My Tips for Easy Living get more spunk

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A diet that works, Making writing more exciting, More spunk

The diet program I’ve been working on has been upgraded and printed out for critique by my friends innumerable times. They make suggestions, I make notes on their suggestions and then go home and work and work, trying to make their ideas blend into the existing handout. I haven’t scheduled a lecture yet, but many preparations for it have been made. My goal is to make what I say so obvious that it will not sound like I am asking for anything that people can’t do, do easily, and keep doing as a routine habit.

In addition to showing the handouts to my old artist pals and various business friends, I read diet books seeking ideas that can be incorporated into my lecture. With that background of ongoing input of new information, I have been upgrading on a daily basis my thoughts on how to cope with the problem that is afflicting well over a billion people today.

Obesity is a problem that will continue to harm people and shorten their lives for as long as the profit motive stimulates the sales of various kinds of foods and other pleasure-giving stimulants. As that process will continue as long as there are people to buy and people to sell them stuff, there will be victims of excess. However, people are also interested in long-term health and are willing to spend money and effort to achieve that health. There is reported to be a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to delivering diet and exercise plans to help these people. It appears that the providers of these plans are motivated to help their clients be healthy. Unfortunately, the statistics show that the overweight population has gone from a few percent to perhaps over fifty percent of all people.

Last night in a local tea shop, with twenty college age kids there, almost all of them were huge. HUGE! That is very sad, and although I didn’t talk to any of them I suspect that they don’t want to be huge. I don’t blame them because in addition to being fed poor quality sugar-laden food they are being fed incorrect information about how to cope with their problem. I know my style of intermittent fasting is easy and it works because my wife and I have both dropped from BMIs of 28 or so to BMIs of 23 or so in fifteen months. We have a few simple little games and routine habits.

I have been spending so much time and effort on this diet plan lecture and handout because I want to help these kids and everyone else. I don’t want there to be the slightest hint of guilt being projected at them so I have rewritten Tips for Easy Living many times with the intent that it will be easily accepted and easily followed.

I may not be able to do as my minister suggests because the bar for behavior is too high for me, but as I said to him last Sunday, I can shovel snow, carry rocks and chop wood. Also, the kindest thing I can do is …

I can spend the time and effort need to write a diet plan that people can understand and use successfully.

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1st Friday Art Walk in Bend, Oregon

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The grand purpose of life., What needs to be done?

We rarely miss the 1st Friday Art Walk in here Bend, Oregon. It is an easy couple of hours walking around our beautiful downtown, running into people I know from various venues and participating in generalized festivities. On fine weather evenings, which is nearly every evening here on the 3,600-foot altitude desert, people are dressed comfortably and having a pleasant walk-around. There are lots of tourists and lots of visual arts to look at, and some of the artists remember my name and start talking to me spontaneously. This is becoming more of a problem for me because my memory for names and other things is slipping away with my increasing age. It doesn’t bother me too much because, all in all, I am enjoying my life more than ever.

On that issue, it appears that what makes my current situation feel better is that I am working on several projects I feel are important. The one I am about to go public with is the project where I help people stabilize their life, and to start with, their weight. I know these methods work because I have personal experience so I feel confident about talking about them even though there will obviously be a lot of contention.

The strange reason for this change of attitude was the reading of several survival stories of people in a sustained prisoner-of-war type situation. The most recent one was Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. This book had added relevance for me because of my reading last year of Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays) by James Bond Stockdale, and my own rendition a couple of years ago of Epictetus’ Enchiridion – A manual of Stoic living, found here on this blog. One of the key ideas in each of those books is having an important project to work on. It is more than just having a job, a family, a community; it is more like being a functioning part of the Universe and doing something that promotes that kind of grandiose purpose.

I know that this needs to be done, I want it to be done, and I am doing it.

Today was productive, sort of.

It was one of those pleasant days like they always are for me, I guess. My Tuesdays begin at Dudley’s with a conversation which today was about the Declaration of Independence. It was read aloud in its entirety and then we discussed it and the application of those principles to today’s general political situation.

If you are ever a facilitator of a general discussion group meeting, this subject will probably lead to a good conversation. My participation was totally taken up with observing the people and their interactions and their realization that they were talking in depth about something that was very important. I only tried, with some difficulty, to insert one word into the conversation and that was that I had read somewhere that in Jefferson’s early rendition had been given to Franklin for his suggestions. Franklin changed, “… life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” to  ” … life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That wasn’t discussed further, but I drifted off into a reminiscence for a while on the subject of how a single word embedded in a grander statement had changed the whole world. My favorite one is from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount; his Golden Rule makes sense when you have read the opening Beatitudes, as it is written in the King James Version – “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you: do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” The word should is of key importance because it challenges the person to move to a higher state of being as is defined in the Beatitudes.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the various modern translations change the word should to would. Thus you are by that view recommended to treat others as you would have them treat you. That is okay, but it doesn’t challenge the person to move to a higher state of moral and spiritual being, and only asks them to operate at the level of development that they already inhabit. That isn’t asking much; it is easy to explain, and easy to do. It is so easy a child can do it.

