Attitude – Page 4 – Endurance Free Living

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 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

The Strange Evolution of Fear

When I was thirty, I was worried about my pension. I’d worked full-time for a couple of years, gone back to university, changed direction, changed direction again, wanted to change again. Not at all what a well brought-up middle class kid should do. I was sure the heavens would take their revenge later on.

At about this time, there was an advert in the papers by an insurance company. It showed a picture of a little wizened old man with a barrel organ and an equally wizened little monkey and suggested that this might be my future lot when I reached retirement if I didn’t have enough insurance set by. It made me laugh and afraid at the same time, because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have enough to retire on if my life continued as it had.

I was sixty at the end of May of this year and now I know for certain that I don’t have enough to retire on, in spite of all the investments and experiences in between.

But the thing is, the thought of ending up in the street with a barrel organ and a small monkey no longer fills me with fear. I’ve got my music and a good singing voice and I think that if I had to, I could get by on the street. In fact, there’s a part of me that is even attracted by the idea.

Perhaps the things that fill us with fear are actually the things we could fall in love with. Is it true for people?

Have a great weekend.

Love

Richard

P.S. This post originally appeared, with minor alterations, in my discontinued WordPress blog, ‘Jack-of-all-trades.’

Brexit

I thought I’d give my 5 euros worth on Britain’s decision to pull out of the EU.

I’ve got the BBC News app on my iPad, so I was checking the news early yesterday morning (Friday 24th June 2016). The full count hadn’t been made, but it was already clear what the result would be. And the strangest thing happened.

I’m a British citizen, grew up in England, but I’ve spent the last thirty years in Switzerland and I feel at home here. I didn’t think the decision would have much importance for me, to be honest. I really thought that Britain would stay in. But when I saw the news, I had a physical reaction. The kind of reaction you get when you personally receive bad news. That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.

I felt a tremor in the force.

I think it’s a mistake.

We have something called PPE here in Switzerland: ‘propriété par étages,’ which literally means ‘property by floors’. It’s a misnomer really, because people don’t necessarily own the whole floor of a building. Imagine a building with ten flats and you own one of them. PPE is a means of distributing the running and repair costs of the whole building between the different owners of the flats.

Let’s imagine you own a flat on the ground floor. The annual general meeting comes round and it’s necessary to repair the roof. You don’t feel concerned because you don’t live under the roof, so you ask, ‘Why should I pay for roof repairs?’

The EU is like a huge PPE. Every country has to pay for costs that they feel don’t necessarily apply to them, but sooner or later there will be costs that do apply to them. Complaining about this is like complaining about roof repairs on the building. Sure, when the rain starts getting in, you won’t be the first one affected, but sooner or later the deterioration of the building will trickle or crash down to you on the ground floor.

The point is that distributing the costs of the upkeep of the whole building benefits everybody in the long term. If people start saying that they don’t want to contribute to cleaning the stairs because they never use them, then the whole thing falls apart.

And this is what Britain has just decided. It doesn’t want to pay for roof repairs or cleaning the stairs. So now it will have to move out, buy another property and pay for the upkeep of the whole thing.

I can understand the attraction of going it alone. The problem with a 28 country EU is a lack of focus and identity. Where does Europe really begin and end? Does Turkey, for example, which is still trying to get in but hampered by its poor human rights record, belong in Europe?

Another Swiss example to illustrate.

Up until recently, the Canton of Vaud was composed of hundreds of communes, sometimes with only tens of inhabitants. It became financially and administratively unviable to continue like that, so in the early 2000s, communes started to band together.

Rossens VD, the village where I live has 42 inhabitants. There are many more cows than human beings. Up till 2006, the village had its own administration with a Syndic and Municipalité. In 2006, it banded together with 2 neighbouring villages, Villarzel and Sédeilles to become one commune called Villarzel. Total population, just over 400. The marriage was an organic one because there was a history of cooperation and interaction between the three villages already and the fusion has been a success.

On the other hand, another fusion project in the region called Valbroye involved the combining of fourteen different communes not all of which had an organic pre-existing connection and this has been much more delicate. In the end, only eight communes banded together.

Obviously, the more communes there are, the less organic the new commune becomes and the less likely that solutions will be a good fit for everybody.

