Surrender and Detach or Just Let Go

I stumbled on these 10 commandments somewhere and I recall making an instant note of it. These may not always resolve many things or everything. But then we do not always have to resolve everything, perhaps there is beauty in unresolved spaces or divine timing. If there is any such thing but I question less. Spiritual or not, don't buy it, I am not selling these.

1. Surrender and Detach — Let go of control and allow the Universe to do it’s work. Create and visualize the end goal, then release it to the Universe and detach. Allow things to unfold.

2. Look for Little Miracles— By noticing and delighting in little miracles along the path of your ultimate goal or life improvement, it reminds you that the Universe is indeed working on your behalf. Look for little signs, small steps and synchronicities. It’s reinforcement for your trust.

3. Watch as Your Needs are Being Fulfilled — As your goals are achieved, you will gain confidence in the process of trusting the Universe. This will lead to greater trust. You may even want to keep a journal of all that manifests. When you look back, you’ll be surprised how many dreams will come true over the course of a year!

4. Remember it’s All in Divine Timing — If you get frustrated by the slowness at which your desires are fulfilled, you resonate distrust. So back up and remember that it is not your timing at work here; it’s divine timing. The Universe knows better when to grant your wish than you do.

5. Letting Go of Resistance – Don’t push, don’t react, don’t force. Let it be. If you keep resisting or pushing back, you are not allowing the Universe to give you its grace easily and effortlessly. You are constricting the flow. It’s another sign of mistrust. So just remind yourself to go with the flow.

6. Tune into Your Higher Self — It’s your ego that wants it now and is convinced your desire can’t materialize without your manipulation and control. Turn it over to your higher self, your “heart self,” and let it open the channel of trust with the Universe.

7. Trust God May Have a Better Answer Than You Do — Trust the Universe to come up with the right solution. If you try to push through or mandate to the Universe the solution you see, you may be limiting yourself. If you postulate in your head how things should happen, you are narrowing the Universe’s possibilities.

8. Give Up Your Problems/Turning It Over — If you have a specific challenge that is confronting you, ask the Universe to take it from your shoulders and resolve it. Trust that it is then being handled and wait for answers.

9. Believe in the Best — Believe in the best of people, circumstances and solutions. If you fret about all the ways things could go wrong, you again demonstrate your mistrust in the Universe. Assume that all will be well and when you turn it over, an elegant solution will turn up or that people will do their best.

10. Listen Deeply and Follow Guidance — The Universe’s answer to a challenge or the achievement of your goal may not be some external resolution. It may be guidance you are given, things you are directed to do or signs that you need to follow. Once you turn it over to the Universe with trust, listen deeply for the wisdom you are offered and follow the guidance.

Günter Grass to Rushdie

Salman Rushdie in Joseph Anton: 

He was remembering  something Günter Grass had once said to him about losing: that it taught you more profound lessons that winning did. The victors believed themselves and their world views justified and validated and learned nothing. The losers had to re-evaluate everything they had thought to be true and worth fighting for and so had a chance of learning, the hard way, the deepest lessons life had to teach.

Keeping Our Agreement with the Wild

Extract from the chapter Our Agreement with the Holy in Nature of book The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic by Martin Prechtel.

The most delicious and comforting characteristic of the strenuous, earthbound, and spiritually drenched existence of intact people worldwide is the cellular detail of the knowledge all their people have of not only their tribal origins, but the origins of every star, planet, rock, tree, animal, sound, food, all mores, strangeness, mood with which people live with and by, and finally resting resprout again. 

This vast education is what makes all things feel at home with all other things and to know where to tread and where to be cautious: how to lie still and when to move; how to eat, speak; and what things are biggest, and which are bigger still. 

The loss of capacity, of detail in our modern lives descended from production-oriented imperial civilizations and may well be the driving force behind the need for science, as its penetrating need-to-know analytic capacity tries to fill the painful void of the civilization it serves to make up for the loss of the lyrical mythologic reality of the indigenous soul present at the deepest levels in all human beings. 

