“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving” – Albert Einstein:
A rippa of a quote. I live by it. Keep up the momentum, have a flow. In life, as on a bike, you only have to a) have the good intention b) activate your cells in flow. And then balance simple comes. In flow we balance. We get true.
Anyone who’s ridden a lot knows you don’t “steer” a bike. When I’m mountainbike racing, I don’t turn the handlebars. I look to where I need to be, keep peddling or tumbling down the hill, and the bike simply leans there. Intention. Activate. Flow. Balance.
Every now and then I use the auspice of this column to meet people I’ve always wanted to sit next to on a long plane trip so as to pick their brains for fatty morsels on how to make life better. It’s not a bad perk of the job. So, on Tuesday I arranged to have afternoon tea with social researcher and ethicist Hugh Mackay.
Mackay is a man whose values and considered opinions I’ve gravitated to since I was a kid, like a little mollusk to a sturdy pylon in rough, swirling waters. He’s spent more than 50 years observing and reporting on what matters to Australians, the fatty morsels from which he’s collated in his latest bestseller “What makes us Tick“, I figure, as we order sencha, he might be able to answer this: what’s the one thing that works?
Having interviewed tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Australians and spent decades reflecting on his own sense of wholeness, this is what he reckons makes for a better life: Being creative. And often.
We both agree that the pursuit of happiness is not much chop when it comes to determining a better life. It’s fleeting and only one emotional expression among many on the spectrum. A satisfying, full, purposeful and whole life is what we’re all after and to achieve this requires knowing ourselves, our true, “inner” selves, which is something Mackay and I both agree on, as do a long tradition of philsophers, theologians and eastern spiritual types. And the shortcut to this? Being creative.
I have to share this. I was going to put it on Twitter but it’ll take too many characters.
The New York Times has just run a story on all the studies that point to cells/mobiles frying the brain. The put a link to a list of the relative amounts of radiation various cellphone models emit, or their SAR (specific absorption rate). This number indicates how much radiation is absorbed by the body when using the handset at maximum power.
But more important than looking for a low-SAR phone is how you use it, they say.
So, some tricks.
1. Wait until after your call has been connected to put your phone next to your ear.
Phones emit the most radiation when they initially establish contact with the tower, making their “digital handshake.”
2. Tilt the phone away from your ear when talking and only bring it in close to your ear when you are listening.
Which always looks funny…but there’s method to the madness. The emission of radiation is “significantly less when a cellphone is receiving signals than when it is transmitting,” said experts at Rice University in Houston.
The seasons are changing. In light of such, I found this pretty…. I get a little unsettled when summer moves on. I want to grasp at it longer. I feel I’m going to miss out on something. And I hate the cold (it’s a vatta thing). As I write this I’m aware I should be … Read more
