“Everything Gains in Grandeur Every Day”

I absolutely adore this quote by Giacometti, so republish it every few months:

“The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”

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“…happiness is complex and difficult and worth striving for.”

Hi Everyone: this posting is from a few months back, but we’re getting a spate of new visitors from the WSJ Forums and I want to make sure they don’t miss some of the good old stuff. As for the rest of you, well, it never hurts to reread a little Goethe. – Hillary

From a Wall Street Journal review of a new biography of the writer Goethe:

“Directing sensitivity inward, relishing alienation from the world — these are things that artists have traditionally been expected to do, at least since the days of the Romantic movement that Goethe helped to set in train. As Mr. Armstrong makes clear, Goethe himself took an opposite course, producing great art through active, positive involvement with the age in which he lived.

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Soon You May Have a Medical Credit Score

Somehow, I don’t think “this”:http://www.baltimoresun.com/services/newspaper/printedition/wednesday/business/bal-bz.medfico02jan02,0,1964859.story is going to be help increase access to health care:

“The new medFICO score, being designed with the help of credit industry giant Fair Isaac Corp., could make its debut as early as this summer in some hospitals.

“Healthcare Analytics, a Waltham, Mass., health technology firm, is developing the score. It is backed by funding from Fair Isaac, of Minneapolis; Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp.; and venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners, also based in Waltham. Each kicked in $10 million for the project.

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UN Climate Change Panel Finally Says It: Meat Contributes to Global Warming

Lifestyle changes can curb climate change: IPCC chief

Excerpt:

“Don’t eat meat, ride a bike, and be a frugal shopper — that’s how you can help brake global warming, the head of the United Nation’s Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change said Tuesday.

“The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued last year, highlights ‘the importance of lifestyle changes,” said Rajendra Pachauri at a press conference in Paris.

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Howard Bloom’s Somber Poli Sci Lesson

From an Alternet essay by literary and cultural critical Harold Bloom:

“The horror of what is taking place in Iraq exceeds my worst fears five or six years ago (after Bush came to power). I am horrified at the disastrous mistake involved. Imagine the complete madness in trying to occupy a large Arab country in the middle of the Arab world, a culture we know precious little about, and who speaks a language only a handful of our specialists can speak, with armed forces which we have limited control of and with a large army of private soldiers …. The whole thing is a scandal … a series of lies. I don’t understand the motivation for the war, but suspect the real reason for the war, which one would suspect of a country which is a third oligarchy, a third plutocracy and a third theocracy, is that it simply is a profitable machine.”

A reminder:

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Not Just Republicans

Also from Bloom’s essay :

“The truth is that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hoyer and the other Democrats who lead the Congress Party in the Senate, are far too cunning. They will talk about wanting to end the war and so on, but the truth is that they know they can’t do anything about it and it suits them as they can blame the Republicans for the war in the upcoming elections. But the ugly truth is that we can’t stop the war now. We are responsible for Iraq now. We have crushed it so now we own it. I have never seen this country (America) in such a bad state. But how big a percentage who actually cares, I don’t know.”

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“An Abject Fear of Losing”

Having just a few days ago posted an encomium to Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and current courageous political activist, I was struck by an interesting contrast between his story and the late Bobby Fischer’s.

One of the main points Kasparov kept mentioning in the talk I heard him give is that, You have to have the courage to fail.” In contrast, “Fischer’s obituary in the New York Times notes, “some said he was driven by an abject fear of losing.”

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Just Two Fun Links

“People aged 1 through 100 banging on a drum.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUHLa1qSy24
Fun and oddly compelling.

The Daily Coyote
Young woman lives in a cabin in the Wyoming countryside, finds a 10-day-old orphaned coyote, names it Charlie, raises it, and takes amazing photos and writes\ compelling commentary as it grows up. I’m not a huge fan of photography as an art because the work often seems cold and over-technical, but these photographs are filled with warmth and character and feeling, as well as being beautiful. You really get a sense of Charlie the Coyote as an individual soul.

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Essay: Encounters With Four Activists

I had the good fortune to encounter four amazing activists last year.

The first was Doris Haddock, a.k.a. GrannyD , an incredible woman who walked across the United States at the age of 89 to advocate for the elimination of unregulated “soft” money in campaigns. She then returned home to New Hampshire, and in 2004, at the age of 94, ran for U.S. Senate! With almost no money, and running against an entrenched Republican incumbent, she still managed to get nearly 40%+ of the vote – a people-powered success that proved the effectiveness of grassroots, guerrilla campaigns. Her story is now told in a wonderful and inspiring film, Run Granny Run!, that showed on HBO in October, and is now available on DVD. That film previewed in Boston and GrannyD herself was in attendance and spoke; it was thrilling to see her.

The second was Garry Kasparov , the former world chess champion who is now the leading opposition candidate and champion for democracy in an increasingly autocratic Russia. He gave a talk to more than a thousand people in Cambridge. The subject was on how chess prepared him for success in other fields, and what I particularly remember is him saying repeatedly: “I have won hundreds of chess matches, but lost thousands. You have to have the courage to fail.” No one probably hates failure more than a world champion, so if he could face his fear of failure, we can face our own.

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Meditation on Life Coaching

The New York Times has a pretty good article on life coaches and what they do. I particularly like the fact that the coach they feature most prominently comes, as I do, from a business background: many coaches come from a social work or psychotherapy background, and while those skills are essential, I don’t think they’re sufficient. I find that my strategic and business knowledge are particularly helplful to people who are stuck with their careers or, obviously, businesses.

One thing that I do that I don’t see other coaches doing is include an explicit political framework in my coaching. Not that I tell people whom to vote for, but I do incorporate my conviction that many people are stuck or unhappy not through any fault of their own, but because our hyper-capitalist, hyper-corporate society has decimated our authentic communities, overwhelmed our families, and striven to reduce vibrant, creative, independent-thinking individuals to passive, compliant workers and consumers. For the kind of people I coach – the ambitious dreamers who will fight to retain their dreams and sense of self – the disconnect between who they are and who society is pressuring them to be can lead to incredible confusion, stress and unhappiness.

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