as I live a few more questions

Follow Your Bliss...

Laaaaazzzzzy day. Perched in front of last.fm with a black coffee.

You know, I am starting to feel like the anchor of PPNN (the Potential Pandemic News Network). I feel like I've done my little bit to alert the blogosphere and the online social networks to which I belong.

It's time to download the rest of my pictures from the Canon PowerShot S500 and upload them to flickr:

Resiliency Through Warm Living

Steven Cohen of the blog Library Stuff shares with us some hard-won insights in his post "In a world of Inforuption, love is a killer app", refering to this interview with Tim Sanders of Yahoo!:

"[Saunders quoted by Cohen] NEDS is an acronym for new economy depression syndrome. It�s a mental state that a result of a combination of information overload and frequent interruption resulting in an erosion of personal close relationships. The symptoms are anxiety, fatigue, stress and lower productivity and irritability in a team environment."

Another quote:

"What we�ve noticed is that the survey respondents [who] have strong personal relationships at work in homes suffer less symptoms despite being attacked by the same amount of information. The number one solution is resiliency through warm living. That means a certain amount of face-to-face contact, phone contact on long-term e-mail relationships and living in the warm channels, contributing warm thoughts and ideas. Those create shock absorbers that can help you deal with this information."

I [Cohen] learned this quickly after my panic issues in March, and Walt Crawford and Karen Schneider have mentioned similar concepts on occasion. They talk about taking breaks from technology, getting away from the monitor, and spending time with family and friends. Agreed. Also, I would like to add that taking time for oneself if also very important. I've found that since joining a gym and working out 3-4 times a week has not only decreased my stress level, but I am interacting with others in a different environment than at work, and it has, ironically, enhanced my work on this weblog. On the days that I work-out, I write more. It must be a brain-chemistry thing, although I have no scientific evidence to back it up.

Eudaemonia: Happiness is Flow; and a Comparison of Virtues

Quote from an interview with Dr. Martin Seligman, President of the American Psychological Association (from The Edge):

The second one is eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.

The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more—recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.

Coming out this month as part of the DSM is a classification of strengths and virtues; it's the opposite of the classification of the insanities. When we look we see that there are six virtues, which we find endorsed across cultures, and these break down into 24 strengths. The six virtues that we find are non-arbitrary—first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance, moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster. We sent people up to northern Greenland, and down to the Masai, and are involved in a 70-nation study in which we look at the ubiquity of these. Indeed, we're beginning to have the view that those six virtues are just as much a part of human nature as walking on two feet are.

Fascinating reflections. As an exercise, I tried to see if I could create links between the Nine Virtues of the Enneagram, and the six virtues enumerated by Dr. Seligman:

• "first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster": I belive this would correlate to the Enneagram Four (the artist) and the Enneagram Five (the thinker, the investigator, the innovator, the troubleshooter).
  
• "second, a courage cluster": Courage is the virtue of the Enneagram Six. This could also be said to apply to the Enneagram Eight (the challenger, the leader type).
  
• "third, virtues like love and humanity": This is the domain of the Enneagram Two (the lover, the caretaker, the altruist).
  
• "fourth, a justice cluster": This is clearly in the domain of the Enneagram One (the reformer, crusader, activist, and moralist type) and also the Enneagram Three (whose virtue is Veracity or Truth).
  
• "fifth a temperance, moderation cluster": Sobriety is the virtue of the Enneagram Seven.
  
• "and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster": This is the Enneagram Nine (the optimist, the reconciler, the peacemaker and peace-seeker, the utopian), that which encompasses and includes all of the other types.
  

Wow, the two sets of virtues actually correlate well with each other.

Gay Sexual Ethics

The response I get is always the same when I tell my gay friends what I am reading: a guffaw, usually followed by a cheap joke. "Gay sexual ethics? Must be a short article."

(Aside: my friend Brian pointed me towards an interesting article on gay.com: "What's the link between sex and intimacy?", where five queer people talk about their experiences.)

Out of all the entries that I have made since I first started this weblog, which post do I think has had the most impact on my life?

It's the one where I quoted extensively from the article by Rev. Ron Rolheiser on 'moral loneliness' and my explanation of why I agreed—and disagreed—with Rolheiser's stance. That one post has sparked several conversations with other people (significantly, only by face-to-face or by private email, not via the comments section of this blog). Obviously this is a topic that either touches people deeply, or hits a raw nerve, or is completely disregarded as useless, outdated, 'old-fashioned'.

As I have said before, one of the things I like about being a librarian is kicking the tires on electronic databases that the Libraries has bought or is considering buying. Several weeks ago, during just such a tire-kicking session, I serendipitously came across an article written by Dr. Daniel Helminiak, a professor of psychology at the State University of West Georgia, where he teaches psychology and spirituality.