But the loss of this natural education has put out hearts into a zoo like condition of unnatural confinement, causing the worldwide mass epidemic of depression, of lives lived at a spectator distance from the warm soil that births us. Our memory of what it is like to know the story of every rock face in the canyon through which you and your pony ride, what it is like to know the story of how every one of these rock faces originated, and what it is like to know how your ancestral past appeared pushing in and out from their massive cracks, once lost, our memory of being at home on Earth in a real way sinks out of sight back into the indigenous wilderness of our souls, and we become meaningless and depressed. For without that memory, we can't know where we are. 

[…] 

People say, " I just want it all to be simple so my gardening relaxes me from the incomprehensible overwhelm of the world, so I don't have to worry about all this." I suppose selective ignorance on the right day is relaxing, but that's the creed our most recent ancestors taught us to adopt. But remember, just because you don't know what happened doesn't mean it isn't banging around in your blood somewhere making trouble with your soul and eventually your health. After all, anything not committed to our awareness becomes history repeated by none other than the ignorant and eventually settles in our lives and bodies as sickness and neurosis.

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: Martin Prechtel

Recent debate outpouring surrounding Wendy Doniger's work on Hinduism reminded me of this extract from the book I read in recent past, The Unlikely Peace of Cuchumaquic which was worth mentioning to all, leftists, rightists, liberals, conservatives and all those grey shades of outlook in between:

"All of these ways of reacting to curious and lost outsiders have their manifestations everywhere in the world where there are yet real people at home in their own beloved land. By using such beautiful humorously camouflaged verbal detours, they attempt to keep alive what they hold precious far away from the scalding, culture-wilting gaze of modern people who, having lost their own linguistic seeds of indigenous understanding to civilization's amnesia and being aware how destructive and discourteous an interruption they are, are themselves only frustrated by the precious tangle of such long-winded linguistic treasure. 

While I couldn't say much authoritatively about the rest of the world's antique living cultures, what investigators and other impatient travelers have rarely understood, in the instance of these elderly Tzutujil, was that the questions put to them by the outsiders were not considered by these Mayans to be altogether answerable because they were not considered questions that could be indigenously asked. To the old people these questions themselves were parentless orphans who like linguistic slaves sweated away for academics, forced to work "extracting," artificially mined isolated facts with tools of pointed words to remove a single idea out of greater and necessary matrix of a more diverse and immense natural cultural environment. 

And these questions were held captive by the outside investigator, and any "native" responses to them were collected like unrefined ore that the investigator then hauled away, processed, and smelted into bare facts at the university, stacked as facts into some obscure book which itself would most likely end up deeply buried in the catalog dungeon of some university library of microfiche. Such questions, if responded to, gathered only dead ideas out of their context; responses, when held far away from their parent culture, remained trapped like baby quail, stuck in category cages shackled into equations. Without their mother cultures and living supporting world, they were like wild animals sold to a zoo where with other such artificially extracted ideas they paced behind bars of rigid objectified bias where they could no longer function as themselves, the words no longer able to make real sense of themselves in such rarified unnatural settings.

When such strange lines of questioning were fired at them, the old people knew they were being unconsciously attacked in the most insidious and violent way by a people who were uneducated in any real art of speech. The worst part is the invaders were ignorant of the fact they were attacking, unaware that they were just big powerful people whose every motion and word was a weapon of objectivity calibrated to aim at capturing a concept, or possessing something "never discovered before." At least not by them. Just like Columbus and the so called New World.  

It was apparent to these old Indians that though the "attacker" was definitely dangerous, ironically he or she usually showed some signs of human goodness and wounded affability and that all of this unconscious violence probably came from the huge and hungry cultural vacuum from which the outsider themselves originated. This seemed to be an origins empty of self-awareness causing the investigator to be "sick"; someone in need of spiritual repair, an illness that caused the investigator to need to constantly mine the world in order to fill with material or intellectual acquisition the spiritual vacuum created by the sickness. Because the visitors had obviously not grown up in a living world where they should have been taught as children to speak in such a fashion as to "feed and sustain" the people, the village, and the world around them with the magic life-giving eloquence as they conversed with one another, they instead lived by always trying to get something they didn't have, chaining what they captured into immobilized ideas of dry prisoners of words, in order to be told by people they didn't like but feared that they were good enough when they hauled their tale back to headquarters."

