As this is one of the best talks I've encountered, I am re-posting it.
After bacterial meningitis took her legs, Amy Purdy struggled with depression, and only beat it when she learned to accept her new reality, but not any limitations. After being unable to find prosthetics that would allow her to snowboard, she built her own. Today, she is a world champion female adaptive snowboarder. In 2005, she co-founded Adaptive Action Sports, a non-profit dedicated to introducing people with physical challenges to action sports.
Showing posts with label Existential Questions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Existential Questions. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Monday, February 1, 2016
TED Talk - Before I die.......
I have decided to pick a theme for each week's blog. As it happens, last week's theme was downhill skiing/poetry. This week's theme is "purpose" (i.e. life purpose).
Candy Chang creates art that prompts people to think about their secrets, wishes and hopes — and then share them.
Candy Chang creates art that prompts people to think about their secrets, wishes and hopes — and then share them.
Candy Chang is an artist, designer, and urban planner who explores making cities more comfortable and contemplative places. She believes in the potential of introspection and collective wisdom in public space to improve our communities and help us lead better lives.
Recent projects include Before I Die, where she transformed an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans into an interactive wall for people to share their hopes and dreams -- a project The Atlantic called “one of the most creative community projects ever.” Other projects include I Wish This Was, a street art project that invites people to voice what they want in vacant storefronts, and Neighborland, an online tool that helps people self-organize and shape the development of their communities. She is a TED Senior Fellow, an Urban Innovation Fellow, and was named a “Live Your Best Life” Local Hero by Oprah magazine. By combining street art with urban planning and social activism, she has been recognized as a leader in developing new strategies for the design of our cities. She is co-founder of Civic Center, an art and design studio in New Orleans. See more at candychang.com.
Before I die, I want to find my own unique way to help the world be a better place. I also want to learn to smile more.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
TED Talk - Our Basic Purpose/ Richard Layard
On my drives to/from Tahoe, I usually listen to an audiobook or a course of some kind. Most recently, it was "Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor Frankl. Dr. Frankl was a psychiatrist and a survivor of Auschwitz, who, based on his experiences, postulated that "meaning"(purpose?) was at the core of a mental attitude that could survive almost any hardship and that this attitude could be willed into existence (at least that's my interpretation.)
I'm embedding a video from a TED talk(a favorite source) which embodies Dr. Frankl's tenets in a more easily understood and more current context. Note that it is 22 minutes long.
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. What should be our basic purpose in life? What kind of society should we live in? Prof. Layard argues that the objective for our society should not be to become richer and richer. Wealth, he claims, is related to happiness only up to a point - and where the two diverge, we should not forget that the promised happiness was the only reason we attempted to become richer in the first place.
RICHARD LAYARD is best known for his contributions to happiness economics. You are likely to know him as the author of “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science” (2005) – a book which redefined the simplistic economic link between income and happiness. He is also the
co-founder of the Action for Happiness movement, now counting over 30,000 members. In both 2012 and 2013 Professor Layard co-edited the World Happiness Reports. Professor Layard’s studies have over the years considered unemployment and inequality. Moreover his recent work on the importance of non-income variables contributing to aggregate happiness has focused on mental health.
I'm embedding a video from a TED talk(a favorite source) which embodies Dr. Frankl's tenets in a more easily understood and more current context. Note that it is 22 minutes long.
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. What should be our basic purpose in life? What kind of society should we live in? Prof. Layard argues that the objective for our society should not be to become richer and richer. Wealth, he claims, is related to happiness only up to a point - and where the two diverge, we should not forget that the promised happiness was the only reason we attempted to become richer in the first place.
RICHARD LAYARD is best known for his contributions to happiness economics. You are likely to know him as the author of “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science” (2005) – a book which redefined the simplistic economic link between income and happiness. He is also the
co-founder of the Action for Happiness movement, now counting over 30,000 members. In both 2012 and 2013 Professor Layard co-edited the World Happiness Reports. Professor Layard’s studies have over the years considered unemployment and inequality. Moreover his recent work on the importance of non-income variables contributing to aggregate happiness has focused on mental health.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Strange Gift??
A friend asked me quite a while back to write something for a blogazine on what it's like to have Parkinson's Disease. I have been thinking about it since then. I could discuss the physical side of it....but that is only one level.
For me, perhaps, one of the greatest impacts it comes with is the desire to look much more closely at day to day life, to understand on a deeper level what life is/can be about. We spend so much time focused on things outside of ourself, the goings on around us, money concerns, how we look, etc.
