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Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects. They do not suffer from the penis envy Freud postulated, but from power envy.
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Mary Pipher |
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The Ability to Love New People
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Mary Pipher |
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Via our machines-- be it phone, television, or computer-- we receive an enormous amount of information every day. But we don't have the time, the energy, and the emotional resilience to deal with all of this information. We do triage as best we can, but we still are flooded with more stimulation than we can process and integrate. Still, many people are hooked. Scientists have discovered that every time we hear the blip or ding of an e-mail ..
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Mary Pipher |
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It is difficult to convince humans to act when the payoffs are uncertain while the sacrifices are substantial and immediate.
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Mary Pipher |
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As a general rule, I don't talk long to climate change deniers. From sad experience I have learned that it is impossible to change their minds.
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Mary Pipher |
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The cure for the pain is the pain. Unprocessed pain almost always leads to something much worse than pain. Opening ourselves up to our emotional reactions to that world and allowing ourselves to feel the gamut of emotions that opening inevitably produces is the beginning of a movement toward wholeness and healing. This can produce energy, focus, and a sense of urgency. To quote Bob Dylan, "Behind every beautiful thing is some kind of pain."
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Mary Pipher |
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eb15e7b
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In the Western consciousness, emotion has had a bad rap as the opposite of reason and good judgment. But psychological and neurological research reveal that emotion is the primary organizing force for human beings.
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Mary Pipher |
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One of our most effective coping skills is simply sticking together. In a 2011 New Yorker article called "Social Animal," David Brooks writes, "Research over the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really wants is connection . . . Joining a group that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income."
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Mary Pipher |
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Children are a great aid in both stress reduction and joy production.
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Mary Pipher |
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If you want to know the time, ask a dog. They always know, and they'll tell you the correct time, which is now, now, now.
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Mary Pipher |
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What I find most sustaining is what I loved as a girl: lying down on my back and looking at the sky. That is my first memory and I hope it is my last.
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Mary Pipher |
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Visiting with other human beings may be one of the most ancient healing tonics.
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Mary Pipher |
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Children are also effective at influencing others. Many times in the last few years, I have witnessed children's letters and testimony touch and influence hard-boiled politicians in ways that adults cannot. Politicians are people, too, and they have children and grandchildren. An articulate and earnest child who asks only for a sustainable world can soften their hearts.
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Mary Pipher |
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This pivotal experience taught Mitch that to participate in a democracy, you must show up, meet people, and volunteer. It doesn't work to wait to be discovered.
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Mary Pipher |
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when people come together, they can accomplish more than they can by individual actions. With this transformation from "me" to "we," the wind picks up, the sails fill, and the boat is off. . . Media coverage tends to focus on one person and doesn't point out that the heroine of a story has the support of a small group behind her."
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Mary Pipher |
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Coalition members learned to make our points via stories. It is impossible to argue with a story that simply reflects the experience of the storyteller. People like stories and remember them. They create emotions that are essential to motivation and action. Emotions, not facts, are what energize humans to act. Our best stories were about our own inconsistencies and failings or about our own emotional struggles with the issue.
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Mary Pipher |
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b4e25fb
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This bittersweet phenomenon of a successful event paired with no discernible political gain seemed to be a chronic problem for our group. However, we were experiencing a victory that could not be taken away from us. That is, we were by now a transcendent, connected community. We were learning that relationships always trump agendas, and that a good process is sustaining, regardless of outcome.
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Mary Pipher |
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As we go about our troubled and sometimes frenzied lives, in this time of the Great Acceleration, we have close at hand ways we can move out of the time zone of our current century and into a transcendent experience. We can do this by simply recognizing our kinship with another living being, by finding one beautiful thing to enjoy, or by allowing ourselves to be swept away emotionally by the miraculous and intricate world we have all around..
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Mary Pipher |
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I do it for the relationships. I like to spend my time with people who are trying to make the world a fairer, kinder place. I've been in groups like this since college, and they have made me happy.
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Mary Pipher |
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Too many people only dream at night. I like to dream during the day.
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Mary Pipher |
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I also try not to evaluate myself in terms of the results of my actions. Rather, I focus on the quality of my interactions and the joy I feel every day.
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Mary Pipher |
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Good Moral Character
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Mary Pipher |
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Healing the earth is not a liberal or conservative idea-- it is a form of prayer.
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Mary Pipher |
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inadequate. Most do not help students with what they need most--a sense of meaning regarding their sexuality, ways to make sense of all the messages, and guidelines on decent behavior in sexual relationships.
