An Oxford philosophy professor who has studied existential threats ranging from nuclear war to superbugs says the biggest danger of all may be superintelligence.
Superintelligence is any intellect that outperforms human intellect in every field, andNick Bostrom thinks its most likely form will be a machine -- artificial intelligence.
There are two ways artificial intelligence could go, Bostrom argues. It could greatly improve our lives and solve the world's problems, such as disease, hunger and even pain. Or, it could take over and possibly kill all or many humans. As it stands, the catastrophic scenario is more likely, according to Bostrom, who has a background in physics, computational neuroscience and mathematical logic.
"Superintelligence could become extremely powerful and be able to shape the future according to its preferences," Bostrom told me. "If humanity was sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figure out how to do so safely."
Bostrom, the founding director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, lays out his concerns in his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. His book makes a harrowing comparison between the fate of horses and humans:
Horses were initially complemented by carriages and ploughs, which greatly increased the horse's productivity. Later, horses were substituted for by automobiles and tractors. When horses became obsolete as a source of labor, many were sold off to meatpackers to be processed into dog food, bone meal, leather, and glue. In the United States, there were about 26 million horses in 1915. By the early 1950s, 2 million remained.
The same dark outcome, Bostrom said, could happen to humans once AI makes our labor and intelligence obsolete.
It sounds like a science fiction flick, but recent moves in the tech world may suggest otherwise. Earlier this year, Google acquired artificial intelligence company DeepMind and created an AI safety and ethics review board to ensure the technology is developed safely. Facebook created an artificial intelligence lab this year and is working on creating an artificial brain. Technology called "deep learning," a form of artificial intelligence meant to closely mimic the human brain, has quickly spreadfrom Google to Microsoft, Baidu and Twitter.
And while Google's Ray Kurzweil has long discussed a technological "singularity" in which AI replaces humans, a giant in the tech world recently joined Kurzweil in vocalizing concern. Elon Musk, co-founder of SpaceX (space transport) and Tesla (electric cars), tweeted earlier this month:
Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014
I spoke with Bostrom about why he's worried and how we should prepare.
You write that superintelligent AI could become dangerous to humans because it will seek to improve itself and acquire resources. Explain.
Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
Could we program the AI to create no more than 100 paper clips a day for, say, a total of 10 days?
Sure, but now the AI is trying to maximize the probability that it will make exactly 100 paper clips in 10 days. Again, you would want to eliminate humans because they could shut you off. What happens when it's done making the total 1,000 paper clips? It could count them again or develop a more accurate counting apparatus -- perhaps one that is the size of the planet or larger.
You can imagine an unlimited sequence of actions perhaps with diminishing returns but nonetheless some positive values to the AI that would even increase by a tiny fraction the probability of reaching the goal. The analogy extends to any AI --- not just one programed to make paper clips. The point is its actions would pay no heed to human welfare.
Could we make its primary goal be improving the human condition, advancing human values -- making humans happy?
Well, we'd have to define then what we mean by being happy. If we mean feeling pleasure then perhaps the superintelligent AI would stick electrodes onto every human brain and stimulate our pleasure centers. Or you could take out the body altogether and have our brains bathing in a drug the AI could design. It turns out to be quite difficult to specify a goal of what we want in English -- let alone in computer code.
Similarly, we can't be confident in our current set of human values. One can imagine what would have happened if some earlier human age had had the opportunity to lay down the law for all time -- to encode their understanding of human values once and for all. We can now look back and see they had huge moral blind spots.
In the book, you say there could be one superintelligent AI -- or multiple. Explain.
In one scenario, you have one superintelligent AI and, without any competition, it has the ability to shape the future according to its preferences. Another scenario is multipolar, where the transition to superintelligence is slower, and there are many different systems at roughly comparable level of development. In that scenario, you have economic and evolutionary dynamics coming into play.
In a multipolar scenario, there's the danger of a very rapid population explosion. You could copy a digital mind in a minute, rather than with humans, where it takes a couple of decades to make another adult. So the digital minds could increase so quickly that their incomes drop to subsistence level -- which would probably be lower than for a biological mind. Then humans would no longer be able to support themselves by working, and, most likely, would die out. Alternatively, if social structures somehow continue to hold, some humans could gain immense capital returns from superintelligence that they could use to buy more computer hardware to run more digital minds.
Are you saying it's impossible to control superintelligence because we ourselves are merely intelligent?
It's not impossible -- it's extremely difficult. I worry that it will not be solved by the time someone builds an AI. We're not very good at uninventing things. Once unsafe superintellignce is developed, we can't put it back in the bottle. So we need to accelerate research of this control problem.
Developing an avenue towards human cognitive enhancement would be helpful. Presuming superintelligence doesn't happen until the second half of the century, there could still be time to develop a cohort of cognitively enhanced humans who might have the capacity to try to solve this really difficult technical control problem. Cognitively enhanced humans will also presumably be able to better consider long-term effects. For example, today people are creating more energy-efficient chips to extend the battery life of cell phones -- without thinking about what the long-term effects could be. With more intelligence, we would be able to.
Cognitive enhancement could take place through collective cognitive ability -- the Internet, for example, and institutional innovations that enable humans to function better together. In terms of individual cognitive enhancement, the first thing likely to be successful is genetic selection in the context of in-vitro fertilization. I don't hold out much for cyborgs or implants.
What should we do to prepare for the risk of superintelligence?
If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause.
Attempts to affect the overall rate of development in computer science, neuroscience and chip manufacturing are likely to be futile. There are enormous incentives to make incremental progress in the software and hardware industries. Progress towards superintelligence thus far has very little do with long-term concern about global problems -- and more to do with making big bucks.
Also, we have problems with collective human wisdom and rationality. At the moment, we are very poor at addressing big global challenges. Even with something as straightforward as global warming -- where you have a physical principle and rising temperature you can measure -- we are not doing a great job. In general, working towards making the world more peaceful and collaborative would be helpful for a wide range of existential catastrophes.
There are maybe six people working full time on this AI control problem. We need to add more brilliant brains to this technical work. I'm hoping my book will do something to encourage that. How to control superintelligent AI is really the most important task of our time -- yet, it is almost completely ignored.
Monday, August 25, 2014
ARTICLE: NYTIMES The Intelligent-Life Lottery by George Johnson
The Intelligent-Life Lottery by George Johnson
Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.
But Sagan’s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan’s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one — Homo sapiens — had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth’s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.
Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system — 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.
That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn’t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.
Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest — just a fraction of NASA’s budget.
“If you don’t ante up,” he wrote, “you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.”
Three years ago, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it wasthreatened by wildfire — another reminder of the precariousness of the search.
It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and — at least in the case of humans — to wonder what it is all about.
Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers — 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 — that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and — maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito — purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.
According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and — round after round — hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.
In one of my favorite books, “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.
Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him — idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.
For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us “with a new kind of amazement” and “a frisson for the improbability of the event” — a fellow agnostic’s version of an epiphany.
“We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,” he wrote. “Replay the tape a million times,” he proposed, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.”
Other biologists have disputed Gould’s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.
But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” seem to have “hit upon a relatively simple solution to life’s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.” Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, “may well be just an aesthetic preference.”
In “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.
“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,” Dr. Drake told him. “Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.”
He knew the odds of tuning in — at just the right frequency at the right place and time — were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.
“We’ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,” he said.
Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.
