Just Think

9 Gems from Ernest Hemingway..

Henrik Edberg over at The Positivity Blog posts an incredible paper on life and inspiration. This is the first one and the others are well worth checking out. "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it." - Ernest Hemingway 1. Listen. "I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway Learning to really listen to someone rather just waiting for our turn to talk can be a difficult skill to develop. Often we may have much on our mind that we want to say and so listening falls by the wayside. How can you become a better listener? Here are three tips:

1. Forget about yourself. Focus your attention outward instead of inward in a conversation. Place the mental focus on the person you are talking and listening to instead of yourself. Placing the focus outside of yourself makes you less self-centred and your need to hog the spotlight decreases.
2. Stay present. This will help you to decrease the bad habit of thinking about the future and what you should say next while trying to listen. If you are present and really there while listening then that will also come through in your body language, which gives the person talking a vibe and feeling that you are really listening to what s/he has to say.
3. Be open. Keep your mind open to the possibility that whatever the person is about to say will actually be interesting. If you have already made up your mind that he or she will say something boring then it will be hard to pay attention.

Also, if you really listen then that alone will often provide you naturally with a better and more genuine answer than the clever response thought up while trying to listen simultaneously.

Streaming Moods....

There are so many surprises on the internet. But take a look at this one. Combining music images and thoughtfulness. I love the innovation of all of this and where it will end? I don't know but until then enjoy. Excellent!

Visual Gymnastics

A beautiful mind...

Sometimes we come across powerful language written in a book, heard on the radio and admire it for itself in context. We do the same when we meet truly inspirational people.

It interests me though that in spite of all our prejudices and preconceptions we can perceive the same quality humanity, people's spirit and personality in an e-mail or on the internet. We don't meet them in person but we get a sense about them. I have posted work from Benoit before but here is another example.  For the full context go here -
 
"The nature of collectivist says: "It takes the village to raise a child". The nature of individualist says:  "Who am I?  I need to know!"  The nature of knowledge says:  "The culture of interdependence in serenity is the health of mutuality between the village and who we each are!"

"Currently, we are at a junction of history when the incompatibilities of the past collectivist ruling units, such as the various war machines and their specific contexts, are resisting the individualism that has taken on a corporate shape, and goes on acting as individuals, competing for survival in an unsustainable village. For both, the individual and the village, the genuine paradigm shift comes from discovering the passage from competing to completing, just like the village needs to do with great dedication when the child becomes a teen, in making room for the teen's deployment in the community."

"Failing to do so keeps the teen from getting to know who she/he is, therefore keeping her/him to take her/his place in the smooth running of the village.  Our Western modern society is made of several generations in which the villages have been built to satisfy corporate individualism, supporting competition and forgetting about completion.  As a result, the corporate agenda finds itself having to re-invent the wheel of life with artificial intelligence, leaving behind the cultivation needed for the village and the individual's continuity into maturing."

Lost America

I love it when I find a treasure trove. 

If you, like me, do a ton of traveling and that across America, then you will probably appreciate this. If you also saw No Country For Old Men and fell immediately in love with it and could watch it twelve more times then go see this site.

Fundamentally though this is just a stunning mix of things I admire. A tremendous love for detail, the topic, life and for photography. I simply want to meet this guy or gal because they are clearly so into this work.  It's poetry ­

For example some of the captions of their work -

"Is there anything more ironic than an abandoned Real Estate office? El Mirage, CA. Night, full moon, 2 minutes, red-gelled strobe-flash, tungsten balanced, Canon 20D". I love that technical syrup.

And how about this?...

"I think that pile of white rocks might be a grave? A roadside settlement along Highway 58 near Kramer Junction, CA. This thing was at least 20 feet tall. Night, full moon, headlights, taillights and distant sodium vapor glow of the town of Boron. 4 minute exposure, Canon 20D"

And Finally -

"The second floor corner office in the abandoned gas station/general store in Lockhart, CA. In the Mojave desert near Barstow. Canon 20D. Night, full moon outside, completely dark office, natural flashlight rotated on it's axis on the floor and up at the ceiling. The windows are composited from a different exposure (with no light painting) to cover up the strong reflections from the flashlight on the glass. I knocked back the opacity of the window layer to keep a small amount of the reflections."

By the way if you haven¹t seen the movie then you must. Cormac McCarthy is considered by many to be America's greatest living author, and Joel and Ethan Coen certainly comprise one of the finest voices in modern filmmaking. Despite that, I don't know if I'd have guessed that the McCarthy/Coen combo would be such a perfect fit. They're all brilliant, but they're brilliant in different ways and this is a brilliant movie.

Knowing vs knowing...

With everlasting thanks to Verna Allee for alerting me to this - Richard Feynman with incredible acuity; blessed with the power of grace and truth gives us some astute observations about the "names" of things and knowledge. Check it out. It is 10:00 minutes long but the great insight is astonishing and you get to it between minutes 6-9. It's totally worth persevering and spending quality time with it.

Einstein, by Einstein...

If you ever played the Œ'desert island' or 'Œwho would you have to dinner? game the does this guy feature? With due respect to the greatest (?)  Œ'Just Thinker' this a truly beautiful piece of rationale and soul. If only we could all think and do as well as this.

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

The Beauty of Type...

One of the greatest joys of working in information design and the conveyance of strategy is to be able to experience great typography. The beauty of it in visual terms and of course as it conveys meaning can literally be breathtaking. I came across this amazing blog The Ministry of Type and attach a couple of the images I have found there here. Enjoy and see more images also in the extention.

Amazing Jackson Pollock 2.0

Another incredible surprise brought into my view by StumbleUpon. Just take a look at this it¹s a beautiful hybrid of tools we have seen before but stunningly interpreted. Tinglingly good. Jackson  Pollock

A Pale Blue Dot

The image was taken with a narrow angle camera lens, with the Sun quite close to the field of view. Quite by accident, the Earth was captured in one of the scattered light rays caused by taking the image at an angle so close to the Sun. Dr. Sagan was quite moved by this image of our tiny world. Here is an enlargement of the area around our Pale Blue Dot and an excerpt from the late Dr. Sagan's talk:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every 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.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity - in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."