On Coetzee's Fiction Writings

Discussing Coetzee's work recently with a dear friend, this is what he said, 

I think, I liked and disliked him all for exactly the same reasons! Namely, and in his fiction at least, for his remarkable ability to conceptually knit events within each book he wrote, that turned the original premises round. He deals brilliantly with hypocrisy! But I suppose it is that very skill he has, the way he made art of writing, instead of simply writing to the default of art that turned me off a touch. Dont mind me, his books are amazing regardless.

Spot on. Even though, Coetzee leaves no opportunity to be clinical (I sometimes wonder if he does that intentionally), his work still remains stellar. 

...

जनम जनम माँगूगी तुमको , तुम मुझको ना ठुकराना।

मैं माटी में मिल जाऊँगी, तुम माटी हो जाना।

Its not Rumi. Rumi like?

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

Having read only two of his books, I was eager to lay my hands on this one, a book, perhaps triggered as a reaction to the controversy that surrounded the author for good part of his life. His fault, he wrote a book about a religion he was born into, Satanic Verses. He had not pleased the fundamentalists. But since when the artistic expressions were made to merely please our senses? Its about raising difficult questions, investigating the unknown and pushing boundaries through struggle to understand our presence here a bit more. With the fatwa in place and bloodthirsty search for Rushdie by Jehadis, it was only one thing that was left to answer, what will one achieve by killing the artist? Because, art or its remnants will remain here forever. Or as Rushdie says,

Art was strong, artists less so. Art could perhaps take care of itself. Artists needed defenders.

Thus he defended himself and was defended by others. In doing so, he lost a great deal and gained a good deal as well. Rushdie is not the one to sit back and mourn about the lost years, he is about making it up for lost freedom, suppression of expression and a whole gamut of evolution that took place when he was presented with this unique tragedy and dealing with it. The book is a detailed one of the years before and during the fatwa years. It's detailed, nuanced but sprightly, nonetheless. Its an emotional journey of his upheavals of a literary life, personal both difficult and beautiful relationships with friends, two sons, four wives, sisters,  parents and through all that emergence of the person he was to become. Its a story told well. 

He has been accused elsewhere of being ostentatious of his literary world in this book. Quite honestly, that was his world too and he has written about people in it, with honesty and with humility. He perhaps doesn't need brownie points for moving in that circle, he was it too. He admits somewhere in the book that the greatest compliment he ever received was from Jorge Vargas Llosa, when he said that, outside spanish literature the two authors he always keeps a track of are- J.M.Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Precious.

His life was anything but linear and he painted many moving images of this being, of this migrated self. The uprooted existence that leaves you with the longing to belong in its most difficult form. 

The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogenous instead of homogenous, belonging to more than one place, multiple rather than singular, responding to more than one way of being, more than averagely mixed-up. Was it possible to be-to become good at being- not rootless, but multiply rooted?

With roughly 600 pages, book may seem fat, heavy, tiresome and laborious. It's none of those. It is stimulating, insightful, wise, moving and of course humorous in several places. 

The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. 

The soul had many dark corners and books sometimes illuminated them.

India was surrounded by unfree societies- Pakistan, China, Burma- but remained an open democracy; flawed, certainly, perhaps even deeply flawed but free.

And finally, its no defense but appropriate to ask, 

The Satanic Verses or any other book, no matter how wretched, what sort of Almighty could be shaken by the work of man?

Essential Rumi

I believe none of us are fully comfortable with words like soul, pure love and heart. And perhaps we never will be as we do not fully comprehend their workings. This could be, for all we know that there is something we do not know- something that we will never be able to fully know. Thus begins our spiritual journey, egotistical as it may sound, our quest to find serenity and beauty that comes from deeper exploration of our conflicts and confirmations. Essential Rumi can be an useful set of ideas that presents a philosophy which may ease one's strain and you actually experience inner walls of pre-held understanding crumbling, brick by brick. Leading you to recognize that our presence is perhaps a myth. And its left to us to unfold this myth,  our mystery away from rational. 

