“You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “and your hair has become very white; and yet you incessantly stand on your head – do you think, at your age, it is right?”
In my youth,” Father William replied to his son, “I feared it might injure the brain; but now that I’m perfectly sure I have none, why, I do it again and again.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
To seriously enhance the thinking process, all you need to do is a little bit of exercise. Brain will get more blood flow, and better, more fruitful, ideas.
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
Oliver Burkeman provides an important and insightful reassessment of productivity. The drive to get more done can become an excuse to avoid figuring out what we actually want to accomplish. By confronting this question, we unlock a more meaningful approach to organizing our time.
It is well known Zeus would sometimes come down from Olympus and walk incognito amongst mortals. Eventually he would be recognized and people would cry out “Hey! Zeus!” …
All you need in order to do yoga is a mat and bare feet, and knowledge of the 5 basic poses: Horse, Cat, Cow, Tadpole, and Cobra. All the rest follow naturally from there.
You’ll learn that good pain, as opposed to bad pain, is the body’s signal that circulation is improving and muscle cells are being recognized.