What is Peace?

My friend Edith (who now lives on Vancouver Island) sent me this link (you will need speakers/earphones and the Flash animation browser plug-in):

What is Peace?

Edith said: "This is beautiful; it takes a few minutes....but it's worth it." There is a subtle plug for an online store for "peace products" at the tail end (which you can ignore), but I agree, it is beautiful. Warning: May cause diabetic shock in the incurably cynical :-)

The Nine Passions and Nine Virtues

I have been tinkering around with the Moveable Type (MT) software all week, and I can understand why it has so many fans. It's very configurable and powerful software, and even though it lacks some of the features of other blog software like blogger and LiveJournal, I'm going to stick with it. There is still lots that I haven't investigated yet, notably how to change the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to overhaul the design of the Web site. I had found a Web site caled Moveable Style (I think) that illustrated this feature nicely, but I've lost the URL.

Oh no, wait, I've found it! Check this out: Moveable Style, which brilliantly demonstrates how you can make dramatic changes to the layout of your blog just by adjusting your CSS. Cool.

Anyway, one of the features of MT is the ablity to assign your entries to one or more named categories. It can be an interesting exercise to see how your life divides up into categories; everybody seems to have their own way of splitting life up into little boxes, don't they?

This past summer I attended a particularly funny one-man show as part of the 2003 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. The show, Seven Sins, was written and performed by the openly gay American standup comedian James Judd, and featured vignettes from his eclectic and bizarre life and career experiences, demonstrating each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn, to sell-out crowds at the Festival. And Judd has had a rich life to mine for material: at various times he has been a grape farmer, a criminal defense attorney, and an editor of a technology magazine during the height of the dot.com boom.

This got me to thinking: hey, I could use the same sort of thing to organize quite a few of my posts. But of course, I had to change things a bit, given that I've been studying the Enneagram for a full year now:

The Enneagram (pronounced "ANY-a-gram") is a geometric figure that maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships. It is a development of modern psychology that has roots in spiritual wisdom from many different ancient traditions.    (Riso, Don Richard.  The Wisdom of the Enneagram.   Bantam, 1999.  p.10)

The Enneagram, as "an ancient tradition of remembering the nine Divine attributes as they are reflected in human nature" (Riso, p. 22), found their way into the Christian tradition in a flipped way; the opposites of the Divine attributes became the basis for the Seven Deadly Sins, or Capital Sins, or Passions.

So I went and created categories, not for the Seven Deadly Sins, but for the seven sins plus two (fear and deceit) which comprise the Nine Passions of the Enneagram:

1. Anger (Resentment)
2. Pride (Vainglory: pride in one's own virtue), associated with Flattery
3. Deceit (Lying, Arrogance), associated with Vanity and the Ego
4. Envy, associated with Melancholy
5. Avarice (Greed), associated with Stinginess
6. Fear, associated with Cowardice
7. Gluttony (not just for food, but for all positive, stimulating experiences), associated with (Over-)Planning
8. Lust (for intensity, power and control; does not refer only to sexual lust), associated with Vengeance and Revenge
9. Sloth (Indolence, Laziness)

Wow. WOW.

(Second Note, May 21/04: Layne has moved back into Plain Layne, so I'll change the links again...*sigh*)

(Note Jan. 25/04: this is an imported entry from my former Blogger weblog. The Plain Layne site is now shut down, and any references to pages on plainlayne.dreamhost.com will fail. She's moved over to a new blog at URL: http://sedalina.dreamhost.com/. The quote in this entry is from Layne's blog post, reposted at this address: http://sedalina.dreamhost.com/archives/000566.html)

Wow. WOW. The woman behind Plain Layne can really write: "I remember walking along that sugar cane field like it was earlier today, skirting its knife-edged emerald fringe in the moist torrid heat. Everything was plastered to me with sweat -- hair, clothes, dirt. Even my backpack was soaked. Jungle-coated mountains were slicing open the bellies of clouds and I could smell the unmistakeable odor of a diesel-powered cane grinder, all smoky exhaust and sweet aroma."

I've decided to use Plain Layne as my starting point for blogspace exploration (why not? gotta start somewhere, right?)

Live the Questions

I love this Live The Questions quote, in fact, I bought a journal that has this quote on the cover. I was even thinking about calling this blog Live the Questions.

But I'm still wondering: Why a blog? Is this meant to replace my paper journal? To supplement it? Do I really want to post things here where anyone with a Web browser can read them?

Maybe these are some of the questions I must live :-)