Look at this
just finishing candle stub
as someone who is finally safe
from virtue and vice
the pride and the shame
we claim from those.

Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now. 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
There is a field, I'll meet you there. 

Finally I know the freedom
of madness. 

No one who really loves,
loves existence.

And in that vein, Rumi suggests to dissolve your boundaries, pull and push and reach towards tenderness, of attempting to live beyond that may be undefined & unclear at this point, of sailing inside the inexplicable, drifting within your privacy.

The Misfits (1961)

While Steve Jobs had his version of misfits who thought differently, thinking of an older conversation with a friend, made me come back to the idea of misfits and understand it differently, perhaps. He had described a certain set of professional set-up as dusty, lawless, territorial. All those epithets that come to our mind when we think of Wild West. I had agreed with him wholeheartedly, then. But then,

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Coetzee on The Misfits that I ran into while reading Inner Workings:

The misfits (1961) was put together by a notable set of creative people. The film is based on an original screenplay by Arthur Miller. It was directed by John Huston; and it starred Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in what turned out to be their last big roles. The plot is simple. A woman, Roslyn, visiting Reno, Nevada, for a quick divorce, gets friendly with a group of part-time cowboys and goes off with them into the desert on a jaunt to trap wild horses. There she discovers that the horses will end up not as riding mounts but as pet food. The discovery precipitates a breakdown of trust between her and the men, a breakdown that film patches over only in the most uneasy and unconvincing of ways.

Aside from the ending, the script is a strong one. Miller is operating at the tail end of a long literary tradition of reflecting on the closing of America's western frontier, and the effects of that closing on the American psyche. Huckleberry Finn, at the end of the book about him by Mark Twain, still had the recourse of lighting out for the territories so as to escape civilization (and Nevada, in the 1840s of Huck's childhood, was one of the territories in question).

Miller's cowboys, a century or so later, are trapped in the States with nowhere to go. One of them, Gaye (Clark Gable), has become a gigolo preying on divorcees. Another, Perce (Montgomery Clift) scrapes together a living as a rodeo performer. The third, Guido (Eli Wallach), exhibits the dark side of the male homosociality of the frontier, namely a vicious misogyny.

These are Miller's misfits, men who have either failed to make the transition to the modern world or are making that transition in an ignominious way. The three are presented with a rounded ness that is rare in cinema, the result of Miller's deft professional stagecraft.

But of course Miller's title has a second ironic meaning. If the cowboys are misfits in Eisenhower's America, the Nevada mustangs are even more deeply so. There used to ten of thousands of them; now they are pitiful troops up in the hills, barely worth being exploited. From being an embodiment of the freedom of the frontier, they have become anachronism, creatures with no useful role in mechanized civilization. It is their lot to be herded and hunted from the air; if they are not actually being shot from the air, that is only because the flesh would spoil before the horse-butcher could arrive with his refrigerated truck.

 It dispelled my notion of our transition to mechanized civilization and our precarious origins, evolution and our current belonging and perception towards it.

Coetzee on Naipaul

Why might one be drawn to read a collection of the book reviews from a writer who himself is an accomplished fiction writer? In Inner Workings, J.M.Coetzee analyzes and penetrates few of the literary work by others and through his own voice, gives detailed reviews, explain nuances of work from his, sometimes, detached lens of understanding. In an essay on V.S.Naipaul he explains:

 One of the more consistent strains in the story Naipaul tells of his own life is that it was by a pure effort of will that he became a writer. He was not gifted with fantasy; he had only his childhood in paltry Port of Spain to call on, no larger historical memory (this was where Trinidad failed him, and, behind Trinidad, India); he seemed to have no subject. Only after a decades-long labour of writing did he finally come to the Proustian realization that he had known his true subject all along, and his subject was himself- himself and his efforts, as a colonial raised in a culture that did not (he was told) belong to him and without (he was told) a history, to find a way in the world.

