Tom reminds us: “The ancient Greek word for ‘leisure’ or ‘free time’ was ‘skole’ which turned into the Latin word for school.”
Austin Kleon (the author of Steal Like An Artist) shared the “Manifesto for Slow Learning” and the free book Slow Learning about “A path to a meaningful and mindful future of learning” which a team of 15 authors, artists, and teachers came up with. Recommended read!
If it is right, it happens –
The main thing is not to hurry.
Nothing good gets away.
36. Kindness is vastly underrated. Everyone can be kind – it requires no special skill or training, yet has an immediate, positive impact. It is perhaps the ultimate life hack.
Chris Guillebeau shares this wonderful little gem and other ‘life hacks’ in his 36 Ways to Live Differently shared on his personal blog:
- The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
- Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
- He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
- He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
- The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
- Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
There is brave in soft.
There is wild in simple.
There is peace in thunder.
There are songs in stillness.
They found that when people made a very subtle shift moving from ‘What should I do?’ to ‘What could I do?’ they generated many more solutions and better solutions.
This is how to solve problems more effectively with one simple change by Daniel H. Pink.
Spinning on turntable
Vinyl’s warm sound fills the room
Analog magic
Vinyl’s crackle and pop
A symphony of sound waves
Forever in groove
Vinyl disc spins slow
Echoes of the past come alive
Music timeless flows
created with the artificial intelligence ChatGPT
When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, ‘You’re too this, or I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.
© Blaise Hayward (via Vimeo)
This short film tells the story of Walter Strohmeyer who for almost all of his 90 years has been swimming in the waters off Long Island. An honest and at times heartfelt story about the power of ritual.
The Swimmer by Blaise Hayward is a wonderful little short, I love everything about it.
We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
According to Ian Bogost from The Atlantic The Age of Social Media Is Ending. Yes, please!
theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074
© SUGi (via YouTube)
SUGi’s mission is to empower rewilding and bring Nature closer to anyone anywhere. Our Forest Makers and Ocean Gardeners use your funds to restore biodiversity and regenerate ecosystems.
From the YouTube-Channel by the beautiful SUGi project. If you want to know more about the propagated Miyawaki method and the idea of the “Mini-forests”, there’s a book by Hannah Lewi.
One for my growing antilibrary.
Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while your capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to “get on top of everything” is doomed. (Indeed, it’s worse than that – the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.)
The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.
This first of Oliver Burkeman’s eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life (“There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating”) might as well be written just for me. I’m going to try and adopt this as a kind of mantra for the future.
© emocritus Properties, LLC / Cosmos Studios, Inc. (via YouTube)
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan is always a win.