From Boing-Boing
“Oscar, there are so many things I would like to tell you which have happened over these past twenty years. Ever since you were abducted, on that February 23rd 1984, my heart has remained completely void. You know I considered you not just my son, but also my brother, my colleague. You were everything to me and ever since that day I swore I would neither rest nor give up the struggle to find you.
Artist Joel Harris has posted a selection of his artworks spanning his entire life starting with crayon masterpieces from age 5, and proceeding through his Mad Magazine phase, cartooning phase, Marine Corps phase, European travel phase, and culminating with a radically new style of art that he evolved after he:
“Sold everything I owned and lived in the Amazon region of Peru for 1 year. I took one year off from painting and creativity, and focused on finding answers to life’s questions. In the Amazon, I worked with a visionary/shamanic plant called Ayahuasca which alowed me to view reality from a different perspective, and has changed my life forever…”
A: “By converting as wide a range of experience into conscious thought.” – novelist Andre Malraux
Talk about succinct! Malraux captures the theme of The Lifelong Activist in two sentences.
And he’s not even the first smart French novelist to do so:
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” — Gustave Flaubert
Okay, this guy’s not French,and not even a novelist, but he still rates a mention:
I’m at the age (almost 50!) when many people start to codger, i.e., turn into someone with fixed ideas and narrowed perceptions. A lot of people do it earlier, and some people never do it, remaining youthful until they drop. I’m hoping for that last outcome, and I think I’ll get there, mainly because I hang around with many vibrant young and vibrant older people, and am always open to new learning. Age is a construct, really – a hardening of the mental arteries – and I hope and believe I will feel young forever. (BTW, my real arteries are pretty young, too – thanks, Mom, and thanks, veganism!)
One thing that keeps one young is to partake of the world of youth. I confess that my musical taste peaked sometime in the ‘80s, but I have tried to stay keyed in to various trends of culture and, especially, technology. The world is becoming more technological, and so it’s a good idea to keep track of trends. A good source is the technology section of your local newspaper; but the best stuff is online: I recommend www.boing-boing.net www.wired.com and www.digg.com Just read the headlines if you’re too busy to delve into the articles. And if you’re interested in another topic – be it politics, art, fashion, gardening or something else – you should check out some of the blogs devoted to it. Technology is not only touching all of these worlds directly, but is creating interactive communities around them in which we all participate more or less equally. That’s terrific.
“LONDON (Reuters) – Housework might be bad for your health, according to a study suggesting that tidying up as little as once a week with common cleaning sprays and air fresheners could raise the risk of asthma in adults…
“Exposure to such cleaning materials even just once a week could account for as many as one in seven adult asthma cases, the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.”
Recently, I have been very inspired by a video of “last lecture” given by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Last Lectures typically involve a retiring professor who condenses his or her decades of accumulated wisdom and experience into one final blockbuster talk, but this one is different because the professor, Randy Pausch, is only 46 years old but has terminal cancer: he will be dead in a few months, he tells us, and he will leave behind a wife and three young kids. Pausch’s Last Lecture, on how to achieve your childhood dreams, contains much useful information, but it is his courageous joy and vital energy in the face of a crushing personal fate that has really affected me. It has made me determined to feel more joy in my own daily existence, even the mundane or disappointing parts of it. The video is here – it’s around 90 minutes long, and if you want to skip the intros, just go to the 8 minute marker and start there.
Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly writes here about the “countdown clock” he created on his computer to remind him of how much (or, more to the point, how little) time he has left on the planet and that he shouldn’t waste any. He’s 55 years old, he says, so anticipates he’s got about 8,500 days left, assuming he makes it to the U.S. male average for his age set of 78.63 years.
He reports that his friend Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog), uses another approach:
Was checking my stats tonight, and so I must ask…which one of you got to this site after searching Google for “www.lifelongactivist.com”????
Okay, no one has to confess. I’m glad you all find yourself here via any path. 
From Cary Tennis, Salon.com’s advice columnist :
“Anyway, that sort of reminds me about how hard it is to make social change when many of us feel unrepresented by the major political parties, do not belong to labor unions and must figure out for ourselves how to make activism a part of our complicated little private lives of comfort and ease. So along came this book called “The Lifelong Activist” by Hillary Rettig. It is about how to arrange your life so that even though you have to work for a living and pay bills and raise a family or whatever, you can avoid getting sucked into the utterly life-draining mess that is the typical consumer lifestyle. So you can find time to pursue your art or change the world or both.”
New York Times article on The Moral Instinct
Great long – but extremely lucid – article on morality by psychologist Steven Pinker in Sunday’s New York Times. I love the beginning:
“Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?
“Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.
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