourself with the negative. Yes, life can suck and often does. Man suffers — from fools to hunger and loneliness — but don’t embrace the suck at the exclusion of the miracles that surround us. Birds chirping at day break. A cool breeze. Baby’s breath. Good chocolate. Snow. Sand and surf and the roar of ocean. People who truly love you and are willing to make you a priority regardless of blood ties.
Ask God to help you accept what you cannot change, and courage to change the things you can. Remember, your voice matters, especially when joined with those of others. For example, until the community at large engaged in widespread protests on the streets and on-line to hold George Floyd’s murderer responsible, the police had gotten away for years when they maimed or murdered people like Freddie Gray and countless others.
Do good deeds. Believe in something greater than yourselves. Work towards something more beautiful, be it a garden, a poem, a story, an app, or a life breathed a little bit easier because of you.
Most importantly, live fully. Don’t wait. Go forth and create beauty and opportunities for yourselves and others now.
There is beauty in kindness. Be more kind than necessary, especially to each other. You are your brother’s keeper. Until we next meet
All my love, always and forever,
Dad
P.S., I leave you with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of success and Teddy Roosevelt’s quote from his speech at the Sorbonne. They have long guided me and given me comfort. I hope their words and visions will help you as well.
These are tough times for our little family, but it too shall pass. Until then, we soldier on because that is what it means to live. No one promised any of us an easy life free of challenges, pain, and suffering. To think so would not only be foolish but ill-advised.
A recent study has shown the benefit — and necessity — of everyday stress and it being the key to a healthy old age. Allow me to quote the article in toto as the author expressed it far better than I. Read on below.
Until we meet, please hang in there. We are fighting tooth and nail to expose those who persecute us under color of authority and achieve justice for our family. Leave the fighting to us. You do you and become the best young adults possible. Read voraciously. Study hard. Be kind. Find joy wherever you may be.
All my love, always and forever,
Dad
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Why everyday stress could be the key to a healthy old age
Research indicates that low-level stress from moderate exercise or work can enhance our cognitive and physical abilities in later life
Few words in the English language conjure up more negative emotions than stress. The mere mention of those six letters might elicit mental images of looming work deadlines, unpaid bills, the pressure of exams or tense family Christmases, to list just a few scenarios.
But what if I told you that stress can also be positive? That just as it can harm us, it also plays a key role in strengthening our immune system, forging connections in our brain that improve mental performance and building the resilience we need to navigate our way through the vagaries of life.
This first came to light through the work of an American psychiatrist called Firdaus Dhabhar, then a researcher at the Rockefeller University, New York, who was studying the connection between short-term stress and the immune system as part of the fight-or-flight response. In the mid-1990s, stress was viewed as almost unanimously bad for us, but to Dhabhar this was illogical. From a Darwinian perspective, the survival instincts of our animal ancestors would have been honed through repeated brushes with danger.
“It does not make sense that stress should always be a bad, harmful, negative entity,” he says. “The fight-or-flight stress response is essential for survival. A gazelle needs this response to escape the jaws and claws of a lion, just as a lion needs it to catch its meal. Mother Nature gave us this response to help us survive and thrive, not to kill us.”
Over the past 20 years, Dhabhar and others have shown that bouts of short-term stress can aid us in the modern world. A Ted Talk by Dhabhar, now a professor at the University of Miami, on the positive effects of stress has garnered 30,000 views on YouTube.
For example, the tension of an upcoming race helps prime the cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems of athletes for optimum performance, while surveys have even found that the stress of needing to get work done alongside childcare means that parents are likely to be more productive home workers than singletons.
Both mild-to-moderate physical and mental stress stimulate the production of chemicals in the blood called interleukins, activating the immune system and making it more able to fight off infections, while stress can even affect the development of children before they are born. Babies born to mothers who experienced mild everyday stress during pregnancy had more advanced developmental skills by the age of two, compared with the children of mothers who had enjoyed a relatively relaxed, unstressful pregnancy.
There are also various ways to think about stress. As well as the pressure and tension inflicted by life events, different forms of exercise can be viewed as stress for the muscles, while various types of cognitive challenges can be considered as stress for the mind.
Use it or lose it
In January 2017, the French cyclist Robert Marchand made headlines by setting a new age group world record at a velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. What was particularly remarkable about Marchand’s performance is that he had turned 105 a month earlier and his efforts made him the first centenarian ever to demonstrate improved cardiovascular health with age.
Exercise physiologists found that Marchand, who had begun serious competitive cycling in retirement at the age of 68, had an aerobic capacity for exercise – the gold standard means of measuring cardiovascular fitness – comparable to men aged 42 to 61, half a century younger than him.
Scientists researching healthy ageing now regard him as an indicator of what can be possible if we continue to apply manageable stress to our muscles, blood vessels and heart as we age. But most humans are not like Marchand. Many of us become progressively inactive as the years tick by, which exacerbates any age-related changes already taking place. As a result, if our muscles are not being stressed, their fibres slowly atrophy and we grow progressively weaker. The interaction between the nervous system and the muscles also becomes less efficient without regular use, slowing our reaction times and making us more vulnerable to falls.
Resistance exercise can help to preserve muscle mass. Photograph: Rocketclips, Inc/Alamy
“A muscle which is not activated really rapidly deteriorates in so many ways,” says Casper Søndenbroe, a scientist at Copenhagen University who studies the human neuromuscular system. “Muscles need to have this stimulus in order to maintain equilibrium. If you don’t have a strategy going into the latter parts of your life, when you reach 70 or 80 you’re likely to have some limitations with daily living because the functionality isn’t there.”
