Tuesday 25 October 2016

The ethics of story-owning: South Africa, a case in point.








The Story Clinic is deeply perturbed about Jacob's assumption that he can own South Africa's story. Story-owning has been practised since humankind woke up to itself, and is probably the original sin. The story that anyone owns is the one closest to that organism you call yourself, and is limited. The limitations are linked to your experience, and that's where they belong. The moment you extrapolate, believe, assume and otherwise declare for others, the story expands to where it doesn't belong.

Jacob has no idea that I exist, depend on his role, experience the repercussions of his actions.

Whatever story he believes about himself, his role, his background, his identity, his value, his meaning, has not only done me no good, it's done me harm.

I'm prepared to speak for myself and my family: I am willing to stand for my own story and those close to me.

This man is harming the entire nation, and his denial of that is plainly evil. I wouldn't trash univesities and burn private property as the so-called students are. I would ask a quiet assasin to politely pull a trigger, and trash the political game. I do not hate Jacob. I have looked into my soul, and asked what the appropriate reponse is. Jesus says to love your enemies. Jacob is not my enemy. So I do not love him. I do not hate him. I have nothing against him for being black, that's irrelevant. as much as anything could be.

I hold him in utter contempt, for thinking and assuming, and feeling, that he owns my story.

He hasn't the first clue of what my story is, and that's what makes him disrespectful.

He really doesn't care.

He is uneducated, and that's not his fault, but as an uneducated person, he should admit to his limitations, and not push against the tide of common sense, into the swamp of self-indulgence, which is his basic policy, dressed up as national policy.

To take sides with corrupt and cruel African leaders, and take sides against the hard-won sense of justice just because it's seated in the West becomes obvious for what it is: juvenile side-taking with a continent that struggles to emerge, not because of economic bullying, but because of an intrinsic cruelty that has to own the story.

Let's uncover the story-owning: economically, a hostile take-over is a good exampe of story-owning, an excellent one.  Politically, a coup is on the same par. Religiously, well, leave your intellect at the door. In the market for something? Buy into our story......it's the best, the most, the only.

Don't underestimate the unconscious power of narrative.

So The Story Clinic desires to send Jacob's ownership of South Africa's story to hell, where it belongs.

You've manipulated unbelievably cleverly, Jacob, you've bought and paid for (with my money) your people, but never their loyalty once the money runs out (watch that), your organism baffles me with its huge need and greed (I'll give you a free consultation if you want to deal with that).....

You need to know that your story has nothing to do with South Africa.

It's just personal.

I'm sorry about that, but I'm more sorry for South Africa, because the entire country is suffering the shyte
of your personal story.

I don't hate you Jacob, you're a really poor man.

Free consultation any time you want: The Story Clinic.




Tuesday 30 August 2016

Where stories are born




There's a strange place in the human soul where not many people tarry. It's the no man's land between experience itself and language. It's the starting block before the pistol fires, that moment before you say "I do", the instant when you admit to something really big, those few times when you use the word "love" for real, the utter smudge of time after some-one close dies or goes away, or the sense of falling far away from who and what you are because all possibility of control has gone.

It's neither a good nor bad place. It's a place that's pre-verbal, pre-rational, pre-lingual. If Broca's area, Wernicke's region and the angular gyrus are the language axis of the brain, perhaps the skin is the entry point to where stories are born, because it's literally the edge of ourselves.

At various stages of development from neonate to adolescent through adulthood, subconscious emotional filters create platforms quite independent of human choice and preference. These platforms are where we stand, metaphorically, and when they collapse, we do, too.

But the moment I write about platforms, I have made up a story. We enter the conscious world on the back of a story. One's own narative has begun, regardless of who's telling it, what inspired it, how the chapters will be divided, how it feels as it goes along, what drama and desire prompt necessity and purpose, and what sense of ending prevails.

Let's take away the platforms, strip away the "cool web of language", remove rational thought, eternally distance ourselves from reasonability and totally obscure belief. What we have left are the neurons, the synapses, and the messages that race, meet, connect, reconnect and resume racing.

What's it all saying? Well, he who has ears to hear, let him hear.

I used to tell my Irish friend about the dreams I had at night. He always looked at me with goggle-eyes and his mouth slightly open, and his response was always the same: "Shit!"

When I asked him why he was so rude, it turned out he was jealous. "I wish I had dreams like that," he said. "Tell me how!"

