invisipics – Page 5 – Endurance Free Living

The Dreaded In-Between (continued)

If you read my post a couple of weeks ago about reducing those floating moments (minutes, hours, days?) between actions, then you might be interested in having a look at this video:

3 Signs That You Will Become Rich One Day.

Don’t be put off by the mention of money in the title and the business-inspired aspect of the video.

This advice applies to anybody and anything.

It’s about the importance of time and using it to our best ability.

The remarks at the end about going out and doing things rather than wasting time on social media are spot on (although, I suppose, if you’re reading this, it’s technically a form of social media. Oh well, mummy knows best.)

Hope you find the video useful.

And don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t achieve all you wanted to do today.

Just try again tomorrow.

Love

Richard

The Fragility of Life

I had the misfortune to run over a cat on Friday last whilst driving through a small village on the way to the lake.

Well, strictly speaking I suppose, the misfortune was really the cat’s, mine being only minor in comparison.

Suddenly, there it was without warning, a sandy blur racing across the road only a meter or so in front of the car.

I braked hard but to no avail.

There was a sickening sensation as the right front wheel went over something and then it was in my rear-view mirror, throwing itself in the air and leaping around as if charged with electricity.

I stopped the car off the road and went back to check out the poor beast, dreading what I would find.

Mercifully, for both of us, the cat was dead when I got to it, so it can’t have suffered for more than twenty seconds, thirty at the most.
I had had a vision of it being horribly mutilated but clinging on to life and me sitting with it while waiting for a vet to come and finish it off.

We were both spared that.

Fortune in misfortune.

I picked the cat up and put it gently on the pavement, so it wouldn’t get run over by other cars.

“I’m so sorry,” I said aloud, “I’m so sorry.”

I thought that perhaps someone in the village would know whose cat it was, so that the owner wouldn’t wonder for months what had happened or if it was going to walk through the door at some point.

Closure.

Later, I informed the police of the accident.

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I learnt to drive in 1979.

In all the time since, I’ve never run over an animal. No humans either, I should add.

I hit a rabbit in Ireland once.

We were driving along a country round and there were rabbits everywhere, like the terrestrial equivalent of Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” One of them suddenly took it into its head to leap under the car from a bank by the road, but fortunately I was driving so slowly that it was only a little dazed and soon hopped off again.

Only recently, I was thinking how grateful I was that I’d been spared.

And then this.

No warning.

Sometimes, I have inner warnings to slow down while going through a forest, for example.

Once, when I had a premonition, several deer glided like grey shadows in the winter light from the forest and across the road, invisible until the last moment.

But I was ready for them.

Not this time.

No premonition.

No warning.

A hedge at a right angle blocked any vision of the cat until it was in the road.

What could the animal have been thinking? To dash across the road with a car so close.

I shall never know.

The film goes round in my my mind.

There’s that split-second when our eyes met just before it disappeared under the car….

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And what lesson can be taken away from something like that?

First and foremost, such an experience underlines the fragility of life.

One minute here, full of health and energy, the next gone.

It makes you think.

It makes you define your priorities, or it should do.

It could happen to any of us.

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And, rather disturbingly, it also makes you realize how much the colour red is present in food.

I wish you a safe week, wherever you may be and wherever you may drive.

Love

Richard

The Dreaded In-between

I’m trying to cut down on my in-between times these days.

It’s quite a challenge.

But what are ‘in-between’ times?

If you’re looking for a definition of the ‘in-between’ and what to do about it,
check out this video from the ModernHealthMonk:

Feeling lazy? Use the 3 SECOND rule

Much depends, of course, on how you view time and when it’s well-spent or not.

Basically, I think my time would be better spent if I could move seamlessly from one activity to another with little or no down-time in between.

A lot of you probably feel the same way.

The problem is all those moments, minutes and sometimes hours spent vaguely thinking about what to do next.

You may even have something in your sight line that you know you should do, but you think about doing it instead of doing it.

– You check your iPhone for messages, even though you only did this ten minutes ago.
– You look at the BBC News app for the third time that day.
– In fact, you do anything to avoid getting on and doing whatever it is that you’re thinking about.
– And then you think about all the other things you have to do and this makes you feel so exhausted that you can’t raise the enthusiasm to do any of them.