Pamuk's PEN Speech

Bits from Pamuk's speech, in Other Colours:

Regardless of national circumstances, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as the starving yearn for bread, can never justifiably be limited to nationalist sentiment, moral sensitivities, or hoped for international gain. Some of us have better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some like me, try to do the two things at the same time, but these attachments, this desire to understand, should never stand in the way of our respect for human rights. To change one's words, to package them in a way that will be acceptable to everyone, and to become skilled in that arena is bit like smuggling contraband through customs, and much the same way, even when successfully accomplished, it produces a feeling of shame and degradation.

Freedom of thought, the happiness that comes of the ability to express the anger deep inside us- we have already mentioned how honor and human dignity depend on it. Many writers we respect and value have chosen to take up forbidden topics purely because the very nature of the prohibition was an injury to their pride; I know this from my own experience. Because when another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.

Tread softly

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Full poem here.

...

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

~Rushdie in The Satanic Verses

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets

The book Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets aims to map the exclusions and negotiations that females of various age groups and economic classes encounter in their everyday lives in urban spaces in the city of Mumbai. Authors trio, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade have based this book on their 3 years of qualitative research and conclude that women’s presence and participation in public spaces and events has certainly increased but reserve that the city still does not offer equal claim into the realm of public safety in urban streets and spaces.

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets embarks on a significant journey on how a radically transforming city with respect to infrastructure and rapid construction, still continues to grant women only a status of secondary citizen by denying them complete safety at any time of the day. Provision of safety in urban spaces encompasses different understanding for women belonging to different economic classes. Woman travelling in a private vehicle from destination A to destination B has different safety level offered than another woman travelling from same destination A to B in a public transport.

As presented in the book, low visibility areas, poorly lit spaces, deserted streets and public transportation after sunset all consitute for unsafe environments. To counter, women alter their movement and restrict accessing urban spaces, maintaining a compromise. The book presents scenarios where this aspect of women in public spaces is so deeply entrenched that it becomes their second nature to modify their behavior. Examples like covering their chest with a book, file or dupatta, walking while gazing down and pretending to be on the phone while moving swiftly away into private spaces are common glimpses.

What is curious about the book is that investigates various economic and communal settings and how each is unique in providing different degree of freedom and social constraints. So a city, essentially an amalgam of various faiths and religion and cosmoplitan in its claim, provides a different level of freedom in varied communities. And women are not let loose from the clutches of moral policing in the name of safety. She can be letched, eve-teased, groped, stared and made to feel voilated, possibly anywhere. On the other hand, the same does not apply for men, as the authors point out. Men move about and expand their access to urban spaces more vigorously and more importantly any time of the day. Thus enabling more choices with respect to jobs they take up or engage in various social gestures.

This book presents scenarios of Mumbai’s changing landscape and how this emerging urban fabric could be flawed from equitable development and equal access to all citizens. And this is where I see authors blurring issues of gender humiliation to urban development. The two are distinct issues and a very organic development devoid of zoning has not been a solution either, as suggested by the researchers. Women’s safety in a city is not an unique Indian issue. Its rampant here could be a case of cultural baggage of gender hierarchy and its related perils.

The Dirty Picture

She is unapologetic, unabashed through and through and she does things as she wishes to and just laces it with clever one or two liners and you chuckle, giggle and Silk moves on with her next move. She rips apart all the layers of systematic Indian hypocrisy and quite mercilessly so. And why not, she has learned her lessons very early of this hypocrisy and its vacuousness that Indians proudly swear by. She has learned watching through that key hole that a man can manage to move on from one woman to another quickly and duplicity comes to him naturally. She knows, if she followed the same behavior, she will be labeled loose, lewd and lustful. Guess what, she doesn't care or at least that is what she projects.

The Indian system which puts such a premium on a girl to be 'morally good' one who cares for her modesty and fall in the system's expectation, one of marriage followed by babies or else she falls short of some God forsaken womanhood. And, so even in her rebellious avatar, Silk, ends her life in bridal clothes. One she desired or society desired of her is hard to say.

Movie is pacy, replete with clever one liners and it does not dwell on nuances for too long and there isn't anything to whine about. Nothing at all. A montage, accolades worthy.