I have learnt to beware of anyone who fervently and finally believes anything, from scientists to salesmen to socialites. Interestingly enough, scientists can be the most closed-minded of all. My life is no doubt based on a true story, but I wonder if anyone will ever tell it, or indeed, if it can be told. Like rain after falling, words evaporate. Their energy remains, but dissipates unless someone with ears hears and recognizes. The power of story is that it connects. If I am convinced of anything, it glues my sense of self more strongly.

Then again, something severe happens, and it all falls. Painfully, sometimes never, we reconstruct and re-tell ourselves, moving through no man's land. If it seems I tell a sad story about no man's land, it's not my intention. No man's land is to be claimed. Humankind has blasted sensible meaning as well as meaningful sense out of the water, and has greatly contributed to establishing no man's land. The no man's land where stories are born is however, a fecund place.

Out of failure, new beginnings are imminent. From separation and divorce, it's possible to divine a newness of love. From loneliness, great giftedness is recognized. Careers change, not always for the worse, and if we are to contemplate the seasons well, life and death are not discontinuous. Something is always afoot.

To move out of no man's land at least just start a new story. To make a claim, you have to stake it. Read Amy Cuddy who re-ran her own story to arrive at her admirable work. Write your own journal and see what happens. One paragraph a day. One word of change at a time.

The place where stories are born is the heart of imagination, and that's not an unreal place. To the contrary, if anything is to be taken very seriously, it's imagination, because image, mood and story feed each other, and communicate that heart directly.

We experience that heart, our own heart, each other's heart on an hourly basis. Certainly, we are interrupted, usually overwhelmed by formal narratives, accidental anecdotes, unwanted messages and a thousand acts that are unnecessary to our own drama.

As a service, The Story Clinic offers short jouneys to the heart of no man's land and back again. It's a safe trip. Anyone coming?






Monday 4 July 2016

The Story Clinic





Biofusing is pleased to team up with The Story Clinic.The purpose is to make biofocusing more concrete and accessible. Biofocusing began with the awareness of how to manage attention, since we tend to take attention almost entirely for granted. Paying affective attention has been largely ignored in favour of paying cognitive attention, and how we pay volitional attention is a conundrum, because how can you choose to attend or ignore when you're wired to and for instinctive response? The body has its own story to tell, and that's a large part of The Story Clinic.

Stories do not come in books. That's a side-story. Stories and awareness work together to explain experience, and experience is multi-layered, ambiguous, slippery, and mostly uncontrollable. The nuts and bolts of story are words, sentences and paragraphs, and the machine is fascination, the basis of which is focused emotion.

Emotion is the problem as well as the solution. Good feelings are nice to experience, bad feelings are better avoided, and the movement from one to the other is bitterly difficult to control.

The difference between a story and a lie is often too difficult to tell. How do you know when you're telling yourself lies? At a personal, social, group, community and national level, this is part of what The Story Clinic does. Put more kindly, the story that you tell yourself about everything is the hinge to everything you know. This is not a trite remark. When I discovered that truth, I did not expect to survive it. I waited, every hour, for the heart attack or stroke that would result from the psychological and physiological tension of testing every story I thought I knew. I didn't die, but it took me two years to calm down.

More and more, companies and conglomerates begin to realize that their myth might be about more than money. One significant aspect of the real story is that we live in heaven and on earth simultaneously, and so a good question is why money is so important on earth when it doesn't exist in heaven.

The Story Clinic is versatile because biofocusing is a living tool. The alive things are scary, and thus we try to make them friendly. Stories. Are they friendly or fearful? Well, they're full of energy, bursting into systems of structured concepts, inconoclasting beliefs into better nothings. It's too bad that humans are more rational than animals and can't deal with nothings. So, all the time we have to come up with a story to sort out experience.

The Story Clinic knows how to listen, reflect and return a response if not a solution. The solution is never far away, but depending on how serious it is, it may take a narrative or two, and at least a bit of honesty. I have the sense that this will grow because it's how things actually work. In the meantime, welcome, and thank you for taking the time to touch something here.







Wednesday 20 April 2016

Writing the cosmic story





 
The title is metaphoric: writing is one of the earliest bio-technologies, using the body's abilities to create signification. Human consciousness gradually put together a system of making marks to signify what was going on within itself.

"This is what I am thinking; this is what I feel; this is what I have decided".

