Loose Leaf Notes

1. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” -Susan David, PhD

2. And if I’m ever confined to a bed in a room / I hope my grandson plays Led Zepplin on guitar / His brother can cook me noodles and teriyaki vegetables / while we up the ante in poker and Old Maid – Read Now That I Can Do Crossword Puzzles in One Sitting in its entirety HERE.

3. Writing poetry is a way to zoom in.

4. Veil: evil is veiled. It’s in the word. So is the word “live.”

5. I found two four leaf clovers! Too bad I found them after Joe and I hit a deer with his truck.

6. We lost our wheels but got on our bikes.

7. After I wrote the poem “Now That I Can Do Crossword Puzzles in One Sitting,” I realized I wasn’t as good as I thought I was when I discovered that the puzzles in the first part of my book were easy but the ones in the second part are hard.

8. The message of Soulful Aging is to “do it with art.”  We might forget a name but remember what is beautiful. We might revere a memory or re-name aging as a natural way towards “transcendence.” Taking our leave takes time. More from Reveries of Aging: Aka Losing Our Minds. HERE. 

9. “Take a puppy away from his mother, place him alone in a wicker pen, and you will witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond — a reflection of the limbic architecture mammals share. Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair… Behaviorally and psychologically, the despair phase begins when fretfulness, which can manifest as anxiety in humans, collapses into lethargy — a condition that often accompanies depression. But abrupt and prolonged separation produces something much more than psychological havoc — it unleashes a full-system somatic shock. Various studies have demonstrated that cardiovascular function, hormone levels, and immune response are all disrupted…

10. … But harrowing as this reality of intimacy and its ruptures may be, it also intimates something wonderfully assuring in its mirror-image — just like painful relationships can so dysregulate us, healthy relationships can regulate us and recalibrate our limbic system, forged in our earliest attachments. The solution to the eternal riddle of trust emerges as both banal and profound — simply the practice of continually refining our discernment about character and cultivating intimate relationships of the kind life’s hard edges cannot rupture, with people who are the human equivalent not of poison but of medicine, and endeavoring to become such people ourselves for the emotional ecosystems of those we love… Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. This might sound simple, almost simplistic, but it is one of the most difficult and redemptive arts of living — for, lest we forget, “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love…”

11. “Imagine that reality is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music before and after the song you are hearing is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, that every moment and day endures in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. If we could access all life—the whole record—we could experience it non-sequentially. We could know our children as toddlers, as teenagers, as senior citizens—all now. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now [Besso—one of his oldest friends] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us … know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” – Robert Lanza, A New Theory of the Universe

12. Biocentrism Builds on Quantum Physics– “Insight snapped into focus one day while one Lanza was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds. Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?”

13: You Are the Walrus HERE. 

_____Thirteen Thursday