When Jefferson Airplane (in “White Rabbit,” 1967) quoted the dormouse as having said, “Feed your head,” they were implying that the dormouse from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, had psychedelic drugs in mind. The dormouse, however, never actually said, “Feed your head,” and certainly Lewis Carroll would have had food other than hallucinogens in mind. We have no choice, of course, of whether to “feed” our heads. The brain is a learning machine, and it considers everything in both the external and internal environments “food.”

What prevents or cures everything from ADHD to cancer to depression to diabetes to heart disease? It is not a new pharmaceutical. It is neither herbal nor homeopathic. I’m glad to say that it isn’t surgical. It is Energy-based, but not in the way Reiki Masters and Certified Healing Touch™ Practitioners might think at first. The miracle of healing is exercise.

In SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John J. Ratey, M.D., cites and explains the biochemical evidence that makes exercise what can only be called a “medical miracle.” One of the things that Ratey points out is that our ancestors were much more physically active than most of us are today. They had to be to survive. That means that the health and well-being of our physiology is enhanced by physical activity. Because mind and body are part of the same system, it also means that the health and well-being of our minds/brains is enhanced by physical activity. Ratey provides research-based evidence that physical activity enhances brain function.

From time to time I have seen the following quotation attributed to Einstein: “The significant problems that we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” As often as I have seen the quotation, I had never seen a specific citation indicating where or when Einstein said it. I started wondering about the source of the quotation and went looking. What I found is that the quotation (or similar sayings) is attributed to Einstein on Web pages that that provide quotations without listing sources, and it is not included in lists of Einstein quotations that cite specific sources.

This leads me to conclude that Einstein probably didn’t say it. Somebody else said it and attributed it to Einstein to enhance the authority of the words. In NLP, this strategy is known as Quotes, a linguistic technique that allows speakers to distance themselves from statements by attributing them to others. Quotes may be used to avoid being blamed for critical comments or to attach greater meaning to what is being said:

Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), often called the Father of Inductive Reasoning, seems to have been the first to say that knowledge is power. The truth of that premise seems self-evident. Knowledge provides at least some control—or perhaps the illusion of control—over the vagaries of human existence. When we know that it is going to rain, we can carry an umbrella. H. Jackson Brown, author of Life’s Little Instruction Book, seems to concur with Bacon. He said, “The more you know, the less you fear,” which also seems self-evident. A common metaphor for knowing more is bringing something into the light. The “ghosts and goblins” lurking in the dark disappear in the light of day.

In the States, the feasting officially begins with Thanksgiving, although the warm-up for it starts at the end of October, with Halloween. The candy at Halloween primes us for getting serious about putting on a layer of winter insulation at Thanksgiving time. Then the parties begin, starting before Christmas and extending through New Year’s Eve. It’s no wonder many of us are in a daze by the time the New Year actually arrives. Midwinter festivals aren’t new, of course, but for much of human history (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), the celebrations were moderated by the lack of electricity and the relative meagerness of resources. People could sit around the Yule log making merry for only so long before the darkness and cold persuaded them to go hibernate.

As Debra and I have been working on our new program, Seeing the Divine in Everyday Life: 7 Keys to Joyful Living, one of the recurring issues has been the need to balance immediate needs and desires against longer-term well-being. Elsewhere, for example, I have written about the ways in which some behaviors, such as smoking or eating too many sweets or fatty foods, sacrifice long-term health and well-being to short-term pleasures. While I think that for most people the major challenge is to include the long-term consequences of behavior in their decisions about what to do (and whom to do it with), the long-term isn’t the whole story.

Most of us have known people who were so focused on planning and saving for the future that they missed enjoying the “here and now” of everyday life. In 1911, Joe Hill wrote a song about the way the religion of the time encouraged this mode of thought. Here’s the first verse of “The Preacher and the Slave”:

Soon after I finished writing the “Being ‘At Cause’” article for the December TimeWarp Technologies™ Newsletter, I saw an online “advice” column in which a “therapist” was responding to questions about relationships. The question that caught my attention was from a woman who was complaining about her lover’s “tightie whities.” In brief, she found his briefs unappealing and had some short words to say about his shorts. She said that no matter how much she begged, pleaded, and threatened, he continued to wear the plain white briefs that made him look “unsexy, like a skinny adolescent.”

Since my last blog entry, Debra and I spent a long weekend at Wildwood Farm conducting a workshop entitled, “Your Next Right Step.” We introduced the key components of our new program, “Seeing the Divine in Everyday Life: 7 Keys to Joyful Living.” We had relatively good drives down to Tennessee and back, a good group for training, and good time enjoying the hills of Tennessee.

Debra and I recently returned from having attended the 2007 Annual Convention of the Association for Business Communication, my principal professional association since 1972. The convention was held in Washington, D.C., and, for a number of reasons, we decided to drive there from Michigan rather than fly. We took our time. Two days there, and two days back. In spite of the highway construction along the way, we enjoyed a relatively leisurely drive through absolutely beautiful country in both directions.

In Loving What Is, Byron Katie points out that when you argue with reality you lose—but only every time. While I strongly agree with that observation, one of the conundrums inherent in the concept of loving the current reality is the inevitability—the reality—of change. No matter how much we might love the present reality, it will not last. Another fundamental truth seems to be, “This, too, shall pass….”