Three Cups of Tea

Have you heard about this book, or Greg Mortenson? Maybe what’s flicked across your radar is the story of a man who failed to climb K2, instead found, in a tiny village on the edge of its glacier, sustenance so deep and nourishing that he promised to build the people a school, for their children whose classroom was a teacherless hillside, math done with sticks in soft earth.

He has since built 78 schools for boys and girls across the rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. When he made his first promise, in 1993, he owned nothing – he lived in his car, worked as a nurse. He had no idea how to raise the $12,000 needed to build a school.

He had no political agenda – he simply built schools, and paid the teachers the people chose among themselves. Of the two fatwa’s issued against him, one was overruled by the Ayatollah’s of Iran themselves, the other by a local shariah court.

While the Taliban is once again energetically blowing up girls schools, Mortenson travels eight months a year here to raise funds and awareness, and four months a year in Pakistan and Afghanistan to check in on existing and future schools.

His vision is so powerful and effective, this book is now required reading for our State Department.

Read this book and let your notions of possible and impossible, and scarcity and abundance be thrown into a swirling, heady, welcome chaos.

My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

Imagine if you reorganize how your mind processes information, releasing painful triggers and keeping only happy ones. For good. This is what Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, got to do. Well yes, at age 37 she had to suffer a massive debilitating stroke from which she took eight years to recover for the privilege, but she did get to do this.

Sometimes a book comes along and so touches my life that it ever after informs the most intimate inner processes of my thinking and feeling. This book did that for me.

Consider this: when something triggers an emotion in us, a series of chemicals which we experience as fear, excitement, grief etc. goes through our blood stream in 90 seconds. Any experience we have of that emotion longer than 90 seconds is because we VOLUNTARILY keep thinking about whatever triggered us. We chose these thoughts. We can chose other thoughts.
But generally, we don’t – we mull and attach and prolong the feeling. Sometimes this is a good idea, sometimes not, but it is always a choice. Knowing that is incredibly freeing.

This is just one tidbit from Taylor's story, which is amazing both in terms of how wisely and imaginatively she handled her recovery back from a pre-verbal state, and in terms of how she made use of the fresh start that had been forced upon her.

For anyone who’s tried to meditate and wondered what the heck they were doing, this is for you.