And hey presto! the cosmic story has produced a writer. Out of the table of elements, the atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks and gravitational interruptions, conscious thinking and feeling prowl and ponder. They hold hands; they do not hold hands. They look at each other, then they look away. They try to be an "I", but this is too big a riddle. So they tell stories, from myth to romance to history to scientific sequence in order to get a handle on who and what this "I', this subjective being is. That persona, temporary cloud of atoms held together by an unknown story, takes wondering walks across strange valleys of imagination, climbs hills of whispering secrets, sleeps in forests of fecundity and wakes, knowing and unknowing, in a world where strangeness can't be tolerated for long.

Writing is a metaphor of action. Everything we do could be construed as writing, because every mark we make is evidence of the cosmic story writing itself. We know that writing often is a form of activism.

All our living is a response to the fact of being alive; the marks of our responsiveness are making the world what it is, from our smeared finger-prints on our smart screens to a de-greened re-greened planet, to searing bits of screaming metal in newly-raw human flesh. All the financial gains and losses of today are tomorrow's losses and gains.

By reaching into this conundrum, I perceive that presence is construction, sometimes forged, often accidental. I am not always that which I want to be, neither do I want it to be the other way.

Can the cosmic story be uttered in silence?

The waves rolling and crashing in the background make it difficult to hear the sound of a finger in the sand. When I think about the cosmic story I am tempted to be afraid, because what impells the finger to write is indecipherable and inscrutable. Thus, should I flee in fear, or embrace the unknown?

And then I realize that the cosmic story is at least legible. You may not be able to get the whole thing in one reading, or even one lifetime, but the marks we notice and read in one hour and make in one day are significant enough to deal with. Our stories and the cosmic story are co-authored to a surprising extent.

The child, the sand, the finger, body and beach....who can say where one ends and another begins?

Monday 7 March 2016

Raw intelligence, biofocusing and vulnerability of mind

Explication of intelligence abounds: beginning with IQ tests, discovery or invention of emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, ecological intelligence, the lines of expertise on intelligence with be redrawn many times, with many purposes and effects in mind.

From the point of view of biofocusing, I have an idea that all of this is overcooked. We are born: we grow in body and mind (and maybe the two are different only so far as language permits) and we die. I have a simple view to offer on what to me is raw intelligence. Bodies wave hands, walk about, construct artefacts, destroy them, too, kneel, jump, leap, bow and peform, generally. Make a distinction: minds create ideas that become concrete realities, like creative compositions, feats of engineering, productive business, grandiose aspirations, stories of redemption.

Raw intelligence is that animal in the middle, figuring things out, allowing energies of creativity to come out of corners, and play in these lifetimes. Figuring out is different to riding on populist rhetoric, which is the domain of devious politicians, or diving into hypnotic rhetoric which is the wont of religious and other preachers of enthusiasm. It's also different to the carefulness of scientific discourse which often crosses the boundary to cowardice. That's not the purpose of science.

"Mind" is the simple and obvious assumption of awareness, as it breathes and battles to work with, overcome, disappear into mystery and inscrutability.
These aspects of existence, mystery and inscutability used to terrify me until I realized that they, in themselves, are not so terrible. It's the people who cloak them in ignorance chosen on purpose.

Read Papa, Snake and I.  One fearing mind echoes another until the chain is broken.

It's one of the biggest mistakes ever is to think that the colossus known as education is a bulwark against vulnerability of mind.



Vulnerability of mind does not relate to timidity, although timidity would always be trapped in vulnerability. A shouting, robust mind is as vulnerable to ignorant protest and violence as a baby is to abuse. A monolithic system of educational delivery has nothing to do with respecting raw intelligence finding a way. And don't mistake sensitivity with timidity. Awareness is not a tame animal, humans have really forgotten this. The child who struggles to put bricks together, and can't do it, may just start hurling them at you, and the heavier they are, the more likely this is to happen.

The generic "Im thinking about it" is bland, "I'm figuring it out" is more pragmatic, "I'm working it out" could be purposeful, "Leave me alone, can't you see I'm busy with something important!" as in George's father of the Famous Five, always struck me as being a character who was worth listening to in spite of his short temper.

The sensitive mind, receptive, is, in my view, a permanent fixture.



Whereas we may grow to be emotionally balanced, intelligent and instructive, believing ourselves to be well-instructed, the neurons tend to convey nervousness, which is their business, rather than knowingness, which is the business of that elusive number, the mind.

