Wasting Time is such a, well, Waste of Time

by admin on October 14, 2011

It always starts out with the best of intentions. You are going to go online and look for a recipe for something for dinner, or to see how your favorite sports team got on, but as you are looking for that information something else pops up on your computer – latest on Michael Jackson death trial, or which Republican Presidential candidate has a hidden secret – and you think “well, let’s take a look”. Five hours later you stagger away from the computer with absolutely no clue about what you just saw or why you went online in the first place.

It happens to all of us. It’s a like a giant sinkhole that just draws us in. Even if you are aware of the dangers it sometimes feels as if you have no power to prevent it or stop it once it’s happening.

And it’s such a waste of time

I mean how often have you ever needed or even wanted to have a conversation about 98% of the stuff you read online. And yet you read it. So, what’s going on here and how can you break that habit?

Well, procrastination for one thing. You are avoiding doing something you don’t really want to do, by substituting something else – even if it turns out that you didn’t particularly care about that either. All you’ve done is find a meaningless replacement for something that might be useful.

There’s also the ‘sleaze’ factor. We’re drawn to gossip and chit chat about celebrities, to find out their weaknesses and secrets and sins. And the internet makes that easier than ever. You don’t even have to go looking for it, it seems to find you. And once it’s right in front of you it’s really, really hard to ignore.

How do you break it?

Well, it’s not easy. If it were there wouldn’t be books written about how to break bad habits, there wouldn’t be entire professions devoted to helping people change their minds.

But the first step is wanting to. If you have reached a point where you are just bored about being bored then give yourself some credit for at least recognizing the problem and looking for a solution.

After that, come up with any number of different ways of avoiding mindless surfing and staying focused on what you wanted to find out in the first place. It could be something as simple as writing down on a piece of paper (I know, writing, how radical eh!) what it is you are looking for and keeping that in front of you as you work on the computer. It will help keep you focused on what you set out to do and if you start to stray you just look at the piece of paper and get right back to business.

Time to make time

You could give yourself a set time to surf and even have a little alarm set on your watch or phone or computer that goes off after 15 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, reminding you that the time is up.

You could allow yourself 30 minutes a day for random, pointless, self-indulgent goofing around online. This way you don’t feel deprived, you get to read up on the latest celebrity gossip or whatever it is that is your weakness, and then once you are done you get on with the rest of your life.

None of these distractions are going away. In fact they are only likely to multiply as we become increasingly ‘connected’ in every aspect of our lives. But just because you are ‘connected’ does not mean you have to become ‘disconnected’ from the rest of the world around you.

All you have to do is decide just how much is enough.

 

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The Award You Really Don’t Want to Win

by admin on October 10, 2011

Some awards are really sought after – the Nobel prize, an Oscar – and then there are those no one wants to win – such as the Golden Raspberry, the flip side of the Oscars, given to the person judged to be the worst actor of the year.

Add to that list the Ig Nobel prizes, given to some of the strangest research projects and studies of the year. And believe me, some of these are really strange, to the point where you wonder how on earth did they get funding for this and why on earth would they even think that if they did get money that the findings were worth reporting.

Anyway – here some of this year’s winners.

Physiology prize - a team of European scientists won this for their study entitled “No evidence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise”. This ground breaking piece of scientific exploration concluded that, unlike people, red-footed tortoises don’t start yawning just because one of their chums is yawning. That’s it. Nothing else. End of story. So, next time you see a red-footed tortoise yawning it’s not because it’s copying someone else, it’s probably just bored by all the scientists who keep following it around

Chemistry prize - a team from Japan won this for their work – and in determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. You read that right. “To invent the wasabi alarm”. What’s wrong with a smoke detector or other alarm. Apparently they lack a pungent smell to alert you that something really really bad is happening.

Medicine prize – scientists in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Australia share the shame in this category for their work demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate. No, really, that’s what they studied, how wise you are when you really need to pee. The best bit though is the title of their research: Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains

And if you thought those were crazy, check this one out.