But Sagan’s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan’s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one — Homo sapiens — had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth’s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.
Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system — 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.
That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn’t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.
Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest — just a fraction of NASA’s budget.
“If you don’t ante up,” he wrote, “you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.”
Three years ago, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it wasthreatened by wildfire — another reminder of the precariousness of the search.
It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and — at least in the case of humans — to wonder what it is all about.
Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers — 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 — that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and — maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito — purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.
According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and — round after round — hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.
In one of my favorite books, “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.
Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him — idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.
For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us “with a new kind of amazement” and “a frisson for the improbability of the event” — a fellow agnostic’s version of an epiphany.
“We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,” he wrote. “Replay the tape a million times,” he proposed, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.”
Other biologists have disputed Gould’s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.
But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” seem to have “hit upon a relatively simple solution to life’s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.” Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, “may well be just an aesthetic preference.”
In “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.
“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,” Dr. Drake told him. “Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.”
He knew the odds of tuning in — at just the right frequency at the right place and time — were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.
“We’ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,” he said.
ARTICLE:Why it’s hell to be a doctor in America today By Susannah Cahalan
Why it’s hell to be a doctor in America today
By Susannah Cahalan
Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is mad as hell.
American health care is in upheaval. On one side, overhead and malpractice insurance costs keep increasing, while salaries stagnate. On the other, patients believe that expensive drugs are better, more people are on government-run insurance that pays less, while private insurance fights every claim.
Now doctors spend most of their time trying to game the system, requiring endless paperwork, protracted bureaucratic battles and “treadmill medicine,” seeing as many patients as possible in as little time. This problem will only intensify as millions join the ranks of the insured under the Affordable Care Act.
Modal Trigger
Dr. Sandeep JauharPhoto: Maryanne Russell
In this self-perpetuating cycle, doctors spend most of their time as businessmen — and care suffers.
It’s no wonder then that doctors no longer enjoy their jobs, explains Jauhar, director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and author of “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), out now.
“This book is meant to be like the scene in ‘Network’ when [Howard Beale] opens the window and yells, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore,’ ” Jauhar says in an interview with The Post.
“I see an emotional emptiness created by the relentless consideration of money. Most of us went into medicine for intellectual stimulation or the desire to develop relationships with patients, not to maximize income,” he writes.
In a 2008 study of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Even insurance claim clerks polled in a different study were happier.
Modal Trigger
Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
As managed care has grown (by the 2000s, 95% of insured workers were in some kind of managed care plans), so has physicians’ discontent. In 1973, fewer than 15% of physicians reported any doubts about career choices. Today nearly 40% say that they would not choose to enter the medical profession if given the opportunity to do it all over.
If things continue as they are, the US can expect a shortage of 150,000 doctors by 2025, according to the American Medical College. Jauhar says that doctors on the online community SERMO are threatening to leave the country or scrap their private practices.
The serious downside here is obvious: Unhappy doctors make for unhappier patients.
“The physician-patient relationship is the worst it ever was,” he says.
To hammer in this point, Jauhar quotes facts from the Commonwealth Fund: The US ranks 45th in life expectancy (“behind Bosnia and Jordan,” he adds) and compared to other developed countries near last in infant mortality and health-care quality, access and efficiency. We also have fewer physicians and hospital beds than average.
This “mid-life crisis in medicine” is reflected in Jauhar’s own writing.
Readers can follow his skepticism in “Intern,” his first book about his internship year at New York Presybterian, harden into disillusionment in “Doctored,” which chronicles his time at LIJ as he enters his middle age (he’s now 44).
“Doctored” opens with: “When I look at my career in midlife, I realize that in many ways I have become the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: impatient, occasionally indifferent, at times dismissive or paternalistic.”
This “kind of doctor,” once so idealistic, now takes morally ambiguous speaking gigs with pharmaceutical companies and side-jobs at “sketchy” cardiologist private practices who push for expensive and often unnecessary tests for the reimbursements.
And this is where the book gets really bleak. Doctors — like his own brother, also a cardiologist — refer to patients as “commodities.” One physician at LIJ admitted that “sometimes you have to drag out” a hospital stay for a patient if you want to get paid.
He writes about one of his patients, a 50-something man who complained of shortness of breath. Fourteen doctors, 12 procedures, and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, he was released with minimal improvement.
This is a problem not only of milking income, which of course happens, but because doctors just don’t have the time to do their jobs. Primary care physicians (doctors who Jauhar believes are most unhappy) spend an average of eight to 10 minutes per patient.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. With less time for each patient—studies show (no surprise here) that rushed doctors listen less — relying on expensive tests, which don’t necessarily lead to more accurate diagnoses. Med school advises doctors-in-training that you should be able to diagnose 80% of cases with a health history and an exam alone. No further tests required.
But in this exam on-the-run environment, doctors are more likely to practice “defensive medicine,” or “cover your ass” medicine — costing us about $750 billion a year (of the $3.8 trillion we spend a year) in wasteful procedures that lead nowhere.
“After so many years in medicine, I am convinced of one thing: The vast majority of doctors aren’t bad. It is the system that makes us bad, makes us make mistakes,” he writes. “There is a palpable sense of grieving. The job for many has become just that — a job.”
By Susannah Cahalan
Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is mad as hell.
American health care is in upheaval. On one side, overhead and malpractice insurance costs keep increasing, while salaries stagnate. On the other, patients believe that expensive drugs are better, more people are on government-run insurance that pays less, while private insurance fights every claim.
Now doctors spend most of their time trying to game the system, requiring endless paperwork, protracted bureaucratic battles and “treadmill medicine,” seeing as many patients as possible in as little time. This problem will only intensify as millions join the ranks of the insured under the Affordable Care Act.
Modal Trigger
Dr. Sandeep JauharPhoto: Maryanne Russell
In this self-perpetuating cycle, doctors spend most of their time as businessmen — and care suffers.
It’s no wonder then that doctors no longer enjoy their jobs, explains Jauhar, director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and author of “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), out now.
“This book is meant to be like the scene in ‘Network’ when [Howard Beale] opens the window and yells, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore,’ ” Jauhar says in an interview with The Post.
“I see an emotional emptiness created by the relentless consideration of money. Most of us went into medicine for intellectual stimulation or the desire to develop relationships with patients, not to maximize income,” he writes.
In a 2008 study of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Even insurance claim clerks polled in a different study were happier.
Modal Trigger
Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
As managed care has grown (by the 2000s, 95% of insured workers were in some kind of managed care plans), so has physicians’ discontent. In 1973, fewer than 15% of physicians reported any doubts about career choices. Today nearly 40% say that they would not choose to enter the medical profession if given the opportunity to do it all over.
If things continue as they are, the US can expect a shortage of 150,000 doctors by 2025, according to the American Medical College. Jauhar says that doctors on the online community SERMO are threatening to leave the country or scrap their private practices.
The serious downside here is obvious: Unhappy doctors make for unhappier patients.
“The physician-patient relationship is the worst it ever was,” he says.
To hammer in this point, Jauhar quotes facts from the Commonwealth Fund: The US ranks 45th in life expectancy (“behind Bosnia and Jordan,” he adds) and compared to other developed countries near last in infant mortality and health-care quality, access and efficiency. We also have fewer physicians and hospital beds than average.
This “mid-life crisis in medicine” is reflected in Jauhar’s own writing.