If pragmatic intelligence works things out so that they work, raw intelligence is like the light-house beaming out pulses of purpose to create safety.

There is no safety in being alive, it's a short-term experience. So, what is the deal?



I like my logo. Take a careful look What is the focus? A letter? A zero? A nothing? Please visit the page and hover the mouse over the logo. The eyes look within, without. What stays the same? What changes?







My old friend Spock had a saying his author never heard him say: "What you believe doesn't make it so." It's a saying I have come to believe, and I hope my logical friend is no believer in sub-atomic entanglement, and the two-slit experiment, otherwise our logical positivism is done for.


Raw intelligence means making a decision based on limited evidence based on the need to act. One of my favourite movies, Fugitive,  which I saw at least five times, was about working out whether he was trying to get away or get to.











The clever mind isn't clever because of accolades and recognition. The clever mind survives and grows into kindness and generosity.

That, for me, is raw intelligence at work.

Friday 19 February 2016

Chaos, cosmos and biofocusing

The distinction between randomness and order is similar to the differentiation between chaos and cosmos, and for humans, it's a good idea to pay attention to the difference between controlling the smaller picture for one's own benefit and creating the bigger picture for general benefit.

More food and money for today at the expense of whatever's missing from tomorrow and people to come is a short-sighted view of what's supposed to work for humankind.

You do not have to protect yourself from lack.

I'm not sure if I believe this, myself, but it's a worthwhile thought. All around me, I see people protecting themselves from lack with financial foresight and wealth-building. It makes good sense, because I wouldn't want to run out of time, money or life, and find myself, and especially those I wish to protect, in a bad place.

So, out of that chaos of living, I wish to create a cosmos of safety for those whom I love, and if I were I good politician, the general populace.

Applying this persoanlly, I am up against the balance of personal chaos and cosmos.



Chaos is imagination run riot. No control. No steering, yet total freedom of association. It's daunting when you do it, especially when your nightly dreams merge with waking practicality. When you get to the point where you ask what the point is of your being alive, you're doing biofocusing. To answer that question, you move between chaos and cosmos to find this temporary identity you call yourself, which truly, is only a matter of some decades, which means nothing in the ultimate scale of thiungs, but a great deal in terms of responding to the here and now.




My policy, to prevent my so-called mind from losing all sense of reality, is to reduce the invitation to chaos less, and appreciate the cosmos more. Chaos is real, it's like the sea and its movement before you get the waves, shores, and people happily paddling. Something passes between the moments of perception and the moments before those, and our bodies, which form a temporary cosmos within the greater cosmos, know the difference. Some say the body creates mind, some say mind creates body. I would say language fails to descirbe or explain, at this point. Go pre-verbal, and stay there, and see what happens. It's not a funny or comfortable place to be.

The experience of being alive has no text-book, not even a sacred book. Raw intelligence, which is a coming blog, is ever-present, where you have to think on your feet, for yourself, at total risk, rather than depend on any kind of over-cooked nitelligence, the words and wisdom of which you think you can buy.

Which is what academia and religion have become.

Sort out your own life, determine your cosmos from your chaos. Yes, these are really immense dimensions that defy understanding, yet the task is there, it's part of being alive. That single point of connection between the two, your living body and concommitant mind, which is your living awareness is the real thing. You can grow it, constrain it, reduce it, domesticate it, even deny it. It will always obey that mysterious agent which is yours to command. There is a you, that commands, and another you, that obeys. One is cosmos, the other is chaos, but the communication between the two is not obvious. One would assume that cosmos orders chaos, but then again, chaos energizes cosmos.

There's more to be said about this, but this is a worthwhile reflection. For myself, I am content to be both, the chaos of storm, the cosmos of abatement.




Sunday 14 February 2016

Gravitational waves, middle C and the eye of the storm

Gravitational waves, postulated by Einstein, have been verified in the past weeks. Two immense black holes circled each other very rapidly, disappeared together, and we heard the chirp. I listened to it three times this morning.

So what?







Well, the implications for daily living are not huge. Nothing will change your luck, income, or Valentine's import for today. The real difference is about understanding that time and space are alterable, and that we can hear it, albeit expensively. Apples will still fall towards the centre of the earth, even though your head will impede the fall if it's in the way. As the report put it, the fabric of space and time can be torn by major events.