And so on.

I’m a great believer that identifying the problem is 50% of the solution, and this is where Alex’s video is a help.

Giving a name to these in-between times helps you to be more conscious of the process and therefore to do something about all this time wasting and procrastination.

And he suggests that once you have made yourself aware of what you are doing (or rather not doing!), you should count to three and then do whatever it is that you’ve been thinking about or putting off.

This is not to say that you should never daydream.

Daydreaming can be very creative.

But too much in-between time ultimately gives you a sense of frustration with yourself.

You know you could be using your time better.

So try to make a habit of catching yourself when you’re having an ‘in-between’ moment.

And move on.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

It’s Here: TTAC Live Symposium

Here’s a heads up about the live event starting today and running over the whole weekend.

Just click on the picture or on:

TTAC Live Symposium 25th – 27th November 2016

And remember: the valuable advice in the symposium isn’t just about cancer but about keeping you healthy in general.

Hope this is useful.

Love

Richard

Note: Affiliate links

The Lost Ways

Given the recent election of Donald Trump as the new American President, we may all have to brush up on our survival skills in the near future.

So here’s a heads-up about an interesting book called ‘The Lost Ways‘ which offers a number of intriguing survival techniques and recipes based on old lore.

As an example, you can watch a video on how to make pemmican, a traditional native American way of curing meat with fat and cranberries or blueberries which makes it practically last forever.

Click Here!

But even if you’re not going to be stuck in the woods for months without a refrigerator, there are lots of other wonderful tips and nuggets of wisdom that you can glean from this fascinating book.

Click Here!

If, on the other hand, you’re actually pleased about the election result, you might want to consider getting a free Donald Trump t-shirt.

It takes all sorts to make a world, as my mother would say.

You need to hurry, though. At the time of writing, the offer is only valid for another 19 hours….

Click Here!

God bless America!

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

P.S. Affiliate links.

Scandinavian Logic

We’ve just come back from a trip to Stockholm, Sweden.

While there, we coined a new term: Scandinavian logic.

It describes situations where a certain amount of information is given but not enough to be really useful.

Example: The parking at the hotel.

The lady at reception indicated that it was in a red building across the road, that the name of the hotel was marked and then she gave us a code to enter the car park.

We drive across the road.

It is dark, so all colours are relative.

There’s a brick building that seems to be a car park but no mention of the hotel.

We drive around for a bit and eventually come back to the building.

We enter the code in the command box which is accessible from the car.

Nothing happens.

I get out of the car and approach a man working on a lorry nearby. He informs us that there is another command box.

In fact, we discover that there are three in all. For two of them, including the hotel one, you have to get out of the car to punch the code in.

The name of the hotel was taped onto the command box, but not visible anywhere else outside.

A number of similar things happened to us during our stay, hence our coming up with the term.

The problem seems to be an incapacity to put one’s self in another person’s shoes.

People seem increasingly unable to think about anyone else but themselves.

And it’s not because everyone spends a huge portion of their day hunched over a mobile phone that communication is improving.

The opposite is true.

Communication is getting poorer and poorer with every new means of communication that we invent.

It’s important to reverse this trend.

Do not make assumptions.

The situation is not necessarily clear to the other person.

What you are saying is not necessarily clear to the other person either, even if it seems clear to you.

Try to imagine the situation from the other person’s point of view.

And try to use simple and succinct language.

In the example above, a few simple words of explanation could have avoided twenty wasted minutes of searching.

What can you do to improve your communication this week?

Have a great week!

Love

Richard

The Truth About Cancer Symposium 14th-16th October 2016

Just a heads up about the latest event organized by Ty Bolliger and featuring numerous authorities on cancer and health in general.

The Truth About Cancer first live Symposium is taking place from 14th October to 16th October 2016. There will be input from all sorts of experts about cancer and in particular about preventing and curing the disease by natural means.

The event features over 40 of today’s most popular and in-demand health luminaries… including Dr. Joe Mercola, Mike Adams, Dr. Josh Axe, Ocean Robbins, Chris Wark, Sayer Ji, Dr. Eric Zielinski and many others!

