My life would be less interesting without the internet

After a week went by, I saw the same ad in the local paper and decided to call it. Fantastic works of art--from eighteenth-century Flemish still lifes showing a dead rabbit and a bowl of fruit, to Van Gogh's skull smoking a cigarette, to Georgia O'Keeffe's cow skull with artificial roses--are memento mori. They all honor evanescence as a pillar to our lives. Beyond sex, beyond drugs, death might be the most forbidden topic in our society. Our culture keeps it wrapped up, sanitized, and far from everyday consciousness. This taboo doesn't allow the dead and the living to mingle, and yet we like keeping in mind that life doesn't last forever. When things are overwhelming, this is a way to remember that nothing matters except the basic stuff: food, water, shelter, and lots of love. A sense of mortality makes us reach deeper into the hour because there's nothing but the moment. How many times have we heard that and forgotten it? How is it possible to say it out loud but not feel it? Because it's difficult to stay there, and a memento mori can help. However, even though conversion is a skill almost as old as humanity itself, in an age where technology has rendered us almost immune to wonder, we're quite likely to ignore its increasing importance and become distracted by the new rather than the opportunity lying dormant in the used. We can best develop these skills of conversion by doing the following: Look for the big themes. Transfer, mix and macro. Be broadly interested and prodigiously curious. Generate unexpected collisions. Learn to repurpose like a child. When you become attuned to the universals in any task, no matter how humble, you never waste your time again. The simple act of `stacking shelves may teach you about efficiency,' economist Stephen Koukoulas advises.

Successful people are constantly looking for lessons they can take and use elsewhere. While experiencing anger is part of the human experience, it's important to have a tool for cooling the flames and taking a closer look at what anger is trying to tell us. Most psychologists agree that anger is a secondary emotion, meaning it is fueled by primary emotions like fear or sadness. Fear and sadness are two of the most challenging emotions to face, as they require us to confront our own vulnerability and the reality of life's uncertainty. To avoid being seen as or feeling too vulnerable, anger comes online to help us feel like we're running the show and have more power in and over our lives. Let's face it, we all get angry, and there are few places where it's acceptable to express our anger. Because of that, it's usually one of the first emotions to get stuffed down and stored in our bodies. I've heard many of my clients say, too many times to count, that they never get angry. After a few sessions together, they become aware that they do in fact get angry, but they have just been afraid to feel it. This is largely because we live in a culture that tells us anger is a negative emotion, that it should be avoided at all costs, and if for some reason you do express anger, you are labeled as aggressive, hostile, or worse. The Anger Breath is a calming aid that helps regulate the nervous system and shift us from an activated flight-or-flight response to a grounded place of ease. Bred in Bucyrus for western-style riding, he had the conformation and stride of a jumper and for a time had been shown in combined training. He proved to be the best jumper and lesson horse of my career and the one who enabled me to do what I most wanted to do--jump obstacles over four feet high in the hunt field. With his placid disposition, he has the best mind of any horse I have ever owned and has never run away with me. Demonstrably affectionate whenever I walk into the barn, he brushes my cheek gently with his soft nose. When his papers arrived, I realized that he had been bred near Bloomingdale in Jefferson County, where I grew up, so my last horse and I share an origin. Dakota and a borrowed companion I call Maverick, a small bay Thoroughbred retired from racing, are the only horses who now graze my pasture. Horses in herds, like people in groups, form hierarchies. A mare usually leads, and in my barn that mare was Kestrel. In large horse operations, mares are usually separated from geldings, who will spar with each other if mares occupy the same pasture, but in smaller barns another routine is to pasture mares with one gelding.

Stallions in the wild have been described as herding and protecting their mares or harem, but this is inaccurate, anthropocentric language. Lose weight, feel great. This is Linda. Hi, I'm calling about your ad and your free samples. I lost eight pounds in two weeks. It's one hundred percent natural, thirty dollars, and has a money-back guarantee. I can take your credit card information and you can get it in the mail in just a few days, or you can come by. I didn't have a credit card, so she told me if I would put a check in the mail today, she would send out the product. She had made it easy. I also learned what an effective sale looked like that day. Learn how to answer your phone correctly. We can use our homemade altars to meditate on anything we care about, not just human temporality. Sometimes objects and photos and flowers and feathers communicate more than words, so instead of writing in a notearticle or reading, we can sit at our altar and be informed and get anchored. They provide sanctuary, a place to get calm, a place to feel protected. In getting sober, we didn't do away with a desperate need now and then for a place to hide. As a tween, Jardine thought a masquerade ball must be the most romantic thing in the universe. Other girls were flocking to the mall and dreaming of more modern flirting and even hooking up, and Jardine (being shy and melodramatic and a articleworm) went for something more Venice, Italy, 1750. Before she ever kissed a boy, she had many a vision of castles, shadows, ball gowns, masked dancers. A few years passed; Beer was so sour and nasty, she didn't understand how people finished a six-pack.