Public Safety prize – John Senders at the University of Toronto in Canada, conducted a series of experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him. The goal was to test just how this might interfere with your ability to drive safely. I think the answer would be quite a lot, but what do I know. I’m no scientist.

But my favorite award is the

Mathematics prize -this was shared by a bunch of people who all made predictions about when the earth would come to an end. It includes Dorothy Martin who guessed we’d all be done by 1954, Pat Robertson (yes, that Pat Robertson) who guessed 1982, Elizabeth Clare Prophet (1990) and Harold Camping who thought it would all come to a nasty end on both September 6, 1994 and then again on October 21 of this year. Well done Harold for sticking to your guns. The Ig Nobel folks honored them for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

Amen to that.

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Ah, the not-so-simple life!

by admin on October 5, 2011

Sometimes you just feel the need to get away, to get out of the City and head out to the country, the mountains, the lakes, the seaside, for some peace and quiet. To escape the constant bombardment of the senses by noise and traffic and lights and sounds and smells. So, recently Shirley and I decided to get away, to go camping. And we discovered that the simple life is not so simple at all.

Getting away from it all

Now we always travel light. When we got on vacation we bring one bag each, regardless of whether we are going to Portland for a weekend or Paris for two weeks (if we ever went to Paris for two weeks that is) so we figured camping would be an equally easy thing to do. Boy were we wrong.

Traveling not-so-light!

By the time we had loaded into the car the tent, the cooler with the food/wine/beer, the box with the cooking gear/plates/cups/utensils, the cooking stove, the sleeping bags, the blow up mattress (OK, so I’m a sissy) and of course books and ukuleles there was barely room for us. We thought that somehow we had overdone it but when we got to our campsite we realized that we were traveling light compared to everyone else.

Some of these campsites – and admittedly they had kids – had five or more chairs, extra tents to cover the picnic tables, bikes, assorted toys, umbrellas, even surf boards. In short, their sites were jam packed and you wonder how they managed to cram all that stuff into their cars – until you realized they were all driving massive SUV’s or oversized mini-vans (isn’t that a contradiction in terms, an oversized mini van!)

In the end we looked like the poor kids on the block living a bleak and impoverished existence.

It’s all relative

Looking around at all the campsites, and all the families trying so hard to get back to nature it reminded me of Gandhi. No, really it did.

Ben Kingsley goes camping

Gandhi always tried to lead a life of simplicity, weaving the cloth for his own clothes, eating frugally etc. But of course he also led a national organization and traveled extensively and worked hard to spread the word of non-violence around the world. And all that took a lot of money so it’s no surprise that one of his biggest supporters – a textile manufacturer – always used to laugh when people praised Gandhi for living a life of poverty, saying “It costs me a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”

That’s how I felt looking around at the campsite. It costs a heck of a lot of money and takes a huge amount of effort and equipment to get back to nature.

Call of the mild

But you know what. It was all worth it. Once we’d set up the tent, got everything unpacked, the fire going, the cooker cooking, the wine uncorked and beer poured, and looked around and realized that we were in a willow grove, on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Pacific Ocean with our only companions being some raccoons and  owls, we realized we were back in nature. That night, with the sound of the ocean rolling in as the backdrop I slept better than I had in ages.

Finding the simple life isn’t simple. But it is definitely worth the effort.

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How 9/11 is Creating Communities

by admin on September 14, 2011

I confess that on the tenth anniversary of September 11th I didn’t pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV news or listen to the radio. I didn’t have the heart to. I’d already heard enough and read enough and certainly seen enough reminders of that dreadful day and didn’t feel I wanted to wallow in it any more. It was just too painful.

Then I came across this email from one of the founders of a group called Meetup. What is wonderful is that it’s a story about how 9/11 had a powerful impact on us – not just in the obvious, tragic sense – and helped inspire some people to create new communities of their own.

Instead of succeeding in isolating us as individuals, fearful for our lives, the attack had the opposite effect. It made us hungry to know our neighbors and our friends. And that is truly something worth celebrating.

