520
June 23, 1994
Happy Birthday Princess,
We get old and get used to each other. We think alike. We read each other's minds. We know what the other one wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted.
But once in a while, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You're the object of my desire, the #1 earthly reason for my existence. I love you very much.
Happy Birthday Princess.
John
519
Why Can’t We Fall Asleep?
By Maria Konnikova
Here’s what’s supposed to happen when you fall asleep. Your body temperature falls, even as your feet and hands warm up—the temperature changes likely help the circadian clocks throughout your body to synchronize. Melatonin courses through your system—that tells your brain it’s time to quiet down. Your blood pressure falls and your heart rate slows. Your breathing evens out. You drift off to sleep.
That, at least, is the ideal. But going to sleep isn’t always a simple process, and it seems to have grown more problematic in recent years, as I learned through a series of conversations this May, when some of the world’s leading sleep experts met with me to share their ongoing research into the nature of sleeping. (The meetings were facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship.) According to Charles Czeisler, the chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, over the past five decades our average sleep duration on work nights has decreased by an hour and a half, down from eight and a half to just under seven. Thirty-one per cent of us sleep fewer than six hours a night, and sixty-nine per cent report insufficient sleep. When Lisa Matricciani, a sleep researcher at the University of South Australia, looked at available sleep data for children from 1905 to 2008, she found that they’d lost nearly a minute of sleep a year. It’s not just a trend for the adult world. We are, as a population, sleeping less now than we ever have.
The problem, on the whole, isn’t that we’re waking up earlier. Much of the change has to do with when we choose to go to bed—and with how we decide to do so. Elizabeth Klerman is the head of the Analytic and Modeling Unit, also in the Sleep and Circadian Disorders division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her research tracks how multiple individual differences in our environment affect our circadian rhythms and our ability to fall asleep easily and soundly. “When you go to bed affects how long you can sleep, no matter how tired you are,” she told me.
518
Asking the Big Questions
By Steve Pavlina
When I was younger, I decided that I didn’t want to reach my deathbed feeling like I’d missed the whole point of this life. I realized that in order to avoid that problem, I’d have to create a connection between exploring the big questions and my everyday life.
What Are the Big Questions?
The big questions are yours to discover and explore. Here are some of mine:
What is the nature of this reality? How does it actually work?
Is this reality objective (a world of objects and energy that I inhabit as a physical being with consciousness) or subjective (a dream-like world where consciousness is primary and everything sensory is a simulation within this greater consciousness)?
What will happen to me when I die?
How long might I be able to extend my life here, and in what form?
Can I trust this universe? And what does it mean to trust or distrust the universe?
Is the universe itself conscious in some way?
What is intimacy? How deep can intimacy go with another person? How well can I know someone?
What exactly am I? Am I this body with a consciousness? Am I this consciousness that contains a body that I can animate?
Why do I seem to be present and aware?
Why am I here?
Who are the best people for me to connect with while I’m here? How will I recognize them?
How can I merge the objective and subjective lenses to make better decisions? And can I consistently practice the ability to use both lenses in key situations?
How much time is wise to spend learning for myself vs. sharing with the world? Does sharing with the world matter? Am I just sharing with myself when I do that?
Do people communicate energetically somehow? When I get inspired by article ideas that practically write themselves, why do they feel like transmissions that I’m receiving?
How shall I use my remaining time here, especially if I don’t know how much is left?
517
Speaker for the Dead
By Orson Scott Card
PROLOGUE
In the year 1830, after the formation of Starways Congress, a robot scout ship sent a report by ansible: The planet it was investigating was well within the parameters for human life. The nearest planet with any kind of population pressure was Baía; Starways Congress granted them the exploration license.
So it was that the first humans to see the new world were Portuguese by language, Brazilian by culture, and Catholic by creed. In the year 1886 they disembarked from their shuttle, crossed themselves, and named the planet Lusitania—the ancient name of Portugal. They set about cataloguing the flora and fauna. Five days later they realized that the little forest-dwelling animals that they had called porquinhos—piggies—were not animals at all.
For the first time since the Xenocide of the Buggers by the monstrous Ender, humans had found intelligent alien life. The piggies were technologically primitive, but they used tools and built houses and spoke a language. “It is another chance God has given us,” declared Archcardinal Pio of Baía. “We can be redeemed for the destruction of the buggers.”
The members of Starways Congress worshipped many gods, or none, but they agreed with the Archcardinal. Lusitania would be settled from Baía, and therefore under Catholic License, as tradition demanded. But the colony could never spread beyond a limited area or exceed a limited population. And it was bound, above all, by one law:
The piggies were not to be disturbed.
