Community again

The Top 500 Poems is a collection of the 500 most anthologized poems in the English language.  I love picking up the book and approaching it from various angles - random, chronological, by author, by order of popularity.  Today it was Chronological.  Chaucer stands close to the beginning -

                                      .....a group
of sundry people, by chance fallen
into fellowship....

The Canterbury Tales

Seven Ways to be Happy Right Now

"If you do any of these seven things for two straight weeks, you will feel happier."

1)  Three Walks

     Studies from the Pennsylvania State and the American Psychosomatic Society
     "Half an hour of brisk walking a three times a week improves happiness."
     "Three thirty minute brisk walks or even jobs even improve recovery from clinical      depression....results were stronger than...using medication."

2)  The 20 Minute Replay

   A study from the University of Texas  "dramatically improves happiness"
   Write for 20 minutes a week about some positive experience.
   "you actually relive the experience as you're writing it and then relive it every time you read it.

3)  Random Acts of Kindness

    Study done at Stanford University
     five random acts of kindness a week  -
     over time you feel better about yourself and you feel appreciated, and short term
     "doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any      exercise we tested."

4)  A Complete Unplug

     Kansas State University
     Take some time periodically to deliberately unplug from electronics

5)  Hit Flow

     Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi
     Get totally absorbed in an activity you enjoy and are really good at.

6)  2 Minute Meditations

     Massachusetts General Hospital Study
     spend a few minutes each day quietly paying attention (mindfulness) to what is happening.
     More powerful than you think
     "parts of the brain associated with compassion and self awareness grew while parts associated with stress shrank."  Meditation can permanently rewire your brain to raise levels of happiness."

7)  Five Gratitudes

     Write down five things you are grateful for from the past week.
      A study from 2003 - "happier and healthier"

Alget qui non ardet.

Alget qui non ardet.

"That which does not burn grows cold" or "He grows cold who does not burn."

Love, interest, passion, testimony, commitment are a few of the things that require tending (much like a fire) in order to keep going.

Peck - Crisis and Community

Here, however, is the passage I was looking for when I picked up Peck again

"Genuine communities of a sort frequently develop in response to crisis.  Strangers in the waiting room of an intensive-care ward suddenly come to share each other's hopes and fears and joys and griefs as their loved ones lie across the hall on the 'critical list.'"

"On a larger scale, in the course of a minute a distant earthquake causes buildings to crumble and crush thousands of people to death in Mexico City.  Suddenly rich and poor alike are working together night and day to rescue the injured and care for the homeless.  Meanwhile men and women of all nations open their pocketbooks and their hearts to a people they have never seen, much less met, in a sudden consciousness of our common humanity."

"The problem is that once the crisis is over, so - virtually always - is the community.  The collective spirit goes out of the people as they return to their ordinary individual lives, and community is lost.  yet community is so beautiful that the time of crisis is often mourned.  Many Russians speak with great feeling about the brutal days of the siege of Leningrad, when they all pulled together.  American veterans still remember the muddy foxholes of World War II, when they had a depth of comradeship and meaning in their lives they have never since been able to quite recapture"

"The most successful community in this nation - probably the whole world - is Alcoholics Anonymous, the 'Fellowship of AA'....As with the victims of a natural disaster, AA starts with people in crisis.  Men and women come to it in a moment of breaking."

M. Scott Peck - Politics again (sorry)

Havel's description of the sense of community that arose in connection with the trial of the Plastic People of the Universe (who can explain rock band names?) put in mind of another author I haven't picked up for quite some time - M. Scott Peck (specifically A Different Drum, his book on the phenomenon of community).  Haven't yet had time to pursue it in any depth, but I DID run onto a quote the resonated with Capek's staking out the radical center-

"When people ask me to define myself politically, I tell them that I am a radical conservative.  Unless it is Thursday, when I say I am a radical moderate.  The word "radical" comes from the latin radix, meaning root--the same word from which we get "radish."  The proper radical is one who tries to get to the root of things, not to be distracted by superficials, to see the woods for the trees.  It is good to be a radical.  Anyone who thinks deeply will be one.  In the dictionary the closest synonym to "radical" is "fundamentalist."  Which only makes sense.  Someone who gets down to the root of things is someone who gets down to fundamentals.  Yet in our North American culture these words have come to have opposite meanings, as if a radical were necessarily some left-wing, bomb-throwing anarchist and fundamentalist automatically some right-wing primitive thinker."

Havel - Community

The feelings that arose in Havel at the trial of a rock band were shared by a group of other dissidents who gathered to support the accused.

"Only the exalting awareness of an important, shared experience, and only the urgency of the challenge that everyone felt in it, could have explained the rapid genesis of that very special, improvised community that came into being here for the duration of the trial, and which was definitely something more than an accidental assembly of friends of the accused and people who were interested in the trial.  For instance, a new and quite unusual etiquette appeared: no one bothered with introductions, getting acquainted or feeling one another out.  The usual conventions were dropped and the usual reticence disappeared, and this happened right before the eyes of several squads of those 'others' (though they wore no uniforms, they were identifiable at once).  Dozens of things were discussed that many of us, in other circumstances, might have been afraid to talk about even with one other person.  It was a community of people who were not only more considerate, communicative, and trusting toward each other, they were in as strange way democratic.  A distinguished elderly gentleman, a former member of the praesidium of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, spoke with long-haired youths he'd never seen in his life before, and they spoke uninhibitedly with him, though they had known him only from photographs.  In this situation, all reserve and inner reticence seemed to lose its point; in this atmosphere, all the inevitable 'buts' seemed ridiculous, insignificant, and evasive.  Everyone seemed to feel that at a time when all the chips are down, there are only two things one can do: gamble everything or throw in the cards."

Serpentum in sinu foves

"You are nourishing a serpent in your bosom"

A proverb that refers to a fable of Aesop's.  As one who has nursed more than one serpent in his bosom with the mistaken belief it would not bite me, it's a useful reminder.