Well worth checking out:

TTAC Symposium

Just to refresh your memory, Ty started to look into the disease after not one but seven members of his family died from the disease and its conventional treatments.

He has made it his mission to inform everybody about natural ways of preventing and treating the disease and the dangers of the traditional approach to dealing with cancer – namely, surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.

He has made a series of remarkable documentaries about these issues.

So here’s the link again:

TTAC Symposium

Hope you find it useful.

Have a great weekend.

Love

Richard

P.S. The links above are affiliate links.

What the Lord’s Prayer Means to Me

I’m taking a risk here, I know.

Many people run for cover when someone mentions anything to do with spirituality.

Given the track record of the church, this is hardly surprising.

I just felt that it might be helpful to share this.

So I’m counting on you to suspend your disbelief and read on regardless….

In 2002, I was really depressed.

I mean REALLY depressed.

I’d often been depressed in the past, limped along between highs and lows, but this was rock bottom. I was dog-tired of myself and tired of the struggle.

I had a wonderful wife (still do!) but even love couldn’t seem to save me. I had this panic I couldn’t really explain. I’d sleep, wake up in a cold sweat and dread what the day would hold.

No matter what I did, I was like an exhausted battery that I simply could not charge.

I went to see a lady healer whose strength comes from her belief in God.

We did a session together and at the end she said, ‘You really should try to pray, you know. There’s a small church just next door. You should stop by on your way out.’

Rome

So I did.

I went in and sat down.

It was a long time since I’d talked to God and I hadn’t got a clue how to start or what to say. I wasn’t convinced that anybody or anything was listening and I felt that anything I thought or said would just be empty words, empty sounds.

Then I thought of the Lord’s Prayer, that cliché of a prayer that somehow we all take for granted because we had to say it so many times when we were children growing up and because somebody says it in every film that has anything to do with Western spirituality.

I hadn’t said it in years.

I didn’t think of myself as a Christian anymore anyway.

But I was stuck for a way to open my conversation, so I thought, ‘What the hell, let’s try it.’

And the thing is, I remembered it all even though I hadn’t spoken or thought it for such a long time.

There was some comfort in that and simply going through the ritual of saying it. It was calming somehow. I didn’t really believe a word of what I was saying, but that wasn’t important.

It was the first time in my life that I truly understood the value of a ritual.

Sometimes, just going through the motions is enough.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to start preaching at you. I just want to share this because I think it might be of help if you are going through a really bad time and you don’t know where to turn.

You see, I think we really are like battery accumulators and we need to be recharged.

Lots of different things can recharge us, of course. People we love, nature, music, all sorts of things.

But if you get to the point where you never really feel charged up, where you are always tired, you can be pretty sure that you’re no longer connected to the power source that ultimately charges us all.

You can call it what you like: God, the divine aspect of ourselves, a universal energy field, ‘The Force’ in Star Wars – really you can call it what you want.

But whatever you call it or however you think of it, you need to connect to it to be fully charged.

After all, you wouldn’t expect your rechargeable battery to charge up if you didn’t plug it into the mains. Well, it’s the same with us.

And don’t worry if you’re not even convinced that this power source exists.

As I progress through life, I’ve come to feel that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you keep an open mind.

So keep an open mind about this.

Just start a conversation, even if you think you’re only talking to yourself and you feel stupid about it.

It doesn’t matter what you say either. I used the Lord’s Prayer but use whatever suits you.

And don’t just do it once. Do it every day for a while and see what happens.

I still don’t think of myself as a Christian. I use Christian terminology in my ‘prayers’ because I was brought up in England and our family went to Church of England services so this language feels familiar.

If I’d been born somewhere else, I might find another approach more useful or comforting.

It doesn’t matter.

But the fact remains that I haven’t felt really depressed in the last fourteen years and I consistently have much more energy than those around me.

I’m one of the happiest people I know.

I have a conversation with ‘God’ every day and the Lord’s Prayer is part of that.

It has a very special place for me because it enabled me to jump-start my conversation with God and that conversation is still going on.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

The Value of Turmeric

The BBC continues to do its stuff.

Here they are testing whether turmeric has a positive effect on health:

Could Turmeric Really Boost Your Health?