What struck me most in the report was that the sound itself, which was captured inadvertently, was musically described as beginning down there somewhere, rising to middle C and then disappeared. I'm not sure what, but something absolute has been sounded. Now we know that middle C is at least close to the centre of the universe, if not the keyboard.





I once asked the director of Living Sound, Larry Dalton what his favourite key was. "C major," he said, without a moment's hesitation. He's in heaven now, so perhaps he would have more to say on this subject.
None of this is intended to be flippant. Gravitational waves, musical absolutes and human experience overlap to a dramatic extent.

To my increasing dismay, I have been forced to admit fixation with the need to discover an absolute narrative for human experience. I was challenged by the Gospel, and took it on. I would like to back off, and declare myself inadequate, but I'm not. Life isn't plain sailing, and from time to time, we find ourselves in the eye of the storm.





That eye of perception strikes when trauma does, and alters our sense of reality, which is key, here.

Not only is Newtonian physics not sacred; neither is anything else.

This understanding is not helpful when a hurting human presents and wants comfort.

Pain, death and loss are the key problems that present impossible solutions.

Can you change these for real?

Physical pain can be managed to an extent, emotional pain can be relieved to a greater exent, unfortunately death is unavoidable, and loss can be re-interpreted to a huge extent. Gravitational waves, being more than a discovery relating to theoretical physics, may be able to press one's middle C, and assist with that difficult re-interpretation.

Anyone who listens to, and better, loves music, would probably not realize how the keyboard is structured. Middle C is in the middle, a nondescript white  L-shaped key with a scientific description of the waves it produces. It sounds kind of flat to me, I prefer F sharp, or E flat, but that's a matter of personal attunuation.

The point is that the universe produces sounds, and that sounds are absolutely evocative and provocative.

Sounds have meaning, that's why we miss voices when we can no longer hear them when we want to.

The eye of the storm is in there, the subjective status of the realm of theoretical physics which becomes a practical problem. We can't bring back the dead, we can't reduce the experience of living to something controllable, we actually can't do much at all except pour another whiskey.

On the other hand, check biocentricm a la Robert Lanza. Check biofocusing a la WH Willies.

What determines what in this confusing universe? The question probably isn't one, and con-fusion is the only way to go, as we gather, parrot-like, mimicry of the closest thing to us. The furtherest is going to be far too weird.
Are humans relevant?

That's up to them.






Saturday 13 February 2016

Making up your mind, breaking up your mind

The two things we take most for granted in my opinion are health and mind. The first is tangible enough, and when it works well, we don't pay that much attention until something goes wrong, and we experience pain, fear of death, and usually, we are prepared to go for help to relieve these.

The second, mind, is a lot more tricky because it's very slippery, and has to be made solid on purpose, usually for the sake of others, and not for oneself. Once it's solid to the limited extent that this is possible, we accept the solid stuff as the sense of reality. I have worked really hard to make my own mind solid enough to deal with the slipperiness of life, and was very surprised when I learnt that I had to decide to break down a lot of what I had built because it wasn't fruitful.

Once I took that decicion, breaking down happened quite rapidly. Being intellectually strong does not necessarily mean being fruitfully intelligent. Emotional sensitiviy does not necessarily result in emotionally intelligent action.








There's more than enough mind-bashing that we encounter as we make our way through life and resilience is required to conquer bullies, fools and enemies. External antagonism can be expected. I'm referring more to internal constructions of habits or even loyalties that are fruitless, unnecessary and self-destructive. And no-on is going to break them down except oneself. I don't think there are gentle ways of doing this: you take the decision, and once you do, a kind of auto-pilot kicks in and you begin to recognise the false perceptions and deregister them.

Here are a few examples of era-related perceptions that don't work:

The priest knopws more about God than you do.

What's on the cell-phone/tablet screen is more worthy of your attention than the person you're with.

The doctor knows more about your body than you do.

You're so very special that you don't ever deserve to be punished.

The better the feeling, the more the love.

The law is there for our good.

Education is the backbone of civilisation.

Never judge anyone.

Whites are superior to blacks.

Blacks have been abused by whites. 

Death is the end.

Death is the beginning.

Love is the most important thing in the universe.

I am a man/woman/gay.


Once emotions are locked into a perception that works against fruitful action, there's going to be a tug of war until something gives. That seldom feels like a joke. Families splt, marriages fail, nations battle against themselves and each other, and individuals die needlessly.






