Will It Go Round In Circles? Paying It Forward, One Byte at a Time
A friend forwarded me a link to a stunningly honest blog post at Dan and Noah’s Single Dad Laughing blog. The post is about the disease called Perfectionism, and it’s a wonderful piece of brave and thoughtful writing. The kind of brutally honest piece you’ll never read in a commercial magazine.
You owe it to yourself. Then give yourself permission to be less than perfect today. Have a great week!
Researchers, some of whom were restricting calories in their own diets to reap the expected results of this study, were SHOCKED to find that severe calorie restriction doesn’t actually lengthen life span as anticipated.
To quote Texas Governor Rick Perry: “Oops.”
The study, begun in 1987, involved rhesus monkeys.
You can read more here at the NY Times while I celebrate with another dunk of my biscotti. Cheers!
(originally published elsewhere, 9/1/2012)
Personally, I think that one of the most appealing aspects of the internet has been its ability to allow people everywhere to share their stories.
Stories of inspiration, hope, challenges, joys, hobbies, interests, and more.
I’m somewhat saddened to watch the internet morph into a corporate salesplace, as it slowly loses the human touch that made the early internet a pioneering space filled with real stories about real people.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but Facebook really isn’t the center of the universe and you really don’t have 10,000 “friends” this week.
So, as I have the time to do it, I’m going to share with you some of the “other internet.” The Old School Internet that was composed of people with a burning desire to communicate something of importance to their fellow human beings (not just that they “like” Britney).
We’ll start here:
Here’s the story of Sandy Beardsley, who chose to share her journey as she fought to overcome the effects of a brain tumor. Sandy died in 2006, but her husband, Dan, has left her website in place to help inspire and help others. As she said in the first chapter of her site, “I hope that my words can in some way help anyone that is facing such a challenge. You are not alone.”
Thank you, Dan and Sandy, for sharing your story and helping others find their way through what can be a very confusing and scary process.
Here are more of Sandy’s words, from the genesis of her site in the Summer of 1999:
This is an ongoing written account of my journey through living with a brain tumor. I have kept a journal and continue to write about my experience. At first I kept the journal to express my emotions in a positive way. I began to think I might share these words with others when my journey was finished. Now I realize that that day may never come. Life is a journey and the process is what’s important, not the ending. My husband came up with the idea to share my words on a website.
Please visit the site here and experience for yourself Sandy’s wonderful, giving spirit, filled with strength and hope. And remember this: Life is what’s happening NOW, today. Make the most of it while you have it!
In my personal experience, the key to good health is a successful combination of very tiny improvements to DAILY HABITS: mental habits, eating habits, exercise habits, and spiritual habits.
So I was particularly interested by this FASCINATING story from the New York Times about Ikaria, an island in the Aegean Sea, that has the world’s highest concentration of long-lived people.
It contains an engaging story about a native Ikarian who lived in the US and returned to his homeland after being diagnosed with lung cancer. But only a New York Times writer can tell that story as it needs to be told, so I’ll let you read it yourself.
Here are just a couple of quick quotes from the piece:
Over the span of the next three days, I met some of Leriadis’s patients. In the area known as Raches, I met 20 people over 90 and one who claimed to be 104. I spoke to a 95-year-old man who still played the violin and a 98-year-old woman who ran a small hotel and played poker for money on the weekend.
So, how do the natives themselves explain their unusual longevity?
Ask the very old on Ikaria how they managed to live past 90, and they’ll usually talk about the clean air and the wine. Or, as one 101-year-old woman put it to me with a shrug, “We just forget to die.”
In Samos, they care about money. Here, we don’t. For the many religious and cultural holidays, people pool their money and buy food and wine. If there is money left over, they give it to the poor. It’s not a ‘me’ place. It’s an ‘us’ place.”
You really owe it to yourself to set aside a relaxed ten minutes to read this great story:
The Island Where People Forget to Die by Dan Buettner.
It’s the time of the year everyone gets re-inspired to get back in shape. If you’re into Yoga, Pilates, or Fusion Workouts, you owe it to yourself to read this article in the New York Times (How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body).
The article details quite a few instances of serious injuries (strokes, cerebral hemorrhages, cartilage and muscle tears, spinal stenosis, etc.) that are much more common than I ever realized.
Yoga aficionados, you owe it to yourselves to learn what poses are particularly risky. Here’s the link again.
You’d never think that by working to insure your health, you could risk it completely. Stay healthy, stay informed!
Have you ever wondered why so many people today have to wear glasses? I have.
Scientists are beginning to realize there appears to be a connection between a person’s childhood exposure to sunlight and proper eye/lens development.
Those children who are least exposed to the sun (and most exposed to artificial lighting) grow into myopic (near-sighted) adults.
Here’s a quick quote from an intriguing 2011 piece from the New York Times::
There is significant evidence that the trait is inherited, so you might wonder why our myopic ancestors weren’t just removed from the gene pool long ago, when they blundered into a hungry lion or off a cliff. But although genes do influence our fates, they are not the only factors at play.
In this case, the rapid increase in nearsightedness appears to be due to a characteristic of modern life: more and more time spent indoors under artificial lights.
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.” –Buddha