How good is your air?

• Better air might be the easiest way to prolong your life, especially if you live in a country or area with significant pollution. This article provides somewhat frightening statistics but offers solutions at the end. A few of the easy changes:

– Try not to create particles indoors (burning food, incense, candles, humidifiers!, hairspray).
– Avoid fires and pollution outdoors.
– Use an air purifier inside. 
– Change your home and vehicle air filters often.

Interactive reading

• Underlining and highlighting in isolation do not help you retain information you read. But interactive reading, with subsequent review of the material (especially spaced repetition) can enhance recall. This very cool article from well before 1942 offers tips on how to mark up a book (or article). I had been doing many of these all along. So many good tips and quotes: 

– Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don’t mean merely conscious; I mean wide awake.)

– But the soul of a book can be separated from its body. A book is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music.

– Full ownership comes only when you have made the book a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher’s icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your bloodstream to do you any good.

– The margins (top and bottom, as well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren’t sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It’s like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off. And marking a book is literally an expression of your differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.

– Or, you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That’s one of the reasons for doing it. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you. 

Just say no

• To reading/consuming junk. Unsubscribe from emails. Don’t “bite” on that article link. Don’t watch the TV show that Netflix started without your consent. Don’t be afraid to stop reading a book or article, stop watching a show or movie. Don’t eat the first chip, the cookies sitting out at work. Save your time for the good stuff. It adds up.

Thin Mints

• Do you like Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies? If so, check out these High Key mint chocolate cookies. Almost no carbs, clean ingredients, and they actually taste like thin mints. The sweetener erythritol has a cool taste that often ruins desserts, but in mint cookies it works. 

Stacking

• Cool post from Mark’s Daily Apple on habit stacking microworkouts. 
• You can also couple a microworkout with something you love to do. Katy Milkman in her book How to Change calls this temptation bundling – eg. she indulges in reading fun fiction only during cardio exercise. So, an activity she had no trouble initiating (reading) gets paired with something she struggled to accomplish (exercise). 
• You can bundle mopping with listening to music, a boring webinar with good coffee, folding clothes with a TV show, or any other combination. 

Backpack

• In his new book The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter makes a good case for the modern human issue of “comfort creep.” Life gets easier and easier as we outsource movement, never face temperature extremes, and have access to more calories.
• Easter weaves throughout the book his story of hunting in Alaska, facing the elements. After he respectfully take down a caribou, he and two other guys haul hundreds of pounds of meat five miles back to camp. He goes into the simple but effective art (and science) of carrying a load on your back. In the military, they call this Rucking. 
• Rucking burns about 2-3 times more calories than walking. Because walking involves far less force on ground impact than running (2.7xbody weight vs 8x), even with the added weight of a backpack, rucking causes far less force to the knees and other joints. In one military study, running caused 6 times more injuries than rucking. If you want to know with more precision how many calories you would burn, use this calculator. 
• You can go to websites like goruck.com and spend hundreds on equipment. Or you can just throw a couple textbooks in a regular backpack, and go out and walk on the street, or even better, on trails in the park. 

Mythos

• Check out this interview with an indigenous knowledge expert. They cover many different topics, but focus heavily on imagination. Here are some excerpts. 

– In storytelling, I know that when I say even something as definite as a crow in the room, we are all seeing 30 different crows. It is important that I don’t hit a PowerPoint presentation, and say this is the crow we’re talking about. Everyone’s imagination is being stirred, where they are remembering and catching a glimpse of crows in their lives before that.

– In many tribal stories and indigenous tales, there is an implicit understanding that what we call psyche or soul does not live in a person, but that we live within the psyche or the soul. However, in the West, we have had such a different fate over the last few hundred years that there is now a collective amnesia to the idea that we have a soul at all – whether there’s a soul inside us, or that we dwell within one.

MS: First of all, I would say again that the word enchantment, which ironically is often used about hearing a myth or a story, is the opposite of what’s actually taking place. A story and its effect on a room is not an enchantment, it’s a waking up…
CDC: A disenchantment…
MS: Yes, if you’ve done your job well as a storyteller, your story itself has a magical sensibility to ward off enchantment and to raise up. Secondly, people often prefer to dismiss myths, saying: it’s not true. But a way to think about myth is as something that never was and always is. Or as a beautiful lie that tells a much deeper truth. 

Quotes

“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.”
― Donald Kingsbury, similar to Chesterton’s Fence

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hofstadter’s Law – “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”