To illustrate this, Andy Philp, who heads the biology of ageing programme at the Centenary Institute in Sydney, explains that if an adult male spends five to seven days lying inactive in a hospital bed, they will lose about half a kilogram of muscle mass. But the difference between a 30-year-old and an 80-year-old is that the younger person’s body can recover and regenerate the lost muscle much more quickly.
A range of people between 100 and 118 showed similar cognitive abilities compared with the average 50- to 60-year-old
Søndenbroe has found that some forms of exercise-related stress are better than others for preserving muscle mass in later life. While some age-related deterioration is inevitable, as Marchand showed, it can be kept in check. One of the best ways of doing so is through resistance-based workouts, which involve training the muscles with weights or bands. Cycling is also considered a form of resistance training. “We’ve proved many times that this increases muscle size and muscle strength, so it is really effective,” says Søndenbroe.
Because of this, Søndenbroe is keen to urge people to do whatever kind of exercise they enjoy most. “The most important thing is that the best exercise is the one you actually get done,” he says. “So if you don’t like running high-intensity intervals, you shouldn’t do that. Find something that you enjoy.”
Cognitive reserve
Exercise does not stress the muscles alone: it is also a workout for the central nervous system, and even the mind.
There is a two-way interaction between the muscles and nerves that extend out of the spinal cord. When they contract, muscles send signals back towards the motor neurons, long, spindly cells that control motion, keeping them active and functioning efficiently. The increased blood flow aids with the removal of tau proteins – associated with Alzheimer’s disease – from the brain and cerebrospinal fluid, as well as stimulating neurons to produce a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which protects neighbouring brain cells.
We know that our brain size decreases at a rate of about 5% a decade after the age of 40, with the rate of decline increasing once we pass 70. However, this shrinkage slows in older people who do regular aerobic exercise – forms of physical activity that get the blood pumping around the body, such as brisk walking, running, swimming and biking – to the extent that they have four fewer years of brain ageing.
Studies show that people in their 80s who take up playing the piano can slow cognitive decline. Photograph: Erickson Stock/Alamy
Just as Marchand demonstrated that physical decline and frailty do not always have to come with age, studies of centenarians and supercentenarians – those who live past 110 – have illustrated that age-related cognitive decline is not always inevitable. Joyce Shaffer, a psychiatrist and behavioural scientist at the University of Washington, in Seattle, says a range of case studies between 100 and 118 demonstrated similar or even superior cognitive abilities compared with the average 50- to 60-year-old.
Other investigations have revealed the importance of incorporating a significant amount of mental stimulation into your daily routine, for as long as possible. For example, people who work a normal working week throughout their 50s and 60s are thought to be more resilient to cognitive decline than those who retire early. While challenging yourself by continuing to work or volunteer part-time, or attempting to learn a new skill in your eighth and ninth decades, may sound unnecessarily stressful, this kind of activity can keep your brain young.
“We’ve seen that people who started to take piano lessons in their 80s saw an improvement in brain function,” says Shaffer. “Staying on the job, or at least socially engaged in an activity, has a very good impact on maintaining function. There was a project in Baltimore where retired people went back into schools to tutor deprived students from low-income backgrounds who didn’t have much and they actually experienced improvements in cognition from doing that.”
We’ve evolved to be active and respond to different stimuli and if that’s taken away it accelerates negative processes
Andy Philp, Centenary Institute, Sydney
Given the spiralling rates of dementia predicted over the coming decades, interest in the connection between positive stress and health in later life is only going to grow. Teams of scientists around the world have plans to try to harness the beneficial properties of moderate stress across the realm of medicine, for example in enhancing healing and recovery after surgery. Researchers have shown that this can boost the safety and effectivenessof vaccines, while earlier this year a clinical trial conducted by Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity found that exercise can help improve the efficacy of chemotherapy as well as negating some of the damaging impact it can have on the body.
But of course there is a fine line between too little and too much stress. The constant low-grade inflammation that results from chronic stress has been connected to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, depression, asthma and Alzheimer’s, among other things.
Philp describes moderate stress as being more like a pulse, where various molecular pathways and tissues in the body get stimulated, before returning to normal. “With chronic stress, these pathways get activated and then stay activated for a long time,” he says. “We see this in obesity and diabetes. The inflammatory response can’t be as agile and flexible as it normally would.”
But regular pulses of mild to moderate stress are thought to be crucial for the body to keep functioning healthily. “If you think about it, all our systems are in a resting state, and then a little bit of stress – changing the blood flow to the brain or contracting the muscles – will turn on different molecular pathways to deal with that,” says Philp. “We’ve evolved to be active and responding to different stimuli, and if that’s taken away, it accelerates negative processes.”
These realisations have meant that understanding the benefits of various types of stress – from exercise to having a continuing purpose in life – have become more and more important in the context of healthy ageing.
May 2023 bring you peace and joy. This year will most certainly bring resolution to our persecution and hopefully the exposure of the corrupt scums who abuse under color of authority.
This year, resolve to be kinder than necessary. May be focusing on helping others feel better will help relieve some of your pains and sorrow regarding our separation and the destruction of our once beautiful family.
The kindest thing you can do for another is to listen to them — to truly hear them and see them (as in Avatar “I see you!”). Listen with your heart. Listen without judgment. Listen to understand.
It is easier said than done. During college, when I took advance level courses on counseling psychology, the instructor said that if you master the listening skills, you’d be surprise at how others would open up to you. She wasn’t wrong.
I’d lost that skill from my many years as a lawyer where I learned to listen with judgement and cold analyses. Though that served me well as a lawyer, it served me poorly as a person. Be not like me. Be better. I’m trying to find my way back to that and hope you will do better than I.
Below are two links that will help on your journey. I hope you’ll take the time to view them and make a real effort to be present and be more kind this year — to yourselves and to others.
shoshandjaialai 