thinking thursday

mind

Oh, if you love design, and you love Apple products, you will love this on the shape of things to come: “Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, ‘Why would you be vague?,’ arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: ‘You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.’ Ive was furious, but came to agree. ‘It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,’ he said. He lamented that there were ‘so many anecdotes’ about Jobs’s acerbity: ‘His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.'”

body

The Power of Touch: “Touch itself appears to stimulate our bodies to react in very specific ways. The right kind can lower blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels, stimulate the hippocampus (an area of the brain that is central to memory), and drive the release of a host of hormones and neuropeptides that have been linked to positive and uplifting emotions. The physical effects of touch are far-reaching….’Stress is an explicitly biological phenomenon,’ David Linden said when I asked him about the work, which came out after his book was complete. ‘The body talks to the brain, the brain to the body. The notion that someone’s immune status could be modified by activity in touch-sensitive regions of the brain is not at all crazy. One could certainly imagine a cellular-level explanation for how that would happen.’ The more we learn about touch, the more we realize just how central it is in all aspects of our lives—cognitive, emotional, developmental, behavioral—from womb into old age. It’s no surprise that a single touch can affect us in multiple, powerful, ways.

I’m going to make some of this posthaste.

And these will do nicely for dinner tomorrow night.

spirit

“Finding Joy In My Father’s Death” is a beautiful look by Ann Patchett at the complexities of loss: “I confided my happiness to a few friends and for the most part they were quick to assure me that I would be grief-stricken soon enough. They meant it kindly. By using the words ‘death’ and ‘joy’ in the same sentence, I had gone far beyond the limits of the standard ‘He’s in a better place.’ They wanted me to know that later I would have the chance to redeem myself through suffering.”

Do you ever sit in silence? You might want to.

word

There is more to life than increasing its speed.  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

(photo of my husband, John, on a rare warm day this week, enjoying the part of life that is hammock-slow)