Excerpt from Lucius Seneca, “On The Shortness of Life”: It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is [...]
Archive for the ‘A Life Worth Living’ Category
Exercise is the key to staying young, at least among mice
Posted: 4 March 2011 in A Life Worth LivingTags: Ageing, Mitochondrion, Physical exercise
NYT article about research on mice genetically programmed to grow old at an accelerated pace — the ones that did not exercise died right away, the ones that ran vigorously everyday lived much longer and looked younger, too: The researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the impact that exercise had on the animals’ aging [...]
Something has shifted
Posted: 3 March 2011 in Solitude, Silence, Serenity, StillnessTags: Religion and Spirituality, yoga
I went to a yoga retreat for one week in Yelapa, a small village in Mexico, accessible only by boat from Puerto Vallarta. There are no roads in Yelapa and thus, no large hotels, no nightclubs, no casinos. Cell phone signals are weak. The place I stayed during the retreat had no Internet access. We [...]
“It was I who had been wrong in wanting life to conform to a preconceived ideal; it was for me to show myself equal to everything life might bring.” — Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mémoirs d’Une Jeune Fille Rangée)
What do we lose when we cannot be alone?
Posted: 17 February 2011 in Solitude, Silence, Serenity, StillnessSherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together, examines how friending, texting and tweeting are diminishing our capacity to be alone and to experience solitude. Andrew Keen has reviewed the book: Turkle talks to high school students who are sending 6,000 text messages a day, thereby predicating their whole identity on electronic communications. “If Facebook were deleted, [...]