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Mary Pipher |
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W. S. Merwin . . . traced our attitude of dominion to the beginnings of agriculture. He argued that settling down in permanent places gave us the "illusion of possession." That fateful moment in our hominid history set us up for our downfall."
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Mary Pipher |
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One example of this is the way the world community dealt with the hole in the ozone layer caused by fluorocarbons. This alarming problem, documented by solid evidence, had to be solved for life on earth to continue. And it was. In 1978, governments and businesses worked together to eliminate fluorocarbons in aerosol cans and other products. Today the hole in the ozone layer is disappearing. Scientists believe it will be back to its ideal le..
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Mary Pipher |
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Working together, we were experiencing what Nelson Mandela called "the multiplication of courage."
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Mary Pipher |
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Awareness is an important step in the healing process, but we need not feel conscious of our global problems all the time. Most of the time, we can live "as if" the world we know will long continue. Constructive awareness allows us to think about our global storm when we have an opportunity to make choices about our behavior."
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Mary Pipher |
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Monique once told me, "It is the driven of the world who have the hardest lives. They don't see their families or have time to enjoy a garden or a bedtime story. They may have money and prestige, but they are poor. True wealth for our family means the time to be patient and loving with each other, time to rest and play, and a sense that we are doing what we can to be good citizens of the earth."
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Mary Pipher |
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Monique said, "Not having to rush is the greatest luxury an American can experience these days."
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Mary Pipher |
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Monique teaches her daughters the names of the trees, birds, wildflowers, and ornamental plants. She wants them to pay attention to the natural world, which will always be a solace to them, no matter what happens.
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Mary Pipher |
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We can be intentional in our decisions about vacations and leisure time. Before we make our decisions, we can explore questions like, How far from home will we travel? Shall we go by bike, car, train, or airplane? Do we have closer alternatives nearby? What kind of tourism and recreation do we want to support with our choices? Travel has always been a big source of pleasure for Jim and me and we have struggled to find the right balance betw..
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Mary Pipher |
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One of psychologist Martin Seligman's early research projects involved giving students one of two assignments-- they could do a good deed or they could give themselves a treat. He asked them to rate their happiness at the time and a week later. When the event occurred, the students who had done a good deed reported higher happiness scores. And a week later, these students felt even happier when they remembered their good deed than did the s..
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Mary Pipher |
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In his book The Pursuit of Happiness, psychologist David Myers reviewed research on the relationship between money and happiness. He found that once personal income had reached a stable but rather modest level, more income didn't make people any happier. Instead, what made people happy was more time with friends and family. He concluded that happiness often involves living a simple life, consuming less, and savoring more. He cited a study t..
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Mary Pipher |
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a philosophy that teaches: try to live a life that is not too arduous, not too comfortable, not too difficult, not too grandiose, and not too complicated.
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Mary Pipher |
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Newcomers need people from their own culture to orient them to America.
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Mary Pipher |
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For newcomers from slow cultures, time is a river that flows through their lives. They have no abstract sense of time. Refugees who have been on sun, seasonal, or Circadian-rhythm time find the change to computer time jarring. One of the first things I teach new arrivals is time management, a very difficult skill to master but one that is essential to success in America. I bring calendars, personal planners, and watches and teach refugees h..
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Mary Pipher |
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I tell them, "Americans are very serious about two things--time and money."
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Mary Pipher |
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It takes most people from one to three years to learn social English and five to seven years to learn academic English.
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Mary Pipher |
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Schools are the frontline institution for acculturation, where children receive solid information about their new world.
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Mary Pipher |
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Whereas job distribution used to look like a triangle, it now looks like an hourglass. There are many jobs at the top and at the bottom, but the jobs in the middle are gone.
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Mary Pipher |
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61ec36a
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The INS is incredibly understaffed. For the last few years Congress has funded enforcement but hasn't funded routine service and processing of documents. A recent newspaper article reported that of the 115,000 calls made to national INS offices daily, only 500 are answered.
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Mary Pipher |
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started the Thrive Project with a group of mental health professionals. We trained mentors from different cultures to be cultural brokers on mental health issues.
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Mary Pipher |
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Our Western mental health system is dependent on verbal expressiveness, self-disclosure, and a belief in individualism. It splits the personal and the professional, the sacred and profane, and the mind and the body. Our system is also expensive, hard to schedule,
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Mary Pipher |