Fellow Meetuppers,

I don’t write to our whole community often, but this week is special because it’s the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and many people don’t know that Meetup is a 9/11 baby.

Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles from the Twin Towers, and I was the kind of person who thought local community doesn’t matter much if we’ve got the internet and tv. The only time I thought about my neighbors was when I hoped they wouldn’t bother me.

When the towers fell, I found myself talking to more neighbors in the days after 9/11 than ever before. People said hello to neighbors (next-door and across the city) who they’d normally ignore. People were looking after each other, helping each other, and meeting up with each other. You know, being neighborly.

A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9/11 could bring people together in a lasting way. So the idea for Meetup was
born: Could we use the internet to get off the internet — and grow local communities?

We didn’t know if it would work. Most people thought it was a crazy idea — especially because terrorism is designed to make people distrust one another.

A small team came together, and we launched Meetup 9 months after 9/11.

Today, almost 10 years and 10 million Meetuppers later, it’s working. Every day, thousands of Meetups happen. Moms Meetups, Small Business Meetups, Fitness Meetups… a wild variety of 100,000 Meetup Groups with not much in common — except one thing.

Every Meetup starts with people simply saying hello to neighbors. And what often happens next is still amazing to me.
They grow businesses and bands together, they teach and motivate each other, they babysit each other’s kids and find other ways to work together. They have fun and find solace together. They make friends and form powerful community. It’s powerful stuff.

It’s a wonderful revolution in local community, and it’s thanks to everyone who shows up.

Meetups aren’t about 9/11, but they may not be happening if it weren’t for 9/11.

9/11 didn’t make us too scared to go outside or talk to strangers. 9/11 didn’t rip us apart. No, we’re building new community together!!!!

The towers fell, but we rise up. And we’re just getting started with these Meetups.

Scott Heiferman (on behalf of 80 people at Meetup HQ) Co-Founder & CEO, Meetup New York City September 2011

NOTE: From Shirl, Wow!  I had no idea!  Thanks for letting us know.

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To save your brain you gotta work your heart

by admin on September 11, 2011

I have this theory that the rising rates of dementia and Alzheimer’s are connected to the increasing use of computers. No, don’t go away, it’ll make sense when I explain it. Probably.

Your brain in a computer

See, as computers get more powerful they need more and more memory. And that memory has to come from some where. I know, you probably thought it came from those silicon chip things they stick inside the computer. But I think that’s only part of the answer.

You can’t get something from nothing

I think there is a limited amount of memory in the universe and as you use more in one area you have to take it from somewhere. So, as your PC or Apple gets more and more powerful, and faster and has more memory, it’s coming from the universe – namely me and you. And that’s why, as you marvel at the speed that your computer is working you might also pause to consider that it’s coming at the expense of your Aunt Mabel who, as the rest of the family have noticed, is not quite as quick as she used to be.

Now, I bring this all up because while we may not be able to turn back the technological tide that is sucking up our memory, there are a number of things we can do in our everyday life to help reduce the likelihood that it’s our memory that is sucked up into the iPad.

Pump it up

One is that any exercise you do that gets your heart pumping could also have a big impact on your brain, reducing your risk of dementia or other memory problems. The study, from the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, examined 1,600 research papers and found that most of the science seems to point firmly to exercise as being a great way to not only promote physical health but also mental health.

The best part was that the exercise didn’t have to be hugely strenuous or demanding, it just had to be demanding enough to raise your heart rate and increase your body’s need for oxygen; that could be everything from going to the gym, to going for a walk, raking leaves or shoveling snow.

So, as the fall and winter draw near get out those rakes and shovels. They could help do more than just keep the driveway clear, they could help you keep your mind clear as well.

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Everything New is Old!

by admin on September 5, 2011

When bad things happen people often rush to judgement; they are quick to find fault, to figure out who’s to blame and why, and what needs to be done about it. That can happen in something as intimate as a relationship or friendship, in a broader context in the workplace, or – as recently happened in England – on a national scale after a series of violent and deadly riots.

