Quotes

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

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"I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we’re lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it’s worse than fear - it’s active disengagement."

Ken Burns (American Historian)

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"Time pressure can have powerful effects on the body. Our brain regards clocks, deadlines, and interrupted schedules as a threat, and calls up the ’fight or flight’ stress response. The incessant struggle to do more and more in less and less time also makes us more likely to respond with toxic anger to anyone or anything slowing us down. We feel we’re not accomplishing what we should and self esteem plummets.

"We feel exhausted and overwhelmed all the time, denying ourselves the satisfaction of a job well done. Personal relationships suffer. We don’t have time for the real conversations and intimacy that help buffer stress and increase our resistance to disease."

David S. Sobel M.D. from article Rx: Halting Time Pressure -
an excerpt from Sobel’s book The Healthy Mind, Healthy Body Handbook.

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Eckhart Tolle on seeking and purpose

"You need no time to open yourself to the power of now and so awaken to who you are beyond name and form and realize that in the depth of your being, you are already complete, whole, one with the timeless essence of all life.

"For that you not only need no time, but time is the obstacle to that realization, seeking is the obstacle, needing to add something to who you are is the obstacle.

"The story of your life, how it all unfolds, whether you succeed or fail in this world... Yes, it matters, yes, it’s important -- relatively, not absolutely. Only one thing is of absolute importance and this is it.

"If you miss it, you miss the deeper purpose of your life, which I call the flowering of human consciousness. And ultimately nothing else will satisfy you."

Continued in the Meaning and Purpose section.

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New article: Bitter ashes of burned brassieres, By Elizabeth Wurtzel

Feminism, which was meant to be fun, has lately started to seem so sour. Men, particularly married men, often dislike Hillary Clinton, and I suspect that it’s because she represents the unsexy wing of the women’s movement.

But it cannot be the case that we went through all that bra-burning and consciousness-raising to be left choosing between, yet again, the madonna or the whore.

Balance is difficult. But we can do it; we’re women. Like Ginger Rogers, we’ve been doing everything that men do, only backward and in high heels, for a very long time.

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She’s Running The Show

Many talented women in film such as Charlize Theron and Natalie Portman are finding more creative fulfillment as executives and producers, rather than waiting for better acting roles.

But what sorts of challenges do women face when changing or expanding their career choices?

Charlize Theron was actively involved as a producer of her recent film Sleepwalking, as she was for her acclaimed film Monster.

She admires her mother as a role model, and for her individuality: "It was the greatest thing she has given me. I don’t think she knows that. I don’t even think she set out to teach me that. That’s just how she lived her life and what she encouraged me to do. She was a great mother but at the same time she was very much an individual. She ran a business.

"I always say to my friends who are so torn between having a job and leaving kids behind to go to work that their kids will thank them one day. That will be the thing that will inspire them, because I remember watching my mom put her suit and high heels on and go into a board meeting with eight guys.

"She was running the show and I was like, I want to be like that. She always encouraged me to be an individual, to have my own philosophy."

Continued in my article She Is Running The Show.

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