Are you still chasing the feeling of your school’s annual book fair? Nostalgic for bendy pencils, scented markers, and novelty erasers? Come feel like a kid again at our Out of School Adult Book Fair!
We’ll offer free trinkets and books that bring meld nostalgia with adult interests! We’ll have games and crafts set up for a fun time together!
For adults, 18 and over
Bob Lucas Memorial Library & Literacy Center
Our library serves an ethnically-diverse community of disaster survivors, most of whom lost everything. They are well worth supporting. – www.altadenalibrary.org
—
‘joy doesn’t have to wait until the hard stuff is over.
it can exist in simple, ordinary moments alongside the mess.
he kindly agreed to let me share and reblog this wonderful lesson
i wonder if everyone read this and took it to heart,
would they understand more
about how lucky they are in this world
and begin to help others
who are not as lucky?
—
When I was a young kid, I was small for my age. We’d line up at the start of the year, smallest to the tallest, and I would always be one of the shortest boys in my class. I wasn’t the smartest either, I had to work hard for my grades. Every ‘A’ felt like I had run a grueling marathon to earn it.
On top of that, I would compete against my bigger, stronger brothers and always seemed to get my butt whooped. I write this to say that I didn’t feel special or lucky. When I was successful in school or sports, I would inevitably downplay my wins, assuming the test was easy or the challenge lighter than in past years.
My feeling of being just average persisted for a long time. I was curious about others, but I didn’t have great perspective. It took going off to college for me to see how fortunate I was. I walked in one day to my Economics 101 class and the prof started talking about how fortunate we were to be sitting in his classroom and to have the “luxuries” that we took for granted. He broke the world down into 100 people and called us some of the lucky ones.
Getting to the heart of the issue
We were supposed to be talking about some abstract economics concept that was going to be on the next test, but none of my classmates nor I were going to remind him. I was curious about this new topic and found it fascinating. With a few simple numbers, he showed that I was luckier than I ever could have imagined.
Here’s what I mean.
The 100 People Foundation, regularly uses World Factbook data to break the world into smaller more easily digestible numbers. If the world were a village of 100 people, of course, there would be an equal number of men and women. The majority of the people, 66 to be exact, would be between 15-64 years old, 25 would be between infant and 14 years of age, and 9 would be 65 and older.
From a geographic standpoint, 61 villagers would be Asian (of that, 20 would be Chinese and 17 would be Indian), 14 would be African, 11 would be European, 9 would be Latin or South American, 5 would be North American. As far as languages go, the largest number, 12, would speak Chinese, with 6 speaking Spanish, and five English.
One of the lucky ones
But here’s where it gets interesting. Less than 7 percent of the people would have their own home, eat full meals and drink clean water, have a mobile phone, surf the internet, and have gone to college. Yes, the devil is in the details. Let that sink in, less than 7 percent. Um, I get annoyed when the wifi goes down for a minute, 93% don’t have the Internet or a mobile phone? Really?
Of the 100, close to 80 people would have a place to shelter them from the wind and the rain, but 22 would not. Can you imagine, no shelter? Nothing substantial to save them from Mother Nature’s slights including storms, hurricanes, fires. Eleven of the 100 would be undernourished and 1 would die of starvation. Of the 100, 86 would be able to read and write; 14 would not, with only 7 having a college degree.
I can’t speak for the rest of my Econ class, but when I started to view wins and losses from a different lens, I started to see how fortunate I’ve been in my life.
What about you? How fortunate do you feel when you look at your life from this perspective? Brian
—
“The Overview effect is a cognitive shift. You look down at the earth and realize that everyone who ever lived and died, every person that has ever been born was within this tiny blue speck in space. Divisions such as race, gender, country and language fall away.
The design is round because the world is round, and I wanted to make it a defined and pleasing shape. The colours are chosen from flags. It uses natural frequencies instead of percentages. This is a deliberate choice so that it can be as accessible to as many people as possible.”
credit: This graphic was tweeted byAstronaut Chris Hadfield, and reprinted in many publications.
Gwinn, MI, United States
artfactorysuperior@Gmail.com
—
“customer service is an opportunity to exceed your customer’s expectations.”
-John Jantsch
*John Jantsch is an author, speaker, and marketing consultant who specializes in assisting small businesses. He is the author of Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine, and The Commitment Engine.
A road sign advocating kindness appeared on a street in Hull in July last year – BBC
Kindness has been chosen as Children’s Word of the Year for 2024 after a survey of thousands of young people.
Oxford University Press (OUP) said “artificial intelligence” and “conflict” were also among the most common suggestions.
It follows 2023’s winning phrase “climate change”, and “Queen”, which was the winner in 2022 following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
More than 3,000 children aged six to 14 were asked for their suggestions, with the top three then put to vote by a further 2,000 children.
Andrea Quincey, a director at OUP, said the choice was “encouraging” and reflected children’s increasing awareness of mental health. “We know from previous years that young people are very conscious of the big issues that can divide us as a society and attuned to the important role which language can play in bringing people together.”
“It tells us that empathy and tolerance and the language we use matter, and that kindness is not only a solution to so many problems but is something everyone and anyone can do to make a difference.”
The final vote kindness had been chosen by 61% of children.
—
‘what wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
—
source credits chris mchugh, bbc news, oxford university press
this very moving page popped up on my screen recently
proof once again
that one person’s simple act
can have a huge impact on another
often without them ever knowing.
profound and quiet kindness
yes.
—
source credit: Luck (I), by Joy Sullivan
Joy lives in Portland, Oregon and is a poet and educator. She has a masters degree in poetry and served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts. She also leads live transformative writing workshops for individuals who have experienced trauma and has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford to Florida State University.
Joy’s work is a part of The San Marcos Writing Project and is one of over 200 writing project sites in the country devoted to developing teacher leaders that improve the writing and learning of all students.