Readers can follow his skepticism in “Intern,” his first book about his internship year at New York Presybterian, harden into disillusionment in “Doctored,” which chronicles his time at LIJ as he enters his middle age (he’s now 44).
“Doctored” opens with: “When I look at my career in midlife, I realize that in many ways I have become the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: impatient, occasionally indifferent, at times dismissive or paternalistic.”
This “kind of doctor,” once so idealistic, now takes morally ambiguous speaking gigs with pharmaceutical companies and side-jobs at “sketchy” cardiologist private practices who push for expensive and often unnecessary tests for the reimbursements.
And this is where the book gets really bleak. Doctors — like his own brother, also a cardiologist — refer to patients as “commodities.” One physician at LIJ admitted that “sometimes you have to drag out” a hospital stay for a patient if you want to get paid.
He writes about one of his patients, a 50-something man who complained of shortness of breath. Fourteen doctors, 12 procedures, and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, he was released with minimal improvement.
This is a problem not only of milking income, which of course happens, but because doctors just don’t have the time to do their jobs. Primary care physicians (doctors who Jauhar believes are most unhappy) spend an average of eight to 10 minutes per patient.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. With less time for each patient—studies show (no surprise here) that rushed doctors listen less — relying on expensive tests, which don’t necessarily lead to more accurate diagnoses. Med school advises doctors-in-training that you should be able to diagnose 80% of cases with a health history and an exam alone. No further tests required.
But in this exam on-the-run environment, doctors are more likely to practice “defensive medicine,” or “cover your ass” medicine — costing us about $750 billion a year (of the $3.8 trillion we spend a year) in wasteful procedures that lead nowhere.
“After so many years in medicine, I am convinced of one thing: The vast majority of doctors aren’t bad. It is the system that makes us bad, makes us make mistakes,” he writes. “There is a palpable sense of grieving. The job for many has become just that — a job.”
Sunday, August 24, 2014
LOVE/ JOURNAL: WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT LOVE
I am the first to admit that when I used to get involved with someone, I would fall hard and fast like granite. I know I’m not alone. This is pretty typical, because INFATUATION feels like LOVE…sort of. Infatuation feels frenzied, intense, overwhelming, like you NEED the person. You are drunk on them, they are your addiction.Love at first sight is bullshit. You might argue with me on this because it happened to YOU – but hey! I never said it never works out. Even if you have had a lifelong love affair with the person you “fell in love with” immediately, it was not love – it morphed into it.
You do not know a person, not truly, for years. Everyone is on their best behaviour at first – you start to love how amazing they are, idealize them, and think that having them in your life will make YOU a better person, and you want to do the same for them. You want to drown in each other because your pheromones are off the charts and you want to surf that wave of serotonin every fucking day until you pass out, just to wake up and do it again.
When you start to feel like you are in withdrawal from not being around them, ask yourself if you’re in love with the person and all their faults, or in love with your image of them, or their POTENTIAL (ugh)! In the beginning, that’s all it can be. Love is based on reality. If your partner seems to have no negative side, you are deceiving yourself. Perfection is a fantasy.
Never give up the things you love doing in order to be with someone new. This is fucking terrifying for them.Why would you give up your dreams and passions just to hang out and fuck someone you barely know all day? That can happen the majority of the time outside of everything else, but never make your relationship your ONLY reason for living. Being someone’s ONLY source of pleasure is completely awful, because then you feel pressured to live not only your life for you, but for them, too, and they will always depend on you to feel awesome.
Loving someone hard means allowing them to do what they need to do to be THEMSELVES. If you want to be with a writer (for a very good example) don’t expect to come first. Often, when people are intensely into something (which is very attractive), you will always come second, especially in the beginning. Is this bad? Not necessarily. If they feel loved enough to be able to live life the way they want and be who they are, they will respect and appreciate your relationship so much more. To try and hold someone back is the worst thing you can possibly do in a relationship – and the same goes for if someone is trying to do this for you. Even worse, if you find yourself being held back by someone, get out FAST. Sometimes it happens without you even realizing it! You will feel so repressed that you will explode, and probably not in a purely positive way (happened to me). Make sure you let your loved one be who they need to be, and make sure they let you do the same.
Your sweetheart doesn’t need to know all your tiny weird habits, but declare anything big that might change their whole perception of you. This may very well scare someone off, but that means they are not right for you, and you have saved both of yourselves some time.
This was something I heard from an ex of mine, after we broke up – Love doesn’t just magically happen. It IS magical, but love grows. Infatuation can be instant, but like I said before, love must be cultivated, tended to, nurtured over time. You can’t just stick a seed in the ground and expect a fucking rose to be there the next day. It takes a lot of patience and coaxing, and it will develop IF everything is right. You can tell fairly quickly what is missing, and if it worth continuing. Some things just won’t grow, no matter how much you pour into the soil.
The typical “If you can’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else?” thing is annoyingly true. If you need someone else to validate your existence, you need to turn inward before getting involved with anyone, and make yourself into a person you are proud of. You have to think you are awesome, or you are going to settle for a lot of shit, including shit people. When you are full of love for yourself, confident, and know you are amazing, people notice, and they will flock to you. You will have your choice of amazing people to have in your life.
It seems that most people I encounter feel a nagging emptiness. They can’t put their finger on what it is, they only know that it needs to be filled. So, they go on searching for something that they think will fill the space.
Their life is spent seeking; buying new things, achieving goals, collecting titles and degrees, searching for “the one” that will complete them etc. There’s a belief that when they get enough “stuff”, they will feel full.
It’s so easy for us to believe that there’s something “out there” in the world that will fill the feeling of emptiness. You’ll find as you search, only more searching and a deepening need to find a new thing that will magically fulfill you, even though everything else before has fallen short.
One of the most commonplace and dangerous beliefs in our culture is that a relationship will provide the missing piece that will finally make us whole. TV and pop-culture shows us that the perfect partner is what we need to make us happy. The happy ending of every romantic comedy teaches us that, once we find that special one, everything in our life will be wonderful.
We just needed that puzzle piece, that other half, that soul mate to complete us. This is a commonly accepted delusion. The belief that a soul mate will make our life wonderful and will complete us is backwards.
You must be complete and feel whole, needing nothing outside of you to fulfill you before you can hope to have a fulfilling, healthy, truly loving relationship. When you know that there is nothing that you need someone to give you that you don’t already possess within, then you are ready for mature love.
Love, marriage, family and togetherness are extremely important aspects of life. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t exist without them. They are a huge part of your well-being.
However, believing that your soul mate will come into your life and make things okay or that your whole life is a mess because your partner is misbehaving, is a problem. This kind of attitude makes that one relationship special above all others, and implies that you are not okay without it. This plants the seeds of failure before a potentially truly loving relationship is even given the chance to blossom.
If someone has the power to make you feel love, because this also means that you believe that they have the power to deprive you of love. Making someone the source of love in this way means that specific person is the one who has to give you love, or else you won’t have love.
He or she then becomes the object that you have to get love from and this sends a message to others, to yourself and to the universe at large that you lack love, that you aren’t worthy or capable of having it. Getting love from an outside source causes tremendous issues in your life and in your relationship because love is as much a need for humans as is food or water. If you believe that only that special person has the power to give it to you or take it away, you’ll do whatever you can to “get” the love from this other person.