Becoming ill somehow forced me into the position, a seemingly urgent position at first, of trying to understand...."Why?" Why me, why this, why that? And there were never any answers. But there was something I felt, below the surface. To the other questions --Why are we here? What is our/my purpose? How do I want to live the remaining years of my life? What is most important to me in terms of my focus? There were no obvious answers that seemed to solidify.
My therapist and I gave me permission to ski much more...which may seem trivial and self-centered. But there is actually some form of communication between Mother Nature/Heaven & Earth, the world beneath the surface and I when I am in the mountains. It's difficult to verbalize - the feeling of interacting with the forces of nature - gravity, also fear--trying to look it in the eye, somehow trying to come to know myself and the Earth better simply by being more present in each moment.
Shortly after leaving work, I started to spontaneously write poetry (never mind whether it was any good). But the words come from the subconscious, as though taking dictation. They come from somewhere other than the mind.
It is this place of instinct from which art, in general, comes I think. There is a beauty/poetry in seeing the relationship between forms and lines and taking a photo, for example. You may have no idea why you just snapped that shot...it's not conventional....but there is some feeling of flow, of a beauty beyond the power of words --some form of common force in the world----trying to harmonize with other forces.
It is this force that seems to me to be at the center of the answers that I seek. And I think it somehow fundamentally comes down to love (love of the Earth, of animals, of our common humanity, of each other in all our glowing and less than wonderful moments).
As Henri Cartier-Bresson says, we are simultaneously living and dying. Nothing is static; nothing is permanent. Each fleeting moment carries all of life within it and it can never be re-lived.
What will we choose to do with each of these moments? What will we spend each of these moments focused on--earning a living perhaps, doing all of the daily tasks of living -- yes, of course, but perhaps guided by the "flow" (the "force??") of love/life that permeates every molecule of Earth and its inhabitants.....or perhaps at least trying to better understand that "flow".
I think I have come to believe that the underlying purpose of life is the expression of love......for ourselves, for each other, for the Earth (our home) and all of its creatures. That is the theory, for now at least, that instinctively fits and feels best for me. If I could live the rest of my life devoted to trying to be true to that approach, I would feel that becoming ill and coming to that realization was perhaps one of the greatest gifts ever given to me. As always, that's much easier said than actually done.
For me, perhaps, one of the greatest impacts it comes with is the desire to look much more closely at day to day life, to understand on a deeper level what life is/can be about. We spend so much time focused on things outside of ourself, the goings on around us, money concerns, how we look, etc.
Becoming ill somehow forced me into the position, a seemingly urgent position at first, of trying to understand...."Why?" Why me, why this, why that? And there were never any answers. But there was something I felt, below the surface. To the other questions --Why are we here? What is our/my purpose? How do I want to live the remaining years of my life? What is most important to me in terms of my focus? There were no obvious answers that seemed to solidify.
My therapist and I gave me permission to ski much more...which may seem trivial and self-centered. But there is actually some form of communication between Mother Nature/Heaven & Earth, the world beneath the surface and I when I am in the mountains. It's difficult to verbalize - the feeling of interacting with the forces of nature - gravity, also fear--trying to look it in the eye, somehow trying to come to know myself and the Earth better simply by being more present in each moment.
Shortly after leaving work, I started to spontaneously write poetry (never mind whether it was any good). But the words come from the subconscious, as though taking dictation. They come from somewhere other than the mind.
It is this place of instinct from which art, in general, comes I think. There is a beauty/poetry in seeing the relationship between forms and lines and taking a photo, for example. You may have no idea why you just snapped that shot...it's not conventional....but there is some feeling of flow, of a beauty beyond the power of words --some form of common force in the world----trying to harmonize with other forces.
It is this force that seems to me to be at the center of the answers that I seek. And I think it somehow fundamentally comes down to love (love of the Earth, of animals, of our common humanity, of each other in all our glowing and less than wonderful moments).
As Henri Cartier-Bresson says, we are simultaneously living and dying. Nothing is static; nothing is permanent. Each fleeting moment carries all of life within it and it can never be re-lived.
What will we choose to do with each of these moments? What will we spend each of these moments focused on--earning a living perhaps, doing all of the daily tasks of living -- yes, of course, but perhaps guided by the "flow" (the "force??") of love/life that permeates every molecule of Earth and its inhabitants.....or perhaps at least trying to better understand that "flow".
I think I have come to believe that the underlying purpose of life is the expression of love......for ourselves, for each other, for the Earth (our home) and all of its creatures. That is the theory, for now at least, that instinctively fits and feels best for me. If I could live the rest of my life devoted to trying to be true to that approach, I would feel that becoming ill and coming to that realization was perhaps one of the greatest gifts ever given to me. As always, that's much easier said than actually done.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)