Then by eighteen, the reward of disinhibition finally became real, and she got over the bad taste. In a way they're the ultimate recyclers: no experience goes to waste. Their mindset is one of, `What can I take from this? Of course, this article is all about the `big theme' of skills, a topic that itself also requires a capacity for conversion. Depending on which economist or futurist you choose to speak to, the number of jobs, careers and employers the generation currently entering the workforce will have in their lifetime varies wildly. Add to that the rise of entrepreneurship and the `gig economy' and you can probably round those numbers up without missing the mark by too great a margin. Regardless of the accuracy or otherwise of these estimates, what is clear is that the workplace of the future will not be the workplace we currently know. We will likely work across many projects and take up various roles and responsibilities rather than having a single `job' over the course of a number of years. This means that it's critical to be able to take key concepts, experiences and skills and then redeploy them in new situations, applications and roles. Being able to ladder up and identify the larger theme or context of a problem is often the first step to solving it -- particularly when others are lost in the minutia of it. A great example of this is the collaboration between London's Great Ormond Street Hospital and Ferrari. Anger is often accompanied by a short, staccato breath that is shallow in the chest. These physiological markers are indicators that our sympathetic nervous system is switched on. You've probably been advised, Count backward from 10 to 1 to reduce anger, and while there is some truth to that, switching up your breath is a much faster way to change your state and create a different experience. When we're able to downshift our anger with the breath, it's easier to feel into the primary emotions just underneath the anger, see the larger picture, and facilitate mindful action. The Anger Breath is also a helpful tool for putting our attention on what we have control over instead of wasting our energy on what isn't ours to control. Stand with your feet hip distance apart. Set an intention for your practice. Take long breaths in through your nose. Exhale quickly through your mouth.

Repeat this for three rounds. The stallion protects his breeding rights, but an alpha mare always leads whether at the front or from the middle of the herd. Montana dominated inside the barn while Kestrel dominated in the pasture, a direct reversal of the human tendency for the female to be more assertive in the house and the male in public. Researchers have identified seventeen different facial movements that horses use in order to communicate with each other--including opening eyes wide to show fear, raising the inner eyebrow to signal surprise, and pulling back the corners of lips to indicate greeting. They push down the corners of their lips and furrow their brows to express irritation and pin their ears to communicate irritation or anger. In an almost comical gesture thought to represent disgust, they raise their heads and point their upper lips. In human society, likes and dislikes, joy and anger are social constructs, and I suspect that much more of our behavior is socially controlled than we would like to think. While both social and herd animals form hierarchies, however, I see no evidence in equine herds of the kind of ostracism that people engage in nor the narcissism, egomania, and megalomania one finds in almost all groups of Homo sapiens, the supposedly wise man. In natural horsemanship, the human being takes the place of the lead horse of the herd. Trainers stand in the middle of a round pen, working the animal at the trot or canter while watching for signs of submission--cocking an ear, chewing, flagging the tail, lowering the head--whereupon they look down and adopt a less assertive posture. The horse finally indicates its willingness to do the trainer's bidding by walking toward the person, a motion called join-up. Understand that the second you start talking, you are training that person. If you don't make it simple, fun, and easy, that person will think they can never do what you are doing. Tell your success story first. Talk about what your product has done for you and your loved ones. Identify with the person. Know success stories of truckers, waitresses, single mothers, professionals. Sell and advertise a low-cost product to get your foot in the door, then listen to the person and plant a seed of upgrades, referrals, and working with you WHEN they get a product result. I began to use my supply of herbs, and I could feel the little tablets kicking in right away, that hour, feeding my brain, nourishing my starved body. As I started to feel better, I began to remember all the things that I had pushed aside and had actually done really well at.