London's Burning

In the days and weeks following the riots in the UK, the newspapers, TV and radio were filled with the voices of the professional pontificating class all mourning the end of standards and manners and all sense of decency, blaming it on the welfare state, the collapse of the family, too much immigration, too little education, a lack of respect for the social order, too much respect for the celebrity culture, and calling for the return of flogging/hanging/birching, the return of the draft, and calling for all those guilty to be locked up and the key thrown away.

Hang ‘em all

All terribly satisfying to write I’m sure but woefully short on any insight into what happened and why and what really needs to be done about it.

But then that’s not too terribly surprising. Because apparently that’s what always happens after things like this. The Economist magazine had a wonderful article that dug back into past coverage of similar upheavals in British society- and I mean way back into the past, through the 1970′s to the 1930′s and the 1880′s and all the way back to 1751, a time when the US didn’t exist and was still a part of the British Empire. What’s fascinating is that regardless of the era or the event, the way commentators wrote back then was exactly the same way they wrote just now.

In the 1950′s for example the arrival of – shock horror – rock n roll in England had the upper classes appalled, as was evident from this article in the Daily Mail; “It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.”

Wonderfully lurid stuff

Take a trip a little further back, to 1898, and folks are lamenting the fact that fathers are no longer whipping their kids. I kid you not!

My favorite is from 1913 where one social commentator is warning people of the dangers of – wait for this – silent movies, claiming that watching images of criminals in films will encourage children to copy them. Sound familiar eh! This is what the venerable The Times of London had to say on the subject: “All who care for the moral well-being and education of the child will set their faces like flint against this new form of excitement.”

Like flint.

Boy, they don’t write them like that anymore.

Back in 1862 a crime wave led to the restoration of flogging in England, only a few years after it had been banned. So horrified were the chattering classes back then – and let’s face it we’re talking about rich white geezers – that The Times once again felt obliged to opine on the topic with this editorial; “Our streets are actually not as safe as they were in the days of our grandfathers. We have slipped back to a state of affairs that would be intolerable even in Naples.”

Even in Naples. Clearly there was no such thing as politically correct language back then. (Historical footnote – at the time the English used to consider Naples the epitome of a criminal, dirty, dangerous city; actually, come to think of it they probably thought the same about Glasgow, Lisbon, Vladivostok, Boston and pretty nearly every city in the world except for London – and even then there were certain parts of London they didn’t particularly like)

Don’t rush to judgement

But the point is that there have always been jerks who react with a knee jerk response to anything they don’t understand, or anything that they feel or fear threatens them in any way. That’s not to say that these issues are not important and don’t require serious thought and serious action to make sure they don’t happen again. But just blaming the first group that comes to mind – hooligans, working class youth, thugs, immigrants, people from Naples! – doesn’t do anything to make things better.

Similarly in relationships – personal or professional – just falling back on the same old arguments, the same old reasoning doesn’t resolve any problems, in many ways it just perpetuates them. If something goes wrong and your response is simply to dredge up the past you never get anywhere. You remain stuck forever in the same old manner of thinking. Instead we need to take the time to think about what’s really the problem, why things really are going wrong. Only then can we come up with a solution that will really work.

Otherwise we are no better than people from Naples!

 

 

 

 

 

Fast backward

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A Girlfriend Is Good For Your Health!

by admin on August 31, 2011

Hey kids!  Want to live longer, have a healthier body and mind, have a better outlook on life, and enjoy an enormous surge in endorphins, serotonins, and even, boost your immune system?  Get yourself a girlfriend! Yes, that is right!  Sisterhood can increase all of the above! That’s not just wishful thinking, that is research from Dr. David  Spiegel (co-chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center).

A helping hand, or two

Dr. Spiegel studied the effect of emotional, mental, social, spiritual and behavior factors on health. The study was targeting women with breast cancer, one of life’s ultimate stressors.  When diagnosed with breast cancer most women feel like they have just been hit in the face by a fire hydrant.  Emotions, rational, consequences, prognosis, I mean…really, your life races before your eyes in a slow motion cloud of unrelenting scenes of possible outcomes – most of them not good ones. There is no computer generated movie that can duplicate the stuff that fills up the mind when it comes to facing a life threatening disease like cancer. But one of the best things you can do is have a friend to help you face the fire hydrant!