But, by my view, that is totally degrading Jesus’ message to a mundane farce and not the foundation of a great moral and progressive religion. It certainly isn’t such a profound message that an intelligent man would sacrifice his life to get it published locally to his friends. He would know that that easy message is probably in the thoughts of every human being even in the most remote hunting communities. Treat others well and they will probably treat you well, and don’t treat others badly and they will probably not treat you badly.

Jesus’ message was infinitely more profound and I suspect that even Theodore Parker, the Unitarian Heretic may have missed its essence.

Some Stoics meet in Oregon

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A reasonable way to live, A Stoic society, We have a Stoic meeting.

This evening three of us met at Dudley’s coffee shop for the first meeting of Stoics here in Central Oregon. After I read the opening paragraphs of Epictetus’s book known as The Enchiridion, we talked about coping with life from the point of view of a Stoic.

“Some things are within our power to influence such as our thoughts, opinions, emotions, physical actions and creation of personal habits. Some things are outside of our power to control such as the past, remote things, our body up to this moment, our legal rights such as ownership of property, our reputation and holding public office. Those things are not of our personal control, and our relationship with them must be distant. The things within our power are naturally free for our personal use, and they can not be restrained by others.”

The meeting was scheduled to go from 6pm to 8pm but after Dudley’s closed we talked on the street until about 10pm. This is reminiscent of my many years at the Caffè Mediterraneum coffee shop back in Berkeley.

It closed at midnight but there were many conversations that went past 1am on the sidewalk out front. I loved those standing conversations perhaps even more than the ones inside because they had an even more free-form style than those sitting at the tables. And so it was.

There is a parent group of which we are also members which meets in the same venue on the second and fourth Thursdays. The discussions in that group are formalized and facilitated in a fairly strict way but as there were only three of us present this meeting was totally a conversation.

This was the fifth Thursday of the month but that would be rare for meetings, so the third Thursday is probably open and perhaps once a month would be okay, but there is a music group that plays downstairs on that day, so it would be too noisy. Perhaps a different meeting place or time would be better. I will check on that.

We need a Stoic society here in Bend. It is different from the UU and the Socrates Cafe.

What can I do now?

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Carry water, Chop wood, Do something that helps., Shovel snow, Sweep sidewalks

It is an ever-present problem for every one of us of how to use what is available at this moment to do something we feel is worth the effort. Almost every physical movement of our bodies is directed by some aspect of doing something we want to be done and much of it is under some level of our intentional control, but most are unnoticed acts almost unconscious movements to relieve some minor annoyance. Perhaps an itch, or a general movement to ease a pressure point, or perhaps a blink to wet the eyes, or a shift of the eyes to something in our environment that interests them, not me, or my mind now watching these letters, words, and sentences appear on the screen while my fingers move to my thoughts. All of that is under my general control, and even specific control, if I choose to control it, but most of it is closer to automatic. Boring.

What really matters more to me are the higher callings I feel to help the world be a better place. But for whom? Is it for myself? Well, yes, to some degree because I need to take care of my health and general wellbeing. But I am also concerned for my wife and social associates, and country, and the world, and not only now but for the future. As a conscious being I won’t be around for much longer so my worldview is shifting away from my personal needs and toward these other beings. What can I do to help them flourish?

Do I have more responsibility for my fellow human being who is sitting beside a stopsign with a sign asking for money, or the birds returning in spring and perhaps needing a little seed to help them establish themselves for the coming summer? Both of these can use a handout. Or do I pay the arborists who are just now finishing taking out the tree that was menacing my house, my neighbor’s house and possibly our lives? I counted the tree rings yesterday at 235 years. Wow, that Ponderosa tree was around when the US was just getting started. And what about the million-year-old rocks that I talk to at the UU labyrinth every Sunday; do I have the slightest responsibility to them? They are not alive and have no sensibility of my actions. Or is that just a mental excursion so I can ponder over some obscure thoughts that some people might call meditations.

