Twitching Grey Matter

Mind Churn

christy — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:17:20 +0000

Have you ever gone through one of those times in your life in which you can’t calm down your thoughts for love nor money? I’m going through one of those periods right now. Or at least the past few days. I’ve been awake nearly all night with thoughts swirling around and around and around. Nothing I [...]

Trying NOT to Live a Rube Goldberg Kind of Life

christy — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:07:48 +0000

You may or may not know the name Rube Goldberg . . . but I’m sure you’ve seen his work. He’s the comic artist who devised all of those crazy complex machines to perform simple operations. If you’ve ever played the game Mousetrap, that’s a Goldbergian sort of thing. If you remember Doc Brown’s method of [...]

Dum Spiro, Spero

christy — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:00:33 +0000

No, I’ve not (completely) lost my mind; that’s Latin and not gibberish. Dum spiro, spero … So long as I breathe, I hope. It’s a saying most often attributed to Cicero, a great thinker and orator of ancient Rome. And it is, in my opinion, one of the best approaches to life that I can think of. If [...]

A New Approach to Change

christy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:25:56 +0000

“The best way out is always through.” - Robert Frost Why is it that Western culture seems to teach us that we can bring about a change we desire in ourselves or our situation through avoiding the things that make us want to experience the change to start with? No really, if anyone knows why, please share. I [...]

Gobbledygook and Other Important Ideas from Corporate America

christy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:19:37 +0000

A friend passed along to me a lecture by Australian writer Don Watson, given at the Australian National University. You can Google him to find out more, but he’s done a lot of things – including working as a speech writer for an Aussie politician – and he has not yet lost his sense of [...]

Compassion

christy — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:43:45 +0000

What is compassion really? We talk about it a lot. Compassion for those caught up in the Haiti earthquake. Compassion for the homeless. Compassion for the abused and disenfranchised. Compassion for the suffering of others. But what do we really mean by it? Is it a synonym for sympathy? For empathy? For something else entirely? I can’t help myself. I need [...]

Defiant Honesty

christy — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:40:00 +0000

When was the last time you were faced with a situation in which being honest – and following your own conscience about something – was at odds with your external security? And when I say “security” I mean anything from the really dramatic (your actual life or the life of someone you care about) all the [...]

Lessons I’m Learning from Disaster

christy — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:02:39 +0000

Haiti. Just that one word probably pulls up images that we’ve all seen in the past week or so. The one of the woman with dried vomit and blood on her face, covered by a whitish coating of what I presume is pulverized cement powder. A dear friend of mine was there, working on access to clean [...]

Assess, Evaluate, and Prioritize

christy — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:57:45 +0000

No, this is not a New Year’s Resolutions post. Well, not a typical one anyway. I receive a postcard from a friend living in Japan once each month. She was born and raised in the United States, but has lived in Japan longer than she lived in the US before going there. She lives and works [...]

The Ego Vs. The World

christy — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:03:01 +0000

No matter who among us desires to be seen as humble, and no matter who among us actually achieve it, we all have egos. Each and every one of us. The ego serves as a kind of insulator, a protector between the ways in which we choose to see the world, and the way it actually [...]