Category Archives: Quotes

Optimize Your Brain

The brain is a three-pound supercomputer. It is the command and control center running your life. It is involved in absolutely everything you do. Your brain determines how you think, how you feel, how you act, and how well you get along with other people. Your brain even determines the kind of person you are. It determines how thoughtful you are; how polite or how rude you are. It determines how well you think on your feet, and it is involved with how well you do at work and with your family. Your brain also influences your emotional well being and how well you do with the opposite sex.

Your brain is more complicated than any computer we can imagine. Did you know that you have one hundred billion nerve cells in your brain, and every nerve cell has many connections to other nerve cells? In fact, your brain has more connections in it than there are stars in the universe! Optimizing your brain’s function is essential to being the best you can be, whether at work, in leisure, or in your relationships.

–Dr. Daniel G. Amen

You can read his recommendations further at Seven Ways to Optimize Your Brain and Your Life.

Ask Why

I just finished watching the movie, Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room. It reveals a “lord of the flies” corporate culture in which the greediest, wiliest, least ethical people at the top used all their skill and power to rape a market and the people it serves, as well as their own employees. It’s an excellent movie, but it left me pretty angry and disgusted about the havoc they caused in so many lives. Of course, there was a lot of cooperation from accounting companies and banks that agreed to go along with whatever explanations Enron offered, because they gained as well.

Husband continued to watch the DVD extras, but I had to leave the room when I heard Ken Lay explain how his net worth had sunk from several hundred millions to “less than 25 million dollars.” Granted, he acknowledged other people in his company had suffered far worse, and he said it was tragic. But apparently he’s not so moved by their plight to actually accept culpability directly. The “tag line” to Enron’s ads was “ask why” — it seems this this was a question asked least often.

People who think money can do anything may very well be suspected of doing anything for money.

–Mary Pettibone Poole

Dissolving the Puny Illusory You

Be one with your blog but don’t get too attached. Blog about anything, everything, and nothing. Get a life. Have fun. Practice. Then ponder this: blogging as a transformative practice is NOT a surrender of the ego. In fact, it makes your ego even bigger, in hyper-speed. The trick is to make your ego bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, by blogging, reading, linking, blogging, and learning. So that in time, you can sit back and watch your ego as it grows in cyberspace, spilling gently into meatspace, growing, growing, expanding into Infinity itself… dissolving the puny illusory You who thought of blogging in the first place.

–CoolMel, Kosmic Blogging: 101: How to Blog, What to Blog, Why the heck Blog, and Whatnot

Just Stillness

Still Still

The cats sleep. The furnace belches
dust and heat. A dying man tries

to breathe. Just a machine, your chest rising
and falling. Bleached leaves flap like wings.

The creek, still still, still solid. The hole
in the oak, abandoned. Frogs dream of life

beneath the ice. The hole longs to be filled.
The concrete angel on the patio sulks.

Last night I dreamed the farmer was reaping
snow, that his harvester was eating me

alive. Husked. Hulled. This morning light fails
to be described. A skein of geese unravels.

Boring, predictable. I glean the field for signs.
A crow ruins the silence. I breathe, ignore it.

–Laurel Dodge, La Chambre d’Ecoute

There is something stark, austere, beautiful, and reminiscent of Zen in this poem. I discovered Laurel’s blog last year. I read it often. (I also visit because I have a huge crush on her cat, Bob, who is featured frequently.) What I find compelling about Laurel is her willingness to dwell on the edge; she converses with death, loss, and grief in a way so intimate it makes me uncomfortable. That is why I visit her — because she explores places I don’t feel brave enough to pursue. Also because Bob is so gorgeous, and she captures his catness in all its variety.

Neither Rain Nor Sleet Nor Threat of Death

The closest call came when he was stuck in traffic and a group of gunmen walked up to the car in front of him to drag out the driver, kicking and screaming. He watched silently, hoping the gunmen would not take him, too.

“I cried when I got back to the office,” Mr. Mikayel said, pushing his large-lensed glasses farther up his nose.

—Neither War Nor Bombs Stay These Iraq Couriers (New York Times)