Did my getting to the UU a little early and looking around for some little thing that needed doing and doing it count for anything? I found a broom and swept the gravel away from the sidewalks, that gravel that was thrown down the previous weeks to prevent people from slipping on the ice that was on those sidewalks during the winter. That gravel wasn’t bothering anyone, but the walk to the entrance was a little nicer when it wasn’t there; although if I hadn’t swept it away it is unlikely that anyone would have noticed. That kind of activity is just part of chop wood, carry water, shovel snow, as a way to help the community. It is almost unnoticed and I seek no reward but …

I know that it is something that helps, so I do it.

What should I do now?

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My choice for an action., Tips for Easy Living - Eating., What to do now?

Perhaps everyone feels this way, but it seems I have to intellectualize every little thing I do, and sometimes it comes to this choice between several somewhat worthy goals that could be pursued. It would make sense to list a few of them and then make guesstimates as to how much time, energy, and other resources it would take each of them.

I have been puttering with the various diet ideas for years and tried many of them and like everyone else’s experience discovered that they worked for a while but soon I lost interest and stopped doing them. They weren’t working very well, so why bother. Being more persistent than some folks, I did manage to keep my BMI down to 28 or so but that is above the officially recommended number of under BMI 25. So, after reading another small pile of diet books I decided to follow the general strategy of The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell. It is a combination of low animal-fat diet with periodic fasting and it has been working. After several months of following that method, I read The Obesity Code by Jason Fung which goes further into the processes whereby fasting works. Both of these books give in-depth analysis with documentation of how the body responds to food. Fung gets more deeply into the human body’s hormonal responses to different foods and the timing of eating those foods. As it turned out I had been following his method even before I read his book and was consistently losing weight at about a pound and a half per month. The great thing about the method I was using was that it required very little mental effort.

I have been getting prepared to give a lecture on my personal diet strategy and at least for the moment I do have some energy to do that. However, I also have at least ten projects that are just as important so I would like to run with this one intensely for a short time and if I can’t make it a good success quickly I will move on. But,

I will give “Tips for Easy Living – Eating” a good effort at a public success, not just a personal one.

Being honest and liberal has its failings.

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Fairness, Honesty, Liberality, Obeying traffic laws, The value of cheating

Being honest and fair has disadvantages in the real world. A person who scrupulously obeys the law will soon learn that many people around them do not. This becomes very obvious when the traffic signs are clearly posted on an arterial street as 25 MPH and the average speed that people are going is 35 MPH, and where there are no cross streets for three blocks the speeds will briefly push 45 MPH. Obviously, there are rarely accidents or people would go slower, but they are clearly in violation of the  posted law. What’s going on?

Perhaps the average driver is simply averaging the worth of their time versus the cost of traffic tickets and what they estimate to be the additional expenses of automobile repairs from accidents. When there are large numbers of people routinely driving on given streets that may, in fact, be a realistic assessment of the true costs on that street.

But, to go back to my original problem, being perfectly obedient to the law is counterproductive because every moment of obedience has a personal economic cost and an emotional one too. The economic cost is that time is wasted relative to other people who get ahead. They get an unfair advantage in life because they cheat.

The automotive example doesn’t matter much, but it is easy to observe and to write about. However, it is probable that people who do not obey the clearly posted traffic laws do not obey the other laws of the land or those of interpersonal civility either. A person who cheats at a 35 to 25 ratio is gaining about a 30% advantage in all of their interpersonal relations. That makes a huge difference because it is cumulative, and it is super cumulative if they find ways to invest that 30% advantage in such a way that it grows by itself. That is, if they live within the normal means and put the remainder of their ill-gotten surplus into something that somehow gains in value.

This same kind of advantage may go far beyond the economic transaction concept that I have been using here to illustrate the idea. Also, there may be no downside to behaving in the mildly criminal way because there is rarely any punishment for behaving a little beyond the law, and there is no social punishment either because everyone else is doing it and therefore it is not only tolerated, it is expected.

Am I a fool for being scrupulously honest and fair with other people?

My Life Strategy

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A-Bombs, EarthArk, H-Bombs, My Life Strategy

Strategy issues have interested me since an early age. Perhaps it is because my high school years were lived a half mile across an open field from where the plutonium was created for the first atomic bombs. During those years I was the closest living child to those facilities and I was old enough to be aware of what they were. Somehow, it didn’t seem strange to me that of the billions of people on earth I was the one who was there. Someone would be the closest and that it was me was just a random fact of life.

Six years later I was assigned to B-47 bombers as a pilot and was about to be issued H-bombs, which are a thousand times more powerful than A-bombs, when I balked. Perhaps someone was going to destroy humanity, but I wasn’t going to be the one.

I just realized this afternoon that many of my life projects have been motivated by similar considerations. The Free Speech Movement made it possible for students on every American campus to speak politically in their public squares, and foreign students to speak there too. That is a much more powerful right than the Second Amendment right to bear arms. A personal gun seems like an insignificant toy against a government with H-bombs and the right and ability to deliver them at their choice. But with free speech an individual with a good idea can confront the most powerful government in the world and win. It happens all the time.