The same thing applies to the EU. When the core EU countries banded together, the idea of a unified Europe was relatively clear. World War II was still a very recent memory and I suspect this helped everybody to focus. But when you have a Europe of 28 countries, how can it be organic and solutions satisfactory for all its members? Not possible. It all becomes an amorphous mass.

More is not necessarily better.

A club that lets everybody in isn’t a club. Or as the reverend in ‘A Passage to India’ put it, ‘We must exclude someone from our gathering or we shall be left with nothing.’

The concept of a unified Europe is no longer clear. It is threatened by the huge migrant problems facing the EU as a whole. The Euro is in trouble. And we live in narcissistic times. Community spirit seems to be largely absent. It isn’t fashionable to think in the long term. So perhaps the British decision has a certain logic in the circumstances.

One commentator suggested that it is important to maintain calm and wait until the dust has settled.

Or, we might also say, until the water from that unrepaired roof finally starts seeping through the ceiling.

Have a great weekend wherever you live.

Love

Richard

The Myth of the Open Road

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, there are more vehicles than ever on the road.

This means that the chances of a vehicle coming in the opposite direction are pretty high, even on a country road.

So tell me, why do a lot of people drive as if they are the only people on the road? And why do they constantly drive in the middle of the road rather than keeping to their right here in Switzerland (or left in the UK)?

Is it because they are fiddling with their mobile phone, looking at a GPS screen, changing the radio station, smoking, eating a sandwich, or just because the only person who exists is ME?

I learnt to drive in the UK at the end of the 1970s when there were many fewer vehicles than now. But when I look back, I have no memory of people driving in the middle of the road. Strange, huh?

Here’s another situation.

You’re driving happily along a road at your own speed and suddenly you see a vehicle a few hundred yards ahead of you.

Do you

a) continue driving along happily at your own speed or

b) accelerate, come right up behind the other vehicle and sit on its bumper, impatient for the earliest opportunity to overtake?

If you can honestly say that you do a), then you have my congratulations.

Because the vast majority of people do b).

It’s what I call the Greyhound Syndrome, a phenomenon that I noted as early as the tender age of 16.

So why do people react like this?

We’ve already established that there is a lot of traffic on the roads, so it’s not surprising that you find vehicles on the road ahead of you.

I think it must be a throwback to our days as hunters, a sort of knee-jerk reaction, rather like the reaction of greyhounds to an electric hare ahead of them in a racing stadium.

But we’re not dogs or sheep, are we?

So the next time this situation occurs and you start to accelerate, try to catch yourself and ask why you’re doing this.

Are you really in so much of a hurry?

What happens if you let the electric hare vehicle run in front of you and continue to drive at the same speed as before.

For one thing you don’t get stressed up.

You don’t stress up the driver in front of you by sitting on his bumper which is JUST PLAIN BAD MANNERS.

You’d forgotten that, huh?

Yep, not according the respect of a certain distance between you and the next car is not only dangerous, it’s, I repeat, BAD MANNERS.

And you can continue to enjoy your driving rather than getting het up about the fact that someone is in front of you.

Of course, if your personal speed is faster than the car in front of you, you’re going to catch up eventually and overtake. Just make sure that it is your natural speed and not a reaction to the other car. And don’t sit on the guy’s bumper because, yep, you got it, it’s BAD MANNERS.

I am fortunate enough to do a lot of driving on country roads where you can still drive freely and there is space still. So these days, if someone comes charging up behind me, trying to stress me up and sitting on my bumper, I just look for a safe place, indicate and pull over or slow down to let the vehicle pass.

And then I continue on my way and laugh at the bizarre reaction of the driver who doesn’t really understand what has happened and is usually, suddenly and for no explicable reason, no longer in such a hurry any more.

Perhaps his ego is miffed because he didn’t get to overtake me ‘properly.’

If you can do this safely, then I suggest you try it out. It’s a simple but effective exercise in letting go, rather than allowing the impatient driver behind you to stress you up and influence what speed you drive at, whether it be accelerating or slowing down.

It’s not because other people on the road have the mentality of a child of three that you have to behave in the same way.

It’s your life. Drive it at your own speed!

Have a great week.

Love

Richard