Practice of Wellness now on Substack

Hey everyone. UofL email now blocks Mailchimp, the platform I have used for the Practice of Wellness newsletters for years. If you are at UofL, you likely did not receive the September 2024 edition. Do not fear, you can check all prior posts on www.practiceofwellness.com. 

Going forward, you can also find posts on this Substack page. I am learning how Substack works, trying to make sure you only get the one email per month. Please email me anytime with feedback at practice.of.wellness@gmail.com.

Here are this month’s ideas for wellness:

1. Plastics• Michael Easter with another practical post, this time on how to avoid microplastics. While the internet may admittedly exaggerate the risks of harm from plastics exposure, enough studies have now established that we should probably try to limit exposure. • Easter’s suggestions: avoid bottled and canned drinks, filter your tap water, use a steel or glass bottle, use french press (or glass pour over) for coffee, use an air filter, use glassware to store leftovers and to heat food in microwaves, use wood or steel cooking tools, and eat less packaged food. 
2. Gratitude• From a recent Rob Henderson post, Warren Buffett’s thought experiment to determine if you have good fortune in life, the “marble jar” analogy: Assume that every human being currently alive, all eight billion souls on Earth, is a marble placed in a massive jar. If given the opportunity, would you put your marble in with the others, shake the jar, take another marble at random, and live that life instead? If the answer is no, then you know you have a blessed life.
3. Connection• Jerry Seinfeld gave a commencement speech at a little college that once beat UK in the NCAA tournament. I watched this video on a flight from Phoenix, AZ back to Louisville, KY. After a delay, we arrived just in time to jump in my dad’s car, talk to our sons about the trip, eat sandwiches, change my shirt, and roll up to the Palace Theater to jump in the line for Jerry Seinfeld’s stand up show.Our 12yo twins were sad we didn’t have tickets for them (we watch Seinfeld together a few days a week). • Jerry covered a lot of ground, but interestingly, he joked about luggage, airplanes, how much he loves his work (I was on a work trip), the love of pain (I am fascinated by “antifragility” and how what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger), the uselessness and frustrating distraction of our smartphone obsession (covered well in Jonathan Haidt’s book Anxious Generation), and he even boldly commented on the events from the PGA tournament in Louisville that morning.On the flight, I was reading a book about awe (recommended in Anxious Generation). • With the combination of the inspirational Duke speech and the awe book, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of connectedness, what my friend Mateo would call Qi. Seinfeld’s act at the Palace wasn’t just funny, it was real, meaningful. In his encore he argued that life distills to human connection. Vastness inspires awe, but so do the small details that Jerry told us to fall in love with (and that we laugh about when we watch his show)
4. Low Carb Bread? • We have tried a lot of low carb breads, and Carbmaster from Kroger is the best. Tastes like real bread, low carb, no GI upset, decent price. We get 5 loaves at a time and freeze them (lowers the blood sugar effects even further). 
5. Percolation• Cool article on the process of percolation. From the author of the post (Jyotsna Sreenivasan): “How We Learn by Benedict Carey (Random House, 2014) explains scientific research on how the brain learns. While much of the book concerns rote memorization, I was drawn to chapter 7, which details how the brain approaches long-term projects (such as writing a novel).Most writers have heard this advice: set aside your draft to revise later. And most of us have experienced new insights when coming back to a manuscript. Why is it helpful to set aside a draft? Why do we sometimes get insights about our writing when we are not working on it? Carey calls this process ‘percolation.’”• The three elements of percolation that she expands on are 1) interruption, 2) the tuned, scavenging mind, and 3) conscious reflection.

Quotes

One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us,” van Gogh writes, “but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls…And then one asks: ‘My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity?’ Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love—that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force.

– Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother

It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.

– Nick Cave