No matter what kind of cancer you have…You have Stress!

Dealing with stress can wear down the body’s ability to fight disease.  That means your immune system, endocrine, and nervous systems are compromised by stress!  How do you relieve stress?  Dr. Spiegel says, “Psychosocial support and stress management to augment medical treatment has been shown to improve cancer outcome and quality of life.”   Translation:  Getting together with friends and family while you are undergoing treatment and after can make your outlook better, increase your immune system to fight the cancer and create a more positive outcome.

Talking, Sharing and Being Realistic Is Healthy

Facing life’s realities with the support of friends, social communities, or a loving spouse, will help you cope and help diminish the feelings of depression and detoxify the fear.  So expressing emotions with friends and family, and clarifying problems brought on by having cancer can help you to cultivate better relationships and share the feelings of crisis with everyone in your inner circle. It spreads the weight of the diagnosis and everyone does a little lifting.  Much better than denial!

You Don’t Have To Have Cancer To Get The Benefits!

But guess what?  You don’t have to have cancer to reap the benefits of this study!  You just have to have friends, someone to talk to when you feel down.  Spiegel reveals in this landmark study that found women with advance metastatic breast cancer who are involved in support groups, not only had less anxiety, depression and pain, but survived an average of 18 months longer.  His conclusion was psychosocial interventions improve not just the quality of life but the quantity of life too.

So diminish your stress, be happier, and prolong your life!  Get some friends!

 

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Can’t Make Your Mind Up? Give it a Rest

by admin on August 23, 2011

How many times have you thought “Oh my giddy aunt, what was I thinking?” after you have made a decision that was – in retrospect – clearly a big, fat blunder. We’ve all done it. Bought a shirt, dress, pair of trousers that at the time seemed like a good idea but after you have taken them home and looked at them a second time, thought “dear god, purple velvet flairs! Why, why dear lord!”

Well the reason may not be that you suddenly lost your mind, it may be that your mind simply gave up and took the easy way out.

Mind what you do

A fascinating article in the Sunday New York Times magazine – To Choose is to Lose – explores the science behind why we make decisions, particularly why we make bad ones. It shows how we have a limited ability to keep making good, thoughtful, well-balanced decisions. That the more decisions we make in a single day the more we deplete our brain’s ability to make good ones so that by the end of the day, or at the end of a long stretch of forced decision making, we simply go for one of a few options, either decide not to decide, or go for the easiest option – which is not always the best one.

It explains an awful lot about why decisions we make turn out to be bad ones even if our intentions are good. Our brains are just tired and running low on energy so they switch to an energy-saving mode by making quick, poorly, thought out choices.

Fueling your brain

Decision overload

One of the keys to keeping your brain sharp, or at least sharper, is to keep it fueled (it’s like a muscle and needs energy to be able to function well) and that means eating well. Which may be one of the reasons why so many people on a diet fail to stick with it. It’s fairly straight forward. If you think about it, when you are on a diet you spend the entire day making decisions about what to eat or not eat, and you spend a lot of time telling yourself not to make bad choices – not to eat that cake, that chocolate, that extra cheesy pizza. To lose weight on a diet you have to constantly make better choices about what you eat. But to keep making those choices you need to eat to fuel your brain so that it functions well. Lack of food = poor choices = falling off the diet wagon.

Food for thought

That doesn’t mean you can’t manage to stick with a diet,  and it may be the reason why people who graze – eating healthy food, in small amounts, throughout the day – do better at losing weight than people who stick to the more traditional three-square meals a day.

It also may help explain why at the end of the day it’s probably not a good idea to make monumental decisions about anything more complicated than whether to have one or two olives in your martini. You may wake up to regret the results.

 

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More TV Means Less Life

by admin on August 19, 2011

If you thought TV was bad for your brain a new study says it’s doing just as much damage to your heart! In fact this study says that if you watch TV for six hours a day you may be shortening your life by five years. Five years! That’s amazing. Those Kardashian girls are killing you in ways you hadn’t even imagined.