The species of the world are being threatened by human exploitation of their natural environments and it is inevitable that many of them are going extinct. Because all animals live on other life forms it is necessary for the plants that are at the bottom of the food chain to survive for those animals to survive. With that in mind, I spent a lot of time trying to save them. My plan is called the EarthArk Project. It is simple but it hasn’t happened yet. The idea is to distribute envelopes addressed to the EarthArk in Antarctica to people throughout the world. These people would travel about their local area with the instructions to get pinches of local seeds and soils and drop the filled envelope into their local postal system. Once in Antarctica, the samples would be put into permanent cold storage at -50° F. on top of Argus Dome at 14,000 feet altitude.

My present interest is in helping humanity to get control of the obesity epidemic. The government has failed the public because it has promoted policies that don’t work and have failed repeatedly. We humans could add several years of healthy living to our life expectancy with a simple method of eating. Basically, “My Life Strategy – Food” is an improved version of eating the way everyone ate back before 1973, when the US government began interfering with how we ate. It supported farm policies and food manufacturing policies that ended up feeding the public vast amounts of corn-derived sugar. That made vast amounts of money for some individuals but has destroyed the health of Americans and now the population of the world too.

The attention of humanity is continually being directed to unpleasant things which keeps our anxiety high and sells newspapers and other media. Also, there is a constant plea for money to give to the poor of the world, much of which gets used up in “administrative costs.” To instead take a positive approach, I am presently creating markers to identify local places so that people can go there and have a meaningful experience.

My Life Strategy is to find key points and reveal them in a meaningful way.

My Life Strategy – Food

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My Life Strategy

I am planning to give a presentation on diet and weight control and have been working up the handouts for the presentation. Because of my failure to convince a group of people of the worth of my plans for their spiritual life enhancement I now have more time to devote to the diet project. It was interrupted for a couple of months because of my working up what everyone agreed was a beautiful presentation for that group. It would have brought that moribund organization back to life. But that is not what they wanted, and my plans were not to become a reality, and thus I can use my newly developed skills elsewhere, and perhaps even some of my artwork will be of use too.

There is a worldwide need for what I have to present. For example, people are desperate to learn how to control their obesity but the establishment hasn’t been able to get past the inertia of making money. Vast sums are being made with food and information that don’t enable people’s optimum performance and health.

I have had the habit of giving things away for free (for example the 3,783 Probaway blog posts), but to make a great success of anything it is necessary to have people not just use something but to identify with it. There are many million-dollar success stories based on diet plans that don’t work and medical cures for obesity that fail and thus send people to early graves.

There is far more to this human problem than obesity and that centers around people’s loss of contact with reality.

There is a desperate human need to solve that problem and I intend to do it. It isn’t going to be telling anyone to do anything specific; it is going to be in the form of general tips that people can apply to their personal needs. It is putting a point of view for looking at things before the public’s eyes and letting them see the beauty in these views when seen in a healthy way.

My Life Strategy is to see things from a point of view that will make doing healthy things the obvious thing to do.

What’s next?

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Satisfaction with temporary meanings and purposes., The meanings of life.

I had several good conversations today, and I attended the UU settling ceremony of Reverend Scott Rudolph as our permanent minister. I have been reading and thinking about the obesity problem of present-day humanity and what I can do about it. The problem is obvious and the solution is also obvious, but the way to bring these things into being is obscure. There are vast amounts of money and inertia invested in the current way of doing things. All of that would be okay except that it is bringing humanity into a condition of unnecessarily shortened life expectancy and a less pleasant life leading to that departure.

I have already failed at all of my projects even though I felt they were important. The EarthArk is of existential importance for humanity and many other species too and I spent quite a lot of effort on that, but it went nowhere. And the several months of effort trying to work with a local group of people to make their organization flourish totally failed. There are many more of these kinds of things, but they are now meaningless to me and to everyone else, so why bother to even list them?

My recent conversations with the UU labyrinth rocks have been enlightening in that they brought into perfect clarity my temporariness in time, smallness in size and my triviality in purpose to the grander scale of things. So, I am thrown back into an existential philosophical funk and am forced to generate my own purposes and meanings. I am practiced at that, but the effort has an inherent limitation because anything I create as value can instantly be voided of its value. Thus the value is meaningless unless I choose to give it meaning. That feels like a soaring into the sky, sometimes, and sometimes a swirling into a bottomless abyss.

It is impossible for anything to have permanent meanings so I, and we, must choose to be satisfied with the temporary ones.