“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” -Gandhi.
I got this only a couple of weeks ago … . Forgiveness is good for you, but its f… hard. I need the reminder. This is my favorite tattoo.
Source: tattoolit
In Giving I Connect with Others
“Paralyzed and silent in her bed, my daughter Paula taught me a lesson that is now my mantra: You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.”
Paula led a life of service. She worked as a volunteer helping women and children, eight hours a day, six days a week. She never had any money, but she needed very little. When she died she had nothing and she needed nothing. During her illness I had to let go of everything: her laughter, her voice, her grace, her beauty, her company and finally her spirit. When she died I thought I had lost everything. But then I realized I still had the love I had given her. I don’t even know if she was able to receive that love. She could not respond in any way, her eyes were somber pools that reflected no light. But I was full of love and that love keeps growing and multiplying and giving fruit.
Source: NPR
Caine’s Arcade
Caine Monroy is a 9-year old boy who spent his summer vacation building an elaborate DIY cardboard arcade in his dad’s used auto parts store.
Caine dreamed of the day he would have lots of customers visit his arcade, and he spent months preparing everything, perfecting the game design, making displays for the prizes, designing elaborate security systems, and hand labeling paper-lunch-gift-bags. However, his dad’s autoparts store (located in an industrial part of East LA) gets almost zero foot traffic, so Caine’s chances of getting a customer were very small, and the few walk in customers that came through were always in too much of a hurry to get their auto part to play Caine’s Arcade. But Caine never gave up.
One day, by chance, I walked into Smart Parts Auto looking for a used door handle for my ’96 Corolla. What I found was an elaborate handmade cardboard arcade manned by a young boy who asked if I would like to play. I asked Caine how it worked and he told me that for $1 I could get two turns, or for $2 I could get a Fun Pass with 500 turns. I got the Fun Pass.
This short film tells the story of Caine’s Arcade, and of our attempt to make Caine’s day.
If you like the film, please share it with a friend, and leave Caine a message on his Facebook page. Contribute to Caine’s Arcade Foundation to provide scholarships for innovative kids. Of course, if you are in the LA area, come on down and play Caine’s Arcade – Caine loves customers!
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering. -Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Image: Mind Map - Dreamscape Series by Patricia Oblack
Source: abstracthinker
The Pursuit of Happyness is a based on Chris Gardner’s memoir about his nearly one-year struggle with homelessness. Will Smith stars as Gardner, a homeless salesman turned stockbroker. Gardner’s persistence is epic in the face of set backs and losses.
“Don’t ever let somebody tell you, you can’t do something, not even me. All right? You gotta a dream you gotta protect it. If people can’t do something themselves they want to tell you, you can’t do it. If you want something go get it period.
The hard truths of med school: i’m no superman.
Firstly, let’s play homage to the ultimate cliche—I have referenced the Scrubs theme song in a post about med school.
Med school is competitive. You’re ranked according to your performance. You’re constantly compared to your colleagues and studying becomes a matter of keeping up with the standards rather than learning medicine because you want to be a good doctor or because the magical ways in which the heart works fascinates you.
And then there’s that voice. You know the one. The one that tells you that you shouldn’t need anyone’s help. That you’re weak and pathetic and stupid for asking your colleagues questions or not knowing the answer to the consultant’s question regarding Charcot’s triad (fever, RUQ pain and jaundice for ascending cholangitis).
Today, I had a clinical exam. I aced it. And it’s not because I’m a particularly good med student. (I spend way too much time on tumblr, for starters.) I did well because I have amazing colleagues who took the time to push me to the next level. Colleagues who gave me feedback and tips for improvement and lots of compliments and let me examine their lungs ten times a week.
Medicine’s a team sport, from med school all the way up to clinical practice. Think about it: ward rounds are four or five doctors discussing cases with one another. Research papers are never written by just one doctor. Surgery consists of anaethetists and many surgeons tolerating one another long enough to save a life (or remove a lesion).
And honestly? Studying for hours is boring when you’re all alone, and I’m yet to see anyone perform an adequate gastrointestinal exam on themselves (I’ve tried). The only way to survive med school is by embracing your colleagues and siphoning their knowledge while willingly sharing your own. Ignore the voice that tells you to be competitive and that you should be capable of making it through all alone and that you shouldn’t need help.
Don’t be afraid to show your weaknesses to your colleagues. You’re not a superhero, and neither are they—we’re all med students, we’re all struggling, but to quote High School Musical, we’re all in this together.
Source: mylifeasamedstudent
Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care™ is a workplace program that gives people involved in the delivery of health care an opportunity to come together and reflect on their roles as health care providers through the medium of literature.
Source: masshumanities.org
“The kindest thing anyone could have done for me, once I finished five weeks’ radiation, would be to look me in square in the eye and say clearly, “Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now? Who can you be and how can you get there, double time?” Cruel and unusable as it may have sounded in the wake of trauma, I think its truth would have snagged deep in me and won my attention eventually, far sooner than I found it myself. Yet to this day with all the kindness done for me, no one has so much as hinted in my direction; and I’ve yet to meet another dazed person who’s heard it when they needed it most – Come back to life, whoever you’ll be. Only you can do it.” - Reynolds Price
#1 International Bestseller and New York Times bestseller!
1000 Awesome Things (blog, app and book) Start a portfolio of awesomeness to sustain you through the darker moments.
Source: childrenknoweverythingaboutlove
“ A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of depression, but a Beethoven symphony reveals what that depression feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of mind, yet they are rarely brought together. - Eric Kandel
Stroke of insight
“How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.”Jill Bolte Taylor
One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …
Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”
Source: ted.com
“I know I’m not an ordinary ten-year-old kid. I mean, sure, I do ordinary things. I eat ice cream. I ride my bike. I play ball. I have an XBox. Stuff like that makes me ordinary. I guess. And I feel ordinary. Inside. But I know ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. I know ordinary kids don’t get stared at wherever they go.”Born with a facial deformity that initially prevented his attendance at public school, Auggie Pullman enters the fifth grade at Beecher Prep and struggles with the dynamics of being both new and different, in a sparsely written tale about acceptance and self-esteem. Read an excerpt of Wonder
Source: 365q
“The optimism bias protects us from accurately perceiving the pain and difficulties the future undoubtedly holds, and it may defend us from viewing our options in life as somewhat limited. As a result, stress and anxiety are reduced, physical and mental health are improved, and the motivation to act and be productive is enhanced. In order to progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities — not just any old realities, but better ones, and we need to believe them to be possible.”
Neuroscientist Tali Sharot, author of The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, at TED 2012. (viaexplore-blog)Likes
-
-
-
she’s doing a poor job of covering herself up
-
why i'll keep studying medicine.
I want to write and read and stare out windows and document the world around me.
I want to run away to book towns...
-
Julia Margaret Cameron , Cecilia Tennyson, 