Death Watch

Now this is not some anti-TV nutcase just trying to get you to do something crazy like read books or go for a walk, these are well regarded Australian scientists who have their paper in a respected medical publication – the British Journal of Sports Medicine - and the researchers say that just sitting there watching TV for hours at a time is as dangerous for you as smoking or not doing any exercise (which come to think of it would fall under the sitting watching TV banner as well, but I digress…….)

Now, there’s lots of things I could write about the methodology they used to come up with their findings but that’s rather dry and you can read it if you go to the study itself. What is interesting is that they calculated that in 2008 Australian adults (25 years and older) watched 9.8 billion hours of TV a year.

Now, while allowing for the fact that Aussies are sports mad and that a single cricket game can last five days that’s still a heck of a lot of TV. It makes me wonder how many bad sitcoms did people watch, how many dreadful reality shows, how many episodes of Australian Idol etc.

One hour more = less

Here’s an even scarier statistic from the researchers: each hour of TV watched after the age of 25 reduced the life expectancy of the viewer by just under 22 minutes. In TV terms, that means each episode of ‘Glee’ means your life is reduced by an episode of ‘Two and a half Men’.

Really, fun as ‘Glee’ is, is it worth missing 22 minutes of Charlie Sheen.

Or, to put it another way. Is it worth watching that re-run of Law and Order (for the 12th time) if it means missing out on playing with your kids, your grandkids, your neighbors kids, your wife/husband/partner/lover/cousin/uncle/goldfish? Or just reading a book. Or just going for a walk. Or just hanging out with people you like who have interesting things to say?

Comparable to smoking

Previous studies show that smoking one cigarette can, on average, reduce your life expectancy by 11 minutes. That’s the same as watching half an hour of TV. So, if you are smoking while you watch TV you might as well gather the family around now, coz you ain’t got long to go and you’ll be lucky to make it to the end of this season’s ‘Dancing With The Stars’

We all can make choices about how we live our lives. And with hundreds of TV channels and On Demand and Apple TV we clearly have a dizzying array of choices of what to watch. I guess the only question now is would we rather watch life on TV or live it ourselves.

 

 

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When Strangers Meet

by admin on August 17, 2011

My daughter Ari is a performance artist, she is also a grant writer, a list maker, a graphic artist, an organizer of other people’s stuff, a thinker, a positive person, a person of reason, an old soul and a questioner.  She’s much more than that too.  As a person in her 20′s, she questions her life and her dreams and her future in this year of 2011.  She works hard and doesn’t get paid much…yet!

When the News is Bad…Make Your Own!

I think it is not easy for people of Ari’s age to stay hopeful in these economic times.  We are all being

pummeled with bad news on a daily scale.  Stocks, bonds, the Euro, the debt all of these things permeate the psychology of the society and create a low grade anxiety that flows through the family and our neighborhoods, seeping into our relationships with other people at home and at work, creating a pessimistic view of our futures as a whole.  These seem to be trying times, and yet we know there have been worse than this throughout history!  Certainly there are places all over the globe with people that are starving, or are witness’s and victims of  killings, or simply prisoners in their own homes.

We can go on and on with all the wrongs on this earth and we can feel helpless about it all.  After all what power do you have, just an individual, just a person, just one voice.

There is Hope But It’s Up To You!

It may not be much but if you can get a few strangers together to talk about things that are meaningful to them, if you can bring people together to exchange ideas without any agenda, that is; The reason to come together is not to “meet” someone, or to “learn” how to cook, or “network”, if you can bring some people who have never met to simply exchange some ideas, have a conversation, learn about the experiences of others, without the obligation to ever see each other again.   Well my friends, that is something.

…and that’s what my daughter does when she has a Stranger Dinner – It’s Performance  Art. It brings together strangers, creates a simple space for people to connect on a level that we so rarely do. From the heart. From the mind. Without any agenda.

And that’s a very powerful thing.

 

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