Breaking down bad habits of intellect, emotion and decision are as requisite as building habits of fruitfulness, and it's confusing and dismaying to realize that the relationship between these can be indistinct unless you have an extremely sharp and humble sense of clarity.

The real needs of the day are usually right in front of our noses. They are the ones requiring insightful thoughts, integrated emotions and clear decisions resulting in fruitful action.









Thursday 28 January 2016

Biofocusing and creating love




One of the most misunderstood words I know is "love". We assume it's an abstract noun, the definition of which is something you can't see, smell, hear, taste or feel. This is back to front, because the next assumption we make is that it's the most important feeling of all, and everybody knows what that feeling feels like.

It would be interesting to survey a global linguistic reference to love. Greek, for instance, makes distinctions between four kinds of love: affectionate love, love for a friend, erotic love and divine love. Biofocusing challenges a lingusitic approach to love by asking and answering questions about what one actually means and does in respect of that which is most important to you, which goes to the core of living. Love should relate.

It's commonly understood and accepted that family and friends are the most important aspects of our living. Through them, we are greeted into earthly living, and when our bodies die, they grieve and mourn. These feelings are mutual, communal, inescapable and go as deep as deep goes. The implication is the sense of profound connection which we don't want to be broken. Another truism is that if you love money more than you love people you're on the wrong track, and if you love yourself much more than others, it probably isn't love.

I am convinced that our primary task as a species on this planet is to create love. To make sense of such a statement we need a little bit of analysis, a lot of synthesis, and a great deal of fruitful action. I also need to point out that the actual process doesn't start with us humans, but with where we pop out of. There is a verse in the Bible that says "Herein is love, not that we love God, but that God first loved us".

We are indeed greatly loved, which means that a huge amount of energy has gone into the creating of our bodies, and we should honour that by putting all possible energy into being fruitful in this world.

As I have become older, I have become cautious of accepting that heaven is sheer bliss. Spirit is where we come from, spirit is where we go back to, spirit is where we are, in the present. So we know about heaven, or spirit, or whatever word is relevant. But we don't do it.We are distacted, seduced, commanded, narratized away from the feelings of that path we're really on.

Check your best feelings: favourite team won? Anticipation of favourite food? Sex? Friends and chat? Party? Walking with your best friend?  I wonder how common or uncommon mine are: when I meditate or write poetry, study intensively to find connections, or come across something beautiful and allow it to reside, I experience really weird and amazing rolls of ever-increasing energy pulsing through the me of my body, if that's graspable.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment" wrote Shakespeare.
"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests
and is never shaken...."

I don't think he meant a light-house, but rather the stars that made navigation trustable.

But in respect of creating love, a light-house is a good metaphor. It's purpose is ultimately one of safety, and my point in this particular writing is that our purpose of creating love is not far from this agenda.

The human spirit has proved to be cruel, as well as loving. It's a knowing, a sense and a choice. Just as light houses have been built on purpose, so does very much more have to be built on purpose. Many inventions have proved to be convenient yet destructive. It's difficult to differentiate between the human element and the material element in some cases. Motor vehicles are a great convenience, yet have killed many, mostly because of human error or negligence, the cell -phone has destroyed much social fabric, and military apparatus, from the rifle to the bomb yet to be invented speaks for itself.

Let's stick with the light-house.

Each life is such. The chaotic ocean is a given. Storms are inevitable. Peace returns. But over the moving surface, there's a job to be done, whether walking on the water, or shining the way. Love is not one thing, but the many actions that create a rare movement designed to be communal. I can't think of one material thing I've built in my life. I was booted out of wood-work, tried to make a small shelf-system that went hollow in the middle, and all my gardening attempts went to dust quite quickly. I do remember, I once put together a model boat that stayed together, and I even painted it, so carefully. That's about it. I admire people who know how to build bridges, engines, buildings and real boats. I often wish I had these skills.

Each life is something built on purpose for achievement, in one way or another. Whether it's to survive one more day, make a massive merger, plan a new surgical procedure, or discover an unknown element, or teach your children well, if it passes the test of acceptability, something is gained.

If the result is shock, disappointment, horror, trauma, pain, disbelief and self-doubt, something is lost.

How to create love goes live for sixty minutes on 10 February 2016 on www.learnitlive.com 

The world we should live in won't arrive unless we build it, life by life.