Fortunately, they conclude that the answer is yes.

Turmeric (circumin) has received a lot of press in recent years as a cure against cancer and other diseases.

Hope the article is useful.

Love

Richard

The Oil in the Machine

A long time ago in the early 1980s, I was studying at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton NB, Canada. The university is on top of a hill and I used to negotiate a wooden stairway from the road where I was living to get up the first part of the climb.

One day, some people were at the top of the stairway, so I waited patiently at the bottom to let them come down. They took their time and then walked past me calmly without the hint of a thank you.

I was flabbergasted.

“That would never happen in England,” I said to myself.

Chistmas 1982 found me in England, and guess what? Exactly the same thing happened to me.

I made a careful mental note then and there that I would never again assume that behaviour in the land of my birth was superior to or different from the country in which I happened to be while abroad. The last thing I wanted to be was an ex-patriate living in a dream of a country that never was.

I have now been living in Switzerland for thirty years.

In July, I went to England with my wife Brigitte to visit my mother who is the same age as the Queen.

One day we went to the beach at Holywell, Eastbourne. It was very pleasant indeed. A light breeze, a little cloud, a hint of sun, neither too hot nor too cold.

We’d been there a while when a number of children in school uniform started to arrive at the beach. Some of them went swimming. One even went into the water in her school uniform. Three boys, probably aged somewhere between ten and twelve started playing with a ball somewhere behind us up the beach.

Suddenly a tennis ball whizzed out of nowhere and hit my wife extremely hard in the back. She was both shocked and physically hurt. Understandably, she was angry, but the boy responsible ran away and the other two just laughed.

I suggested that we hang on to the ball until she got an apology. Sooner or later, someone would have to come and ask for the ball back, I reasoned.

Nothing happened.

Only when we got up to leave the beach did two adults come up to us. One was the father of one of the children, the other a teacher from the school.

We explained what had happened and that an apology was in order. The teacher tried to convince us that the boys didn’t know what they were doing and hadn’t hurt my wife deliberately. The father said that it was the last day of school and the children were just blowing off steam. At no point did either of the adults in charge show any sign that an apology was in order.

I said that we weren’t going to give the ball back until the boy who had thrown it gave my wife some sort of apology. A third adult came up and asked for the ball informing us that we couldn’t walk away with other people’s property.

I repeated what I’d said before.

The father eventually came up with the boy who simply said, ‘Sorry,’ without any grace or sincerity at all. I felt it was probably the best we could do and we gave the ball back.

I must admit that I was shocked by the attitude of the adults present and saddened to think that basic manners in England had sunk to such a low point.

Boy hits adult with ball on beach: apology. End of discussion.

Here, we had adults going to any length to justify the behaviour of children with no hint of an assumption of responsibility. We were the culprits because we were walking off the beach with the ball.

I would like to be able to say that this was an isolated incident, but in the last six months I have been in several situations where similar things have happened – and in different countries too.

There is a growing refusal on the part of parents generally to accept responsibility for the behaviour of their children in public or to admit that they might be at fault. Indeed, if you indicate in any way that the behaviour of their child is bothersome, the parents use emotional blackmail to give the impression that they are the victims and you the one at fault. They also become very aggressive, very quickly.

I do not think that parents who continually try to find excuses for their children are doing them any favours.

We live in a society that has become so ego-driven that even the golden rule of civilization has been eroded.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Or in other words, don’t do something to someone else that you wouldn’t want done to you.

Without this rule, there is no civilization.

Why is it so difficult for people these days to apologize?

They will go to any lengths to try and present the other person in a bad light and make a crisis out of something that would be forgotten almost instantaneously with a quick apology. They argue that black is white and that white is black. It is the world upside-down.

We’re talking basic politeness here.

It is my belief that politeness is the oil in the machine of human society. Without oil, what happens to a machine? After a while, it doesn’t work anymore.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‘polite’ equals ‘weak.’ The very fact that you are capable of standing back from yourself long enough to think about somebody else indicates that you are far stronger than the many impolite people around you.

It’s simply a question of offering basic respect to other people.

It doesn’t cost anything.

It doesn’t take up a lot of time.

And it helps considerably to improve human relations in general.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard