“Happiness runs in a circular motion,
Thought is like a little boat upon the sea,
Everybody is a part of everything anyway,
You can have everything if you let yourself be.”
A song of prayer written by Donovan after his trip in 1969 to India with The Beatles (with Graham Nash and Paul McCartney’s brother Mike on backing vocals).
With the advent of the printing press, the indexbecame an accepted feature of books — and a frequent battlefield Indexing
“Happiness runs in a circular motion,
Everybody is a part of everything anyway,
You can have everything if you let yourself be.”
Research: Stress Might Have Gotten A Bum Rap
To misquote Shakespeare’s Hamlet, stress may be neither good nor bad – but thinking makes it so.
A growing body of research suggests that it is our beliefs about our feelings, as much as the feelings themselves, that determine their effects on the brain and body. Negative views of stress and anxiety often exacerbate our problems. - The Guardian
Minimalist Paintings, Maximal Life: Carmen Herrera, Belatedly Appreciated, Dies at 106
The country reported a total of 74 deaths across its three most-populous states: New South Wales (36), Victoria (22) and Queensland (16).
"Today, is a very difficult day for our state," New South Wales (NSW) Premier Dominic Perrottet told the media.
Only four of those who died in NSW had received their booster shot, leading the state's health officials to call on people to avoid delays in getting their third dose.
This is the wildlife photo of the year, as chosen by the public
(CNN) — “An image of a frozen lake and the reflection of willow branches above the water’s icy surface has claimed the top prize in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award 2021. The shot by Italian photographer Cristiano Vendramin, originally among a shortlist of 25 images, was voted for by more than 31,800 wildlife and nature enthusiasts, according to a press release Tuesday from organizers at London’s Natural History Museum. His image and that of the top four “highly commended” finalistswill be displayed in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition currently running in London at the Natural History Museum. The images that made it to the final stages were varied in topic. There was a photo of two lions taking shelter from the rain and another of an unusual encounter between an eagle and bear. A picture of a kangaroo and her joey that managed to survive the devastating bushfires in Australia was highly commended, as was an image of a dance between two male golden pheasants…”
In November 1967, Robin Farquharson ‘dropped out’. After losing his job as a computer programmer along with the flat he’d been renting, he decided to forgo the dwindling funds in his bank account and live on London’s streets. In his short memoir Drop Out! (1968), Farquharson recounted his homeless wanderings and loose associations with London’s underground scene, moving from all-night cafés to ‘psychedelic’ nightclubs; he described being robbed and beaten in the street, and his first experience of LSD. At 37, Farquharson felt too old to be a hippy, nonetheless he saw his disaffiliation within the context of a wider movement towards social and personal liberation, inspired by Timothy Leary’s injunction to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’: words he interpreted as a call to ‘rid yourself of responsibility, quit the rat-race. Don’t obey society’s paralysing conventions … Step out of the trap.’
The 1960s dropout has been dusted off and trotted out to model a life lived against the digital grain Drop Out
Here’s the third thing I learnt: your own ambitions can be a hard master too. In my thirties I decided to focus on trying to be a writer and a journalist. I had cleverly worked out that while music was a dying industry, print media was surely the future. I worked very hard at this. I pitched articles. I wrote for every publication that would have me. In the wake of my musical failure, I worked too hard. This time I succeeded in making a career of it but I also hit a wall. I became unsure if I liked writing any more or even what constituted “success”.
The problem with wanting to become something and focusing so much on some future version of yourself is that you don’t really fully experience things in the present tense. Everything you do becomes just one more thing on an anxiety-laden to-do list. Things I might otherwise have enjoyed, like interviewing an interesting person or visiting a cool place, become worry-filled steps on the road to “success”.
A few years ago, ground down by my own psyche, I decided to enjoy things more, to pick projects based on curiosity rather than what would bring me closer to a phantom notion of my future self.
Even the desire to create things — the one ambitious drive I can still relate to — can leave people feeling empty and depleted and underwhelmed once those things are out in the world. It’s all bizarre behaviour that overreaches our genetic programming. I imagine dogs who chase cars feeling similarly confused when they eventually sit behind the steering wheel with no opposable thumbs to grasp it with. At the end of the day, even success feels like failure.
Here’s the final thing I learnt: change can be good. Like a lot of other people, I’m reassessing things at the moment. It’s not unusual to find that the ambitions we once had don’t fit us any more, and the pandemic has intensified this feeling. Covid-19 has been busily rewiring our wants and needs. Ambition seems very silly when the corner office is the same boxroom that everyone else is sitting in. And we’ve spent two years looking at our peers on Zoom and realised that no matter how successful or unsuccessful we are, to an outside observer many of us are doing the same ridiculous thing: we’re huddled over a laptop, taking orders from it, occasionally talking to it and then typing frantically.
I think another change is in order. Maybe I’ll try to be a billionaire. Maybe I’ll start a new band. Maybe I’ll just go outside.