On a lighter note, will ooh la la be as perky or "bombatt" without Bappi Lahiri's voice? Think about it.

On Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

... despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

…change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.

Excerpts from an interview on Better Angels of Our Nature and Why Violence Has Declined

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson

Its difficult to have missed Sir Ken Robinson's talk which is available on TED and perhaps one of the most devoured talk of our time. His wry sense of humor, nailing the ailments of current education system, all laced with his profound understanding on the topic which he talks with ease. One of the recent watch made me impulsively buy his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

His book is a fine extension of things he talks about: creativity, education, its manifestation in a system, a system that perhaps has gone wrong in a severe way. And is looking for ways to change, louder than ever: change that he professes, transformation in a revolutionary way rather than just revising a system. And he does it with pure examples of many creative people who rejected the system, found themselves misfit in a system and kept looking for their creative passion till they discovered it. He urges to look away from the current industrialized model of education and find ways which leverages human diversity in a rich way to save ourselves from an impending crisis of severely damaged human ecology.

He emphasizes that culture itself is strict system, a manifestation, a structure to organize ourselves in an earnest attempt to define our identities.

Culture is a system of permissions.

First we create a system of culture, we put certain parameters of behavior, acceptable & non- acceptable ones. And in doing so, we start putting expectations and sub-consciously demand things and indirectly command people to behave in certain ways in a restrictive way. But things do not always behave in a pre-determined or a predictable manner. Life is not linear, in fact it is extremely organic. To deal with unpredictability and non-linearity, we need to be flexible enough to explore alternate creative paths. And thus he rejects uniformity and homogeneity of a systematic pre-approved thinking.

We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

Book is a celebration of his revolutionary thinking which he has formed over a period of time after interacting with several diverse people across the globe, their journey (sometimes a difficult one) to find their passion and being in one's element, their only element which places them in this magical space in mind where they cannot imagine doing anything else. It breaks all the shackles of a system and frees people to follow that inner inkling of heart whatever that talent might be. For example, so many cultures still emphasize and define a women's secondary role in the system, her delusional image of nurturing the humanity, motherhood and a gender which should bring glamor and gloss to the settings. He says,

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident- all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

Atul Gawande's Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performer Better?

Every time you read essays written by Atul Gawande you are on a high, high achieved through his honest and extremely sorted thought process. He brings his perspective as a physician/surgeon but he correlates his learning and understanding quite easily to other professions and disciplines. His latest essay had the same impact, same heady impact. This is not the first time, I have longed to read his books. Below is an excerpt from his aforementioned article:

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion. Local health systems may need to go the way of the Albemarle school district. We could create coaching programs not only for surgeons but for other doctors, too—internists aiming to sharpen their diagnostic skills, cardiologists aiming to improve their heart-attack outcomes, and all of us who have to figure out ways to use our resources more efficiently. In the past year, I’ve thought nothing of asking my hospital to spend some hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the surgical equipment I use, in the vague hope of giving me finer precision and reducing complications. Avoiding just one major complication saves, on average, fourteen thousand dollars in medical costs—not to mention harm to a human being. So it seems worth it. But the three or four hours I’ve spent with Osteen each month have almost certainly added more to my capabilities than any of this.

Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology. We await every new cancer drug as if it will be our salvation. We dream of personalized genomics, vaccines against heart disease, and the unfathomed efficiencies from information technology. I would never deny the potential value of such breakthroughs. My teen-age son was spared high-risk aortic surgery a couple of years ago by a brief stent procedure that didn’t exist when he was born. But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology. We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

Complaints

I figure, complaining, is a form of luxury. A privilege, if one wants to label it. Perhaps from our impatience, restlessness and a need to be heard. What if, you did not have access to vent, access to complain, to simply offload and step aside? What would you do?

You turn inwards perhaps, reason in all possible ways and reach within for a solution. Perhaps, complaining is an outwardly, somewhat noisy expression, as I see it.

Turning inwards, in absence of such luxurious mechanism of venting, you struggle more honestly, gain focus with the energy conserved, focus that is geared towards something more.

Think Different

To Steve Jobs and his Apple Inc., salüt!