The Professor and the Housewife

Professor J,

Good for you, ending the year with a pretty positive list!

You were correct about the (ahem) under-reporting of the Brazilian water crisis as I had to google it to learn what you were talking about.

I had an interesting conversation this fall with an older friend. She's in her mid seventies and is suffering severe nerve damage from a recent illness. We sat together in a room with blinds closed and the subject of Brittany Maynard came up. It was only a few days before her chosen date of death. My friend had been keeping up and knew every detail. Only a few years ago both of us would have said that she oughtn't be allowed that choice. We discussed how those feelings had changed and softened over time and now how we would both want to be allowed to make that choice for ourselves and we wanted this amazing young woman to have it for herself.

Grace and understanding is often borne of pain and experience. 

Congress should have to sit in alphabetical order like we did in elementary school. While we're at it, dodge ball on C-Span would be a big hit. Or square dancing, where I learned that holding the hand of that boy I disliked in 4th grade, did not in fact, kill me.

Torture having a lasting psychological effect not only on the victim but on the tormentor is of no surprise. It reminded me of brain scans done among serial killers that show marked differences between their brain and the brains of normal individuals that showed what seemed to be a lack of development in the criminal brain. The basic consensus was that they acted as they did because the brain was underdeveloped. In order to prove that however, it seems that you would have to have a subject whose brain had been scanned periodically since childhood. It is quite possible that the brain was damaged by acts of cruelty or that early on there is some sort of disconnect (let's say a lack of empathy) which led to increasing acts of cruelty and violence which in turn damage the brain.

The "happiest man in the world" is purported to be a French Buddhist monk, named Mattheiu Ricard.

It only makes sense that if "as a man thinketh, so he is" that thinking and then acting on those thoughts would be incredibly powerful. Apparently from all of this, brain changingly so.

In a different note, my son who is home from Arizona where he is working for 6 months with American Conservation Experience had this experience on his last hitch:  He was ready to come home and this was the last project to work on before that. He'd been working really hard for 3 months and on this last project he felt like slacking. He was just focused on coming home. He was wet, cold, and tired. It so happened that the crew leader on this expedition was (as my son put it) just the most stand up, nicest, honest, hardworking, genuine guy who never complained about anything, encouraged everyone, and had done 9 months in Afghanistan. When my son felt exhausted he said he would look at this guy and think, "No one is shooting at us out here, so I'm just going to do my job and stop griping." Mr. Snarky said that this guy was what kept him focused those last 8 days.  "When you were around him you just wanted to be a better person."

Maybe the best way to change the world is to just be a stand up guy (or gal) that makes those around you want to be better. That is something to strive for and another positive note for us to wrap up the year on.

Happy 2015!