It’s no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species.
To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.
Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.112 They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. – RABINDRANATH TAGORE.
Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage by considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them; every day begin the task anew. – FRANCIS DE SALES.
As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, “Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.” And even when the information is not false, the problem is “that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.
In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dumbledore asks Snape not to wake Harry: “Let him sleep. For in dreams, we enter a world that is entirely our own. Let him swim in the deepest ocean or glide over the highest cloud.
And time inherently creates a story. Things begin and they end. How they end is the story. Or maybe it’s what happens between when they begin and end that’s the story.
People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills, when it is possible for you to retreat into yourself any time you want. There.
As Marlo Thomas once said, “A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold.
Those who do contemplative retreats in hermitages are far from doing nothing, since they are constantly engaged in training their minds, but there is no ‘noise,’ no ‘waste’ to eliminate, no stress to cure, no chaos to reorganize. This means that there is less to repair during sleep and the sleep quality of meditators is deeper.
It’s not that capitalism isn’t working. It’s that what we have right now is not capitalism. What we have is corporatism. It’s welfare for the rich. It’s the government picking winners and losers. It’s Wall Street having its taxpayer-funded cake and eating it, too. It’s socialized losses and privatized gains.
Like airlines, we routinely overbook ourselves, fearful of any unused capacity, confident that we can fit everything in. We fear that if we don’t cram as much as possible into our day, we might miss out on something fabulous, important, special, or career advancing. But there are no rollover minutes in life. We don’t get to keep all that time we “save.” It’s actually a very costly way to live.
In our daily lives, moving from struggle to grace requires practice and commitment.
REM sleep can help us process emotional stress.
It’s nice to be nice, but it can be extremely draining and self-destructive when it mutes our voice, holds us back, and undermines our authenticity.
The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.
The Exxon Valdez wreck, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, and the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island all were at least partially caused by a lack of sleep.5.
Montaigne: “To practice death is to practice freedom.71 A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” Being a slave to our job and our status in the world makes it much harder to put our day behind us and surrender to sleep.
In fact, we take much better care of our smartphones than ourselves.