516
A Boom in Credit Cards: Great News for Banks, Less So Consumers
By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Stacy Cowley
Udean Murray, a 62-year-old retired telephone operator in Brooklyn, relies on more than a dozen credit cards to make ends meet. Her prescription medication often goes on a Capital One card. She pays for groceries with one from Discover Financial Services.
That’s a risky financial strategy for Ms. Murray, whose only income is Social Security and who struggles each month to make the minimum payments on all her cards.
But it has been a boon for the nation’s biggest banks, which are earning millions of dollars a month on their credit card customers. The four top American banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — together made more than $4 billion in pretax income from their credit card businesses from July through September.
The amount of debt owed by American consumers, which receded in the wake of the financial crisis, is again on the rise.
Outstanding credit card debt — the total balances that customers roll from month to month — hit a record $1 trillion this year, according to the Federal Reserve. The number of Americans with at least one credit card has reached 171 million, the highest level in more than a decade, according to TransUnion, a credit-reporting company.
That is occurring at an opportune moment for the banking industry, which is suddenly struggling to earn as much money from traditional profit engines.
In the years since the financial crisis, the largest United States financial institutions churned out profits largely thanks to a booming business in trading and structuring bonds and other securities. Advising corporations and other institutions on their finances and strategies was another lucrative revenue stream.
Now, though, those businesses are flagging, in part because financial markets have been eerily calm.
So banks are turning more to lending to consumers — especially through credit cards — to pick up some of the slack.
Banks earn money from credit cards in two ways: They take a small cut of each card transaction as a fee, and they typically charge annual interest rates of 15 percent or more on balances that customers don’t pay off at the end of each month.
515
The First Hour: Creating Powerful Mornings
By Leo Babauta
As your day starts, it’s easy to get lost in the habit of checking messages, replying to email, checking the news and your favorite blogs.
It’s easy to fritter your day away doing a thousand small harmless actions … but the essential actions get put off.
The antidote, I’ve found, is putting a little emphasis on making the first hour of your day the most powerful hour. Treating that first hour as sacred, not to be wasted on trivial things, but to be filled with only the most essential, most life-changing actions.
Sacred actions might include:
Meditating
Journaling
Reading
Writing (or creating in some other way)
Practicing or studying
Practicing yoga
Exercising
Focusing on your most important task of the day
On the days when I’m able to take those kinds of sacred actions, my entire day is changed. I am more mindful, I am more energetic, and I’m more focused and productive.
Treating this first hour as sacred helps me to remember that every hour is sacred, if I treat it as such. It helps me to remember that I don’t have a lot of hours left (I have no idea how many hours are left!), and that I have to live each one with appreciation and mindfulness.
My Current First Hour
The time that I wake up, and my morning routine, has varied over the years. It never stays the same, changing sometimes monthly. But when things tend to drift off into mindlessness, I refocus myself and choose a sacred routine that I find helpful.
Here’s what I’m doing right now with my first hour:
A short meditation
Write
Read
Study
Short yoga practice (or run with Eva)
I’ve only started doing this, so I keep each action fairly short (other than writing). The yoga practice, for example, is just a short series of poses, instead of a longer practice that I might want to develop over time. I’ve found it useful to start small when you get started, to form the habit.
514
THE SEVEN HABITS—AN OVERVIEW
By Stephen R. Covey
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
--- ARISTOTLE
Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits. “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny,” the maxim goes.
Habits are powerful factors in our lives. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness … or ineffectiveness.
As Horace Mann, the great educator, once said, “Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it everyday and soon it cannot be broken.” I personally do not agree with the last part of his expression. I know they can be broken. Habits can be learned and unlearned. But I also know it isn’t a quick fix. It involves a process and a tremendous commitment.
Those of us who watched the lunar voyage of Apollo 11 were transfixed as we saw the first men walk on the moon and return to earth. Superlatives such as “fantastic” and “incredible” were inadequate to describe those eventful days. But to get there, those astronauts literally had to break out of the tremendous gravity pull of the earth. More energy was spent in the first few minutes of lift-off, in the first few miles of travel, than was used over the next several days to travel half a million miles.
Habits, too, have tremendous gravity pull—more than most people realize or would admit. Breaking deeply imbedded habitual tendencies such as procrastination, impatience, criticalness, or selfishness that violate basic principles of human effectiveness involves more than a little willpower and a few minor changes in our lives. “Lift off” takes a tremendous effort, but once we break out of the gravity pull, our freedom takes on a whole new dimension.
Like any natural force, gravity pull can work with us or against us. The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go. But it is also gravity pull that keeps our world together, that keeps the planets in their orbits and our universe in order. It is a powerful force, and if we use it effectively, we can use the gravity pull of habit to create the cohesiveness and order necessary in our lives.
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