Love is as much of human need as food and water. You will cry, beg or manipulate the other into giving it to you if you believe it will work. Just as you would scratch someone’s eyes out to get to water if you were dying of thirst. Herein lies relationship disintegration.
Relationships fail because partners feel that they aren’t getting love from their mate, or their mate isn’t meeting their needs. The truth is: your partner not meeting your needs is not what is causing the disintegration; feeling like you have needs that your partner can meet is actually the problem. Love cannot be gotten, only felt, given and expressed.
To deny your need for love is to deny your humanity. However, when the other person has to meet certain expectations and follow your rules in order for you to feel good, that isn’t love, it’s manipulation and control.
If the other person fails to give love to you in the way that you think they should, you feel that you have a “right” to be upset and then you have the right to punish them. You believe that you are then justified in withholding love from them or make them feel bad because they were not the partner you wanted them to be.
This belief that we have needs for love that have to be fulfilled only by specific people in specific ways, is pervasive in our culture. It’s the cause of all of our relationship issues. We are addicted to romantic relationships and placing the source of love outside of ourselves.
Then we develop all kinds of unhealthy patterns in a struggle to get the love. We will even allow ourselves to be abused, or we will become abusers. Some have even killed because they felt their mate deprived them of love.
We don’t see this struggling for what it is: a dysfunctional anti-love and anti-happiness condition. True love is unconditional, it loves regardless of the other person’s moods and actions. You can’t have love in an authentic and lasting way if you believe that you have to get love.
The key to lasting, authentic love is recognizing that you are the source of love and making it your job to bring that love to your relationship.
In other words, to know that you are whole must come first and from that fullness you can give without wanting to be given to in return. Whenever you feel a need for love, instead of seeking for it you can empower yourself and think loving thoughts, speak loving words and act in loving ways. In essence, you choose to recognize that you are the source of love for others.
You do not know a person, not truly, for years. Everyone is on their best behaviour at first – you start to love how amazing they are, idealize them, and think that having them in your life will make YOU a better person, and you want to do the same for them. You want to drown in each other because your pheromones are off the charts and you want to surf that wave of serotonin every fucking day until you pass out, just to wake up and do it again.
When you start to feel like you are in withdrawal from not being around them, ask yourself if you’re in love with the person and all their faults, or in love with your image of them, or their POTENTIAL (ugh)! In the beginning, that’s all it can be. Love is based on reality. If your partner seems to have no negative side, you are deceiving yourself. Perfection is a fantasy.
Never give up the things you love doing in order to be with someone new. This is fucking terrifying for them.Why would you give up your dreams and passions just to hang out and fuck someone you barely know all day? That can happen the majority of the time outside of everything else, but never make your relationship your ONLY reason for living. Being someone’s ONLY source of pleasure is completely awful, because then you feel pressured to live not only your life for you, but for them, too, and they will always depend on you to feel awesome.
Loving someone hard means allowing them to do what they need to do to be THEMSELVES. If you want to be with a writer (for a very good example) don’t expect to come first. Often, when people are intensely into something (which is very attractive), you will always come second, especially in the beginning. Is this bad? Not necessarily. If they feel loved enough to be able to live life the way they want and be who they are, they will respect and appreciate your relationship so much more. To try and hold someone back is the worst thing you can possibly do in a relationship – and the same goes for if someone is trying to do this for you. Even worse, if you find yourself being held back by someone, get out FAST. Sometimes it happens without you even realizing it! You will feel so repressed that you will explode, and probably not in a purely positive way (happened to me). Make sure you let your loved one be who they need to be, and make sure they let you do the same.
That being said, if you are being completely neglected, that person is not right for you, and you should not try to change them. Find someone more suitable. If you are putting in everything you’ve got, and they’re not, then it’s completely unbalanced. You might even be putting them off. If they are not matching you in enthusiasm, back off, or just give it up completely and find someone else.
Your sweetheart doesn’t need to know all your tiny weird habits, but declare anything big that might change their whole perception of you. This may very well scare someone off, but that means they are not right for you, and you have saved both of yourselves some time.
This was something I heard from an ex of mine, after we broke up – Love doesn’t just magically happen. It IS magical, but love grows. Infatuation can be instant, but like I said before, love must be cultivated, tended to, nurtured over time. You can’t just stick a seed in the ground and expect a fucking rose to be there the next day. It takes a lot of patience and coaxing, and it will develop IF everything is right. You can tell fairly quickly what is missing, and if it worth continuing. Some things just won’t grow, no matter how much you pour into the soil.
The typical “If you can’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else?” thing is annoyingly true. If you need someone else to validate your existence, you need to turn inward before getting involved with anyone, and make yourself into a person you are proud of. You have to think you are awesome, or you are going to settle for a lot of shit, including shit people. When you are full of love for yourself, confident, and know you are amazing, people notice, and they will flock to you. You will have your choice of amazing people to have in your life.
It seems that most people I encounter feel a nagging emptiness. They can’t put their finger on what it is, they only know that it needs to be filled. So, they go on searching for something that they think will fill the space.
Their life is spent seeking; buying new things, achieving goals, collecting titles and degrees, searching for “the one” that will complete them etc. There’s a belief that when they get enough “stuff”, they will feel full.
It’s so easy for us to believe that there’s something “out there” in the world that will fill the feeling of emptiness. You’ll find as you search, only more searching and a deepening need to find a new thing that will magically fulfill you, even though everything else before has fallen short.
One of the most commonplace and dangerous beliefs in our culture is that a relationship will provide the missing piece that will finally make us whole. TV and pop-culture shows us that the perfect partner is what we need to make us happy. The happy ending of every romantic comedy teaches us that, once we find that special one, everything in our life will be wonderful.
We just needed that puzzle piece, that other half, that soul mate to complete us. This is a commonly accepted delusion. The belief that a soul mate will make our life wonderful and will complete us is backwards.
You must be complete and feel whole, needing nothing outside of you to fulfill you before you can hope to have a fulfilling, healthy, truly loving relationship. When you know that there is nothing that you need someone to give you that you don’t already possess within, then you are ready for mature love.
Love, marriage, family and togetherness are extremely important aspects of life. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t exist without them. They are a huge part of your well-being.
However, believing that your soul mate will come into your life and make things okay or that your whole life is a mess because your partner is misbehaving, is a problem. This kind of attitude makes that one relationship special above all others, and implies that you are not okay without it. This plants the seeds of failure before a potentially truly loving relationship is even given the chance to blossom.
If someone has the power to make you feel love, because this also means that you believe that they have the power to deprive you of love. Making someone the source of love in this way means that specific person is the one who has to give you love, or else you won’t have love.
He or she then becomes the object that you have to get love from and this sends a message to others, to yourself and to the universe at large that you lack love, that you aren’t worthy or capable of having it. Getting love from an outside source causes tremendous issues in your life and in your relationship because love is as much a need for humans as is food or water. If you believe that only that special person has the power to give it to you or take it away, you’ll do whatever you can to “get” the love from this other person.
Love is as much of human need as food and water. You will cry, beg or manipulate the other into giving it to you if you believe it will work. Just as you would scratch someone’s eyes out to get to water if you were dying of thirst. Herein lies relationship disintegration.
Relationships fail because partners feel that they aren’t getting love from their mate, or their mate isn’t meeting their needs. The truth is: your partner not meeting your needs is not what is causing the disintegration; feeling like you have needs that your partner can meet is actually the problem. Love cannot be gotten, only felt, given and expressed.
To deny your need for love is to deny your humanity. However, when the other person has to meet certain expectations and follow your rules in order for you to feel good, that isn’t love, it’s manipulation and control.
If the other person fails to give love to you in the way that you think they should, you feel that you have a “right” to be upset and then you have the right to punish them. You believe that you are then justified in withholding love from them or make them feel bad because they were not the partner you wanted them to be.
This belief that we have needs for love that have to be fulfilled only by specific people in specific ways, is pervasive in our culture. It’s the cause of all of our relationship issues. We are addicted to romantic relationships and placing the source of love outside of ourselves.
Then we develop all kinds of unhealthy patterns in a struggle to get the love. We will even allow ourselves to be abused, or we will become abusers. Some have even killed because they felt their mate deprived them of love.
We don’t see this struggling for what it is: a dysfunctional anti-love and anti-happiness condition. True love is unconditional, it loves regardless of the other person’s moods and actions. You can’t have love in an authentic and lasting way if you believe that you have to get love.
The key to lasting, authentic love is recognizing that you are the source of love and making it your job to bring that love to your relationship.
In other words, to know that you are whole must come first and from that fullness you can give without wanting to be given to in return. Whenever you feel a need for love, instead of seeking for it you can empower yourself and think loving thoughts, speak loving words and act in loving ways. In essence, you choose to recognize that you are the source of love for others.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
POETRY: TO ME LOVE MEANS FOREVER
Once I was afraid
Of love and it's wonders.
For I had been hurt again and again
by the so called... love of others.
So I tried to hide from the powerful spell
by shielding my heart to those who thought it was theirs.
I shaded myself in the darkness of life,
hoping to never be discovered.
Yet I was wrong to feel all alone,
because you were always by my side.
But it took me some time to realize
that you, my dear, were my only true lover.
And I thank you, my love, for showing me the light.
For without you...
I would still be just another shadow in the night.
2
In loving you...
I have experienced the happiness, the hurt,
The feeling of forever, the need to be with you and to love you.
It's all inside of me; it's you I always think about,
It's you I always miss, and it will always be you,
Because you're the one I love.
To me, love means forever...
No one will ever take your place or know me as you do.
You will always know what I am thinking about
And what I'm feeling deep down.
I'll never love anyone the way I love you!
You know who you are!
Of love and it's wonders.
For I had been hurt again and again
by the so called... love of others.
So I tried to hide from the powerful spell
by shielding my heart to those who thought it was theirs.
I shaded myself in the darkness of life,
hoping to never be discovered.
Yet I was wrong to feel all alone,
because you were always by my side.
But it took me some time to realize
that you, my dear, were my only true lover.
And I thank you, my love, for showing me the light.
For without you...
I would still be just another shadow in the night.
2
In loving you...
I have experienced the happiness, the hurt,
The feeling of forever, the need to be with you and to love you.
It's all inside of me; it's you I always think about,
It's you I always miss, and it will always be you,
Because you're the one I love.
To me, love means forever...
No one will ever take your place or know me as you do.
You will always know what I am thinking about
And what I'm feeling deep down.
I'll never love anyone the way I love you!
You know who you are!
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
LOVE LETTER: MY HEART WILL START BEATING
Dear Soulmate
Once I get to see you, everything will get back to it's original place.My heart will start beating again, my hopes will rise to the top, my dreams will once again come true...once I see, touch and feel you. Once more, just once more will be good enough for me to survive and wake up from this terrible dream ...of not having you. I'm still asleep. My wake up call will be your soft and tender lips touching mine without worries or problems. But again, every time I remember that this is not a dream, that this is reality, it makes me feel stronger, gives me the strength to proceed with my desires of having you once and for all. From my big broken heart, these words...I say: love will touch some minds
Will touch all the heart beats from that woman I must have...or else this poor heart of mine will just brake and fall apart....I shall proceed with my demands of loving you day and night, rain or sunshine, and never be apart from that lonely heart of yours because I'm the only one that will ever bring that glow to those sweet and tender lips of yours.If you think I'm making all this up, you are completely wrong, because this lonely heart of mine desires you and nothing more...If you ever see me crying, please don't ask me why, just go and say, baby, I love you and you are my only one. The love we share, is like trees to air. Without one-another, there would be no other. Without you, I could not exist. I'll love you forever, that's what I insist.Feel The love whispered through my breath and my gentle touch that took away pain. Let me kiss your lips and bring warmth to your heart. Let me falter so I can look into your healing eyes. Let me hold your hand and wrap you in my arms. Smile and melt my heart. Kiss me and take away my breath. Dance with me and forever play our song. ...Is a journey to find inner peace,only in tranquility- can we be free;Others notice our outward space, focusing inward, radiating harmony.What is beautiful about another? A sound, look, touch drawn asunder; A feeling of contentment to the soul, where beauty resides, on the whole. The eyes, a window, to that place, surrounded by your living vestige face; Encompassing all that is thought, in a harboring body, beauty is caught;The simple pleasures we perceive,allow us all to believe;There is beauty in all we say and do,there is beauty in me and beauty in you.
How do i tell you in a few words i love you. Where do i begin to tell you how beautiful you are you have shown me your love so true no matter where you are, i'll never be too far. When you awake and don't see me all you have to do is look in the mirror with sleepy eyes it's hard to see my love for you will reflect, nothing could be clearer. I found in you a lady who loves me without a doubt by your side is where i want a lifetime to spend our love has planted its seed and begun to sprout thru thick and thin i'm here till the end. The most beautiful rainbow couldn't compare you must have been sent to me from above. I see your beauty from within your heart, dear. I promise to shower you with all of my love . When i tell you you're beautiful, it's my heart's reflection your love has shown me the true meaning of forever with just a whisper you have my complete attention nobody has loved me like you have...never. Each day i awake and find you're not here. I close my eyes and picture the night before. I see my lady i will have a lifetime of love to share seeing you there is like opening heaven's door. These are my thoughts as i imagine our beautiful scene together we sit on the rocks near the creek before me is a beauty and love i have never felt or seen. I reach my hand out and place it tenderly on your cheek. Seeing myself in those beautiful eyes. My baby blues tell you i love you with all my heart as i look up i see a pair of doves fly by like the air between their wings, we'll never part reaching down i pick a beautiful purple flower. This flower was born from nature's care it needs the sun and sprinkles from a shower nature's true beauty is the only way our love could compare. Our love flows steadily like the rambling stream with each sunrise our love will begin forever you are in my heart and dreams my eyes open... i fall in love with you all over again
Once I get to see you, everything will get back to it's original place.My heart will start beating again, my hopes will rise to the top, my dreams will once again come true...once I see, touch and feel you. Once more, just once more will be good enough for me to survive and wake up from this terrible dream ...of not having you. I'm still asleep. My wake up call will be your soft and tender lips touching mine without worries or problems. But again, every time I remember that this is not a dream, that this is reality, it makes me feel stronger, gives me the strength to proceed with my desires of having you once and for all. From my big broken heart, these words...I say: love will touch some minds
Will touch all the heart beats from that woman I must have...or else this poor heart of mine will just brake and fall apart....I shall proceed with my demands of loving you day and night, rain or sunshine, and never be apart from that lonely heart of yours because I'm the only one that will ever bring that glow to those sweet and tender lips of yours.If you think I'm making all this up, you are completely wrong, because this lonely heart of mine desires you and nothing more...If you ever see me crying, please don't ask me why, just go and say, baby, I love you and you are my only one. The love we share, is like trees to air. Without one-another, there would be no other. Without you, I could not exist. I'll love you forever, that's what I insist.Feel The love whispered through my breath and my gentle touch that took away pain. Let me kiss your lips and bring warmth to your heart. Let me falter so I can look into your healing eyes. Let me hold your hand and wrap you in my arms. Smile and melt my heart. Kiss me and take away my breath. Dance with me and forever play our song. ...Is a journey to find inner peace,only in tranquility- can we be free;Others notice our outward space, focusing inward, radiating harmony.What is beautiful about another? A sound, look, touch drawn asunder; A feeling of contentment to the soul, where beauty resides, on the whole. The eyes, a window, to that place, surrounded by your living vestige face; Encompassing all that is thought, in a harboring body, beauty is caught;The simple pleasures we perceive,allow us all to believe;There is beauty in all we say and do,there is beauty in me and beauty in you.
How do i tell you in a few words i love you. Where do i begin to tell you how beautiful you are you have shown me your love so true no matter where you are, i'll never be too far. When you awake and don't see me all you have to do is look in the mirror with sleepy eyes it's hard to see my love for you will reflect, nothing could be clearer. I found in you a lady who loves me without a doubt by your side is where i want a lifetime to spend our love has planted its seed and begun to sprout thru thick and thin i'm here till the end. The most beautiful rainbow couldn't compare you must have been sent to me from above. I see your beauty from within your heart, dear. I promise to shower you with all of my love . When i tell you you're beautiful, it's my heart's reflection your love has shown me the true meaning of forever with just a whisper you have my complete attention nobody has loved me like you have...never. Each day i awake and find you're not here. I close my eyes and picture the night before. I see my lady i will have a lifetime of love to share seeing you there is like opening heaven's door. These are my thoughts as i imagine our beautiful scene together we sit on the rocks near the creek before me is a beauty and love i have never felt or seen. I reach my hand out and place it tenderly on your cheek. Seeing myself in those beautiful eyes. My baby blues tell you i love you with all my heart as i look up i see a pair of doves fly by like the air between their wings, we'll never part reaching down i pick a beautiful purple flower. This flower was born from nature's care it needs the sun and sprinkles from a shower nature's true beauty is the only way our love could compare. Our love flows steadily like the rambling stream with each sunrise our love will begin forever you are in my heart and dreams my eyes open... i fall in love with you all over again
Monday, August 18, 2014
LOVE: YOU GET EXACTLY THE TYPE OF RELATIONSHIP YOU WANT
I heard this quote in the movie The Wedding Date,,,“Every woman has the exact love life she wants.”And so I starting thinking...hummmmm... Perhaps this true.
In the movie, Kat (Messing) is flying to London to attend her sister's wedding where Kat's ex-fiance (who dumped her) is going to be the best man. To create the illusion that she's moved on with her life and is unaffected by the break-up, she hires an escort (Mulroney) to pretend to be her new fiance. She found him by reading an interview of him in a magazine.
At one point in the movie, she's talking to Nick (played by Mulroney) about a comment in the interview that she didn't agree with.
She reads the section to him:
"You said (and I quote) , 'I believe every woman has the exact love life she wants'...do you honestly believe that I want to be single and miserable? Do you think I want to be hung up on some guy who led me on for years and then—out of the blue—shattered my heart?"
Nick replies, "First of all, there's no such thing as "out of the blue". And secondly.... yeah, I do."
She's incredulous.
She yells "What??"
Nick says,
"When you're ready to let go, to be un-single and un-miserable....you will. Till then...." and walks away.
There's a HUGE lesson there that most people don't get. Even the ones who SAY theyget it don't really get it. And, just like the case with me several years ago, you can tell they don't get it because they're not living it.
The basic lesson is very simple: you are where you are right now—you've been experiencing what you don't really want to experience—because you made the choice, at some unconscious level, to be there.
Some people will argue that they didn't choose their present circumstances. Or that it's luck. Or "the breaks". Or they say they're on "part of a learning curve" or something. But the truth is that you can look at every area of your life—your marriage, your bank account, your relationship with others, your parenting, your physical health—and the fact remains the same: you are where you are because that's where your opinions, beliefs, and decisions PUT you.
We accept the love we deserve. We as people, man or woman have the power to determine what happyness should look like With that being said – We should be masters at creating the environment We want to be in… If We want to have a healthy love life, We have to create it!! Not only do We create it,
Kurt Vonnegut once said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." You can't pretend to be someone you're not, because the truth will eventually show through. Some women may think they are one way, when in fact they are another; I know this to be true because I have seen it many times. The same can be said for relationships; some enjoy not settling down and living the single life, some play the waiting game, waiting for Mr. Right to come along, some seem as though they can't survive without a partner and so they hop from relationship to relationship never settling because they can't commit, and then there are the types that once they find true love they grab hold of it and get married. This is why women are so complicated, this is why you can't get certain girls to commit or jump into bed with you. I will speak on behalf of the male species in saying that we typically know what kind of love life we want too, but the difference is that we tend to make our intentions known. But it is, in fact our job as guys to find out what exactly it is that women want
In the movie, Kat (Messing) is flying to London to attend her sister's wedding where Kat's ex-fiance (who dumped her) is going to be the best man. To create the illusion that she's moved on with her life and is unaffected by the break-up, she hires an escort (Mulroney) to pretend to be her new fiance. She found him by reading an interview of him in a magazine.
At one point in the movie, she's talking to Nick (played by Mulroney) about a comment in the interview that she didn't agree with.
She reads the section to him:
"You said (and I quote) , 'I believe every woman has the exact love life she wants'...do you honestly believe that I want to be single and miserable? Do you think I want to be hung up on some guy who led me on for years and then—out of the blue—shattered my heart?"
Nick replies, "First of all, there's no such thing as "out of the blue". And secondly.... yeah, I do."
She's incredulous.
She yells "What??"
Nick says,
"When you're ready to let go, to be un-single and un-miserable....you will. Till then...." and walks away.
There's a HUGE lesson there that most people don't get. Even the ones who SAY theyget it don't really get it. And, just like the case with me several years ago, you can tell they don't get it because they're not living it.
The basic lesson is very simple: you are where you are right now—you've been experiencing what you don't really want to experience—because you made the choice, at some unconscious level, to be there.
Some people will argue that they didn't choose their present circumstances. Or that it's luck. Or "the breaks". Or they say they're on "part of a learning curve" or something. But the truth is that you can look at every area of your life—your marriage, your bank account, your relationship with others, your parenting, your physical health—and the fact remains the same: you are where you are because that's where your opinions, beliefs, and decisions PUT you.
We accept the love we deserve. We as people, man or woman have the power to determine what happyness should look like With that being said – We should be masters at creating the environment We want to be in… If We want to have a healthy love life, We have to create it!! Not only do We create it,
Kurt Vonnegut once said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." You can't pretend to be someone you're not, because the truth will eventually show through. Some women may think they are one way, when in fact they are another; I know this to be true because I have seen it many times. The same can be said for relationships; some enjoy not settling down and living the single life, some play the waiting game, waiting for Mr. Right to come along, some seem as though they can't survive without a partner and so they hop from relationship to relationship never settling because they can't commit, and then there are the types that once they find true love they grab hold of it and get married. This is why women are so complicated, this is why you can't get certain girls to commit or jump into bed with you. I will speak on behalf of the male species in saying that we typically know what kind of love life we want too, but the difference is that we tend to make our intentions known. But it is, in fact our job as guys to find out what exactly it is that women want
It's all about what the woman needs, and if she just needs a body to make her feel secure and comfortable, then thats all you will ever be, unless you show her otherwise. You show her what she's missing in her love life, and her love life changes... When a woman finds a guy who constantly reminds her of how beautiful she is, who will lie under the stars and listen to her heartbeat, or stay awake just to watch her sleep... who kisses her forehead, who thinks she's just as beautiful without makeup on, one who constantly reminds her of how much he cares and how lucky his is to have her, she has no choice but to change her love life, because once she has that, she won’t ever want to not have it.
To the female cynics out there, you're love life is what you make it, and somewhere inside every woman is the desire to make one lucky man her last great romance."If you'd rather give up then try, then you will never find anything worth fighting for."(I think this was from a Scrubs episode) I thought I had found myself in one woman's last great romance, but as it turns out, she wanted to give up rather then try. But maybe she's got the love life she wants, maybe she's a relationship hopper, and when I thought I had completed my construction, she jumped ship. But thats the problem with relationship hoppers is that sometimes the best thing they've found is staring them right in the face yet they still let go, because thats all they've ever known. It took me awhile to realize that even though it was love, it may not have been everything I wanted..."Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you're really strangers." (Mary Tyler Moore) I'm at the point where I'm wondering if that made any sense at all or whether it was one long stream of consciousness/diatribe. Who knows..
Billions of things are going on in this world. You can think about it all you want, but life is still going to keep on happening
POETRY: IN A DREAM OF US
An awakening of emotion, never lost,
but without life.
Simple feelings, transformed
into burning passion.
Feelings of love, kindled by loving words
from a kind heart...
Tumultuous serenity... fireless flame... feverish chill...
Such a battle against harmony, for they are apart.
Too far for a fingertip's touch,
a kiss... a warm embrace...
Yet their souls know not the distance,
For their love joins them
at the speed of the heart..
2
How will I know I love you,
How will I know it's true,
What is love any way,
Could my love be you?
is it at a certain age,
or even at a moment?
Is it when you can't stand,
not seeing someone,
for even just a day?
Is it when you feel,
total comfort,
in just the sound of their voice,
and what thay say?
When they touch you,
and a trillion
chills roll down your spine?
When it seems like they
can read your mind,
If this is love,
I think I've found it,
But I'm still just not,
quite sure...
3
Come grow with me in the springtime
When life is renewed and love's in full bloom.
Let it be then that our new limbs are combined.
Come grow with me in the summertime
When emotions are heated and love's completed.
Let is be then that our new love's of one mind.
Come grow with me in the autumn-time
When hearts are brilliant and love's resilient.
Let it be, then, that our faith in one another's defined.
Come grow with me in the wintertime
When spirituality reigns and love's serene.
Let it be then that our roots are firmly intertwined.
4
I thought you would like to know
that my thoughts go where you go;
that life is richer, sweeter far
for such a sweetheart as you are;
and how my constant prayer will be
that god will keep you safe for me
5
There are so many questions you'll ask through life,
Most of which will never be answered--
Things like what will I do with my life
And where will I be in 5 years time.
All of these things are what the wisest man will never learn.
His long hours of research will never answer the question.
I've always wondered, who is my soulmate,
The one with whom I'll share my life,
The one I'll wake beside every morning and,
The one I'll lay beside to watch the stars at night?
She will never be able to say
Because it is me who has to search for that soul.
For some people they never find that soul.
They go on through life alone,
With no one to share their thoughts with
And no one whom they can call upon
Whenever they're feeling blue.
So I guess I could consider myself lucky
For I've found that soul I'm destined to meet,
The one whom I could spend forever with,
The one I can say I truly love,
The one whom I'll never let go of,
Because our love is so deep.
That one person out of the many I know
Is the one I will cherish until time is through.
That one person has the soul that will be forever with mine.
And that one person will always have my heart,
No matter what.
So if you've found that I have given this to you,
Then you should know that you are that soul
And you have my heart.
6
Thoughts of a day
in heaven
On a planet called
love in memories
We were there in a
day long embrace
Among the soft soft sheets
of a sandy place
Blue blue waters surfing
up the white beach
Mingling with our minds
wrapped in softness
Caressing the day away
among sunlight kisses
And night time, too,
among the moonlight
passion
How wonderful was that
time, in endless
pleasure of feeling
In love with love, and
loving each other
Endlessly, completely
on a white beach
Intermingled with the
sweet surf of giving
Love in memories
flooding back
In a dream of us
but without life.
Simple feelings, transformed
into burning passion.
Feelings of love, kindled by loving words
from a kind heart...
Tumultuous serenity... fireless flame... feverish chill...
Such a battle against harmony, for they are apart.
Too far for a fingertip's touch,
a kiss... a warm embrace...
Yet their souls know not the distance,
For their love joins them
at the speed of the heart..
2
How will I know I love you,
How will I know it's true,
What is love any way,
Could my love be you?
is it at a certain age,
or even at a moment?
Is it when you can't stand,
not seeing someone,
for even just a day?
Is it when you feel,
total comfort,
in just the sound of their voice,
and what thay say?
When they touch you,
and a trillion
chills roll down your spine?
When it seems like they
can read your mind,
If this is love,
I think I've found it,
But I'm still just not,
quite sure...
3
Come grow with me in the springtime
When life is renewed and love's in full bloom.
Let it be then that our new limbs are combined.
Come grow with me in the summertime
When emotions are heated and love's completed.
Let is be then that our new love's of one mind.
Come grow with me in the autumn-time
When hearts are brilliant and love's resilient.
Let it be, then, that our faith in one another's defined.
Come grow with me in the wintertime
When spirituality reigns and love's serene.
Let it be then that our roots are firmly intertwined.
4
I thought you would like to know
that my thoughts go where you go;
that life is richer, sweeter far
for such a sweetheart as you are;
and how my constant prayer will be
that god will keep you safe for me
5
There are so many questions you'll ask through life,
Most of which will never be answered--
Things like what will I do with my life
And where will I be in 5 years time.
All of these things are what the wisest man will never learn.
His long hours of research will never answer the question.
I've always wondered, who is my soulmate,
The one with whom I'll share my life,
The one I'll wake beside every morning and,
The one I'll lay beside to watch the stars at night?
She will never be able to say
Because it is me who has to search for that soul.
For some people they never find that soul.
They go on through life alone,
With no one to share their thoughts with
And no one whom they can call upon
Whenever they're feeling blue.
So I guess I could consider myself lucky
For I've found that soul I'm destined to meet,
The one whom I could spend forever with,
The one I can say I truly love,
The one whom I'll never let go of,
Because our love is so deep.
That one person out of the many I know
Is the one I will cherish until time is through.
That one person has the soul that will be forever with mine.
And that one person will always have my heart,
No matter what.
So if you've found that I have given this to you,
Then you should know that you are that soul
And you have my heart.
6
Thoughts of a day
in heaven
On a planet called
love in memories
We were there in a
day long embrace
Among the soft soft sheets
of a sandy place
Blue blue waters surfing
up the white beach
Mingling with our minds
wrapped in softness
Caressing the day away
among sunlight kisses
And night time, too,
among the moonlight
passion
How wonderful was that
time, in endless
pleasure of feeling
In love with love, and
loving each other
Endlessly, completely
on a white beach
Intermingled with the
sweet surf of giving
Love in memories
flooding back
In a dream of us
Friday, August 15, 2014
LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE
Dear Soulmate,
As the days pass by slowly, my desire to hold you in my arms grows like a volcano just waiting to explode, and shower you with tender loving care. My feelings for you are true, and as deep as the sea. I can only hope you feel the same way, because this was meant to be.Your golden hair threads of endless sunshine.Your eyes,seas of compassion and emotion.Each word you hispher, engraved on my heart,memorized In my soul. a look, a casual gaze, a burned image in my mind, of your smile.More than the moon, stars, sun, and clouds is what you always say.But that can't even begin to measure how I feel for you each day! When you came to my life the eternal snow of my solitude melted in my soul, formed rivers to fecundate the life, My love was a dormant volcano crowned by the long cold of my nostalgia. It was the quiet night, it was the night without echo, it was the same sadness cohabiting with the solitude. Then you arrived and lit the fire, you gave heat to my soul and flavor to my life then you arrived and moved away the loneliness and banished sadness. Your love is a volcano in eruption. My love was an extinguished volcano but the lavas of your heart flooded my being and lit my soul!
As the days pass by slowly, my desire to hold you in my arms grows like a volcano just waiting to explode, and shower you with tender loving care. My feelings for you are true, and as deep as the sea. I can only hope you feel the same way, because this was meant to be.Your golden hair threads of endless sunshine.Your eyes,seas of compassion and emotion.Each word you hispher, engraved on my heart,memorized In my soul. a look, a casual gaze, a burned image in my mind, of your smile.More than the moon, stars, sun, and clouds is what you always say.But that can't even begin to measure how I feel for you each day! When you came to my life the eternal snow of my solitude melted in my soul, formed rivers to fecundate the life, My love was a dormant volcano crowned by the long cold of my nostalgia. It was the quiet night, it was the night without echo, it was the same sadness cohabiting with the solitude. Then you arrived and lit the fire, you gave heat to my soul and flavor to my life then you arrived and moved away the loneliness and banished sadness. Your love is a volcano in eruption. My love was an extinguished volcano but the lavas of your heart flooded my being and lit my soul!
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
JOURNAL: I FEELING SAD ABOUT MY DATE AGAIN
I was thinking about my date on Sunday again. It just show once again..how people like to play games. She saw my picture...I told her what I was looking for (marriage and kids) and my approach to dating (if we meet we would be a couple). We even talk for a few weeks to build some sort of bond which I thought we had. I would call her every night. And when she was not feeling well..i sent her things ..sites to look at ...books.....whatever I can to try to make her not feel so sad.
But like always... people say and do something totally different. I felt lead on...it like getting into a relationship with someone and telling them you want kids and that person...never wanted to have kids. I wasted my time... and my heart is broken.I am trying to figure how that lesson of all this
I am not worried...i let the universe take care of things...there is always karma. What you put out is what you will get...so I am not worried about the pain she caused me....i will move on and she has to live with herself. It will come back to her. I would never have done with she did to me. But people are cruel. She did exactly what her ex boyfriend did to her....and then you wonder why people attract the same people over and over again. If you read my blog...you know I believe that relationship are mirror images of who you are.
My heart is too sensitive for this world. Sometimes..i want to just stop my search..because of the constant disappointment. It's hard to find individuals who have a heart...who have compassion....and feel. Each day beckons with determination for me to do my best even though my worst prevails. To be silent when words are all I have. To fill my lungs with sounds of thunderous laughter and to release my tears drop by drop. To feast as a faithful lamb, to find strength in my weakness, to love with no reservation, and to free that which binds my soul – to be less and to be more, to be all and to be nothing, to love and to hate, to pray and to curse and to know the difference.
I do not know how to hate as much as I know how to love.
My heart is full of love. I love. I love. I love. It is in what I do, who I am and goes wherever I go. Inside of me lays something good, something blue and something true. Oh wasted time, wasted days, worry not, for it’s up to fate.
She rules our destiny, decides our rise and our fall. In our days, choices are made and in our choices our lives are shaped. If we could see the path ahead of us, the nature of events as we know them now and how would it have been – Would we make them any different or we would choose the same?
People come and then they leave, careers are driven which in turn drive us, friendships blossom and they die, we have the worst and we have the best. Smiles make our days, sunshine clears the rain and the rain cleanses us too. So when in fact my heart crumbles into millions of tiny pieces, and pain excruciates and carves its name, I know with certainty, that when it rains it rains for me – it clears my sorrows and my troubles too – I start to feel my heart explode with pure and simple love, for although my eyes see only darkness my heart sees only light.
I cannot love any less than I do, I will not have a love one fraction less, for then what am I if not a fool, for believing in the science of life and not the gentle beat of my heart. For me to love is to love with all that I am or not at all, open, raw, without fear, that is me.
But like always... people say and do something totally different. I felt lead on...it like getting into a relationship with someone and telling them you want kids and that person...never wanted to have kids. I wasted my time... and my heart is broken.I am trying to figure how that lesson of all this
I am not worried...i let the universe take care of things...there is always karma. What you put out is what you will get...so I am not worried about the pain she caused me....i will move on and she has to live with herself. It will come back to her. I would never have done with she did to me. But people are cruel. She did exactly what her ex boyfriend did to her....and then you wonder why people attract the same people over and over again. If you read my blog...you know I believe that relationship are mirror images of who you are.
My heart is too sensitive for this world. Sometimes..i want to just stop my search..because of the constant disappointment. It's hard to find individuals who have a heart...who have compassion....and feel. Each day beckons with determination for me to do my best even though my worst prevails. To be silent when words are all I have. To fill my lungs with sounds of thunderous laughter and to release my tears drop by drop. To feast as a faithful lamb, to find strength in my weakness, to love with no reservation, and to free that which binds my soul – to be less and to be more, to be all and to be nothing, to love and to hate, to pray and to curse and to know the difference.
I do not know how to hate as much as I know how to love.
My heart is full of love. I love. I love. I love. It is in what I do, who I am and goes wherever I go. Inside of me lays something good, something blue and something true. Oh wasted time, wasted days, worry not, for it’s up to fate.
She rules our destiny, decides our rise and our fall. In our days, choices are made and in our choices our lives are shaped. If we could see the path ahead of us, the nature of events as we know them now and how would it have been – Would we make them any different or we would choose the same?
People come and then they leave, careers are driven which in turn drive us, friendships blossom and they die, we have the worst and we have the best. Smiles make our days, sunshine clears the rain and the rain cleanses us too. So when in fact my heart crumbles into millions of tiny pieces, and pain excruciates and carves its name, I know with certainty, that when it rains it rains for me – it clears my sorrows and my troubles too – I start to feel my heart explode with pure and simple love, for although my eyes see only darkness my heart sees only light.
I cannot love any less than I do, I will not have a love one fraction less, for then what am I if not a fool, for believing in the science of life and not the gentle beat of my heart. For me to love is to love with all that I am or not at all, open, raw, without fear, that is me.
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