Your always adding to the greatness of your life. No matter who you meet, what decisions you make, you will always improve upon yourself and what you were in the past. Make each second of every day count, for it will never return. Live without regrets and always have a smile on your face. Every interaction you have adds to the masterpiece that exists in your very being.
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Marlene
Look at the good all around you; what was once impossible is now a reality. How does that happen? Work, faith, trust and a knowing that when you change your thoughts, you change your life.
Everything is possible; tap into the incredible goodness that is waiting for you. It's there, ask anyone who has experienced success or a miracle.
Marlene
Yes the elderly do link us to history and... they have wisdom from years of experience that we don't have yet. What are a few pieces of insight they could share with you?
After reading several articles on this topic, I picked one by Nico Pitney. He writes about a gerontologist who interviewed 1500+ Elders for their advice on living and loving. Here are a few highlights and a link to the full article.
One of the biggest regrets of the very old was, I wish I hadn't spent so much time worrying.
If you lose yourself in the middle-age blur of work and kids, you really won't do your kids any good.
How you respond if your partner interrupts you while you're doing something is very diagnostic of how good the relationship's going to be.
Towards the end of life, what's really important to people is to be able to see how their life mattered, how it was meaningful, how there was a story to it that wraps up in a good way.
While thinking about the Topic of the Week, I came across this wonderful article on Self-Esteem.
What is Self-Esteem?
Most people's thoughts and feelings about themselves fluctuate somewhat based on their daily experiences. The grade you get on an exam, how your friends treat you, ups and downs in a romantic relationship can all have a temporary impact on how you feel about yourself.
Your self-esteem, however, is something more fundamental than the normal ups and downs associated with situational changes. For people with good self-esteem, normal ups and downs may lead to temporary fluctuations in how they feel about themselves, but only to a limited extent. In contrast, for people with poor self-esteem, these ups and downs drastically impact the way they see themselves.
Okay?
Marlene
Yes, the work was hard! The results were impressive. He continues to train so that he can maintain what he worked so hard to do.
You can do it too! Just start and then continue one day at a time. You will get there; have faith in yourself, believe in yourself and know you CAN do it!
Be fearless today and take care!
Marlene
No plan? No direction! Would you attempt to build your house without a plan? Of course not; unless you want to waste your time and money. If what I suggested is true, why wouldn't you have a plan for your days? Surely you want to be ready and set to go each day to accomplish what your heart desires.
If you make having a plan a part of your daily routine, it will be come a habit in no time at all. This is YOUR future and you get to set the direction you want to take each and every day.
John Perry
If you think about it, reality comes in many levels, each level involving different kinds of things, having different kinds of properties. Perhaps most people would think of things like dirt at the bottom level, then us at the next level, and the sky at the highest level. But philosophers have a different, more abstract concept of levels of reality. Here are some examples:
• You and I---or at least our bodies--- along with tables and chairs and cities and towns and planets. This is what philosophers call the level of medium size objects. This level of reality is what most of our lives are concerned with. The sorts of things we can perceive with our senses, and so forth.
• Contrast that with a level called quantum reality. Objects like quarks that we can’t see, having properties like spin that we can barely make sense of.
• On the level just above quantum physics, we find electrons and atoms; then there’s the level of chemical facts, where you have chemicals and bonds; then the level of biology, where you have cells.
• Higher levels too, like maybe involving minds, societies, nations…
• And there are angels and God… and numbers for that matter. So we’ve got lots of levels!
Intuitively each level has a characteristic kind of object, characteristic kinds of properties and facts, and usually a different profession for people that study or work with it: quantum physicists, solid-state physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists. Nearer the top, mathematicians and theologians. And then, at least according to Aristotle, at the very top: philoophers. He put philosophers there because we think about Being --- that is, the whole shebang, and we try to figure out how the different levels are related. Most contemporary philosophers feel more in the middle than at the top. And their approach to the issue of levels of reality focuses on the topic of reduction.
We can set God and the angels aside; philosophers who believe in them aren’t likely to suppose they are reducible to something else, and those who don’t believe in them don’t worry about their reducibility either. We can also set numbers aside, since neither Ken nor I have any firm ideas about them. Then, physicalists like Ken and I both tend to be, think that the rest must be one big reality, physical reality. Facts about chemicals really are just facts about atoms and electrons, and they are really just facts about subatomic particles, or whatever else turns out to be at the bottom. And the same with biology and chemistry; psychology and biology; sociology and psychology.
The divisions are based on how humans interact with the different phenomena, the tools we use, the interests we have, and, of course, the National Science Foundation budgets involved. and Ultimately, metaphysically, philohically, there is just one reality, matter in motion --- or whatever quantum physicists replace matter with, or whatever they replace motion with.
One might think of this as depressing and mysterious. I don’t feel like a complex of quarks. Of course, there is another theory. It’s the competitor to Reductionism. It’s called Emergence. That’s the idea that each level in some way emerges from the one below, under certain conditions. And when emergence happens, truly new objects, properties, and facts are involved.
One might favor reductionism over emergence on the basis that in some cases, the reductions though not yet discovered, are in principle to be had. Biologists have known since Mendel that something, which they called `genes', are responsible for inherited characteristics. But for a long time, there were debates about whether genes could really be explained by physical and chemical properties. Many biologists thought that genes could never be fully explained just in terms of physics and chemistry. They thought, in other words, genes were emergent, and not reducible. But with the discovery of DNA and the development of molecular biology, we know this isn't so. The structure that Watson and Crick discovered has allowed scientists to explain how genes work without appealing to anything but the principles and properties of physics and chemistry.
If everywhere some philosophers see emergence, scientists will eventually provide reductions, emergence will just be another idea in the dust-bin called the history of philosophy. But that grand result would require a biological understanding of consciousness and all the other mental phenomena. Should would-be physicalists like Ken and I really be so confident of that? Is it so obvious that it even makes sense?
Luckily we have an expert on all of this to help us think about it, Tim O’Connor, author of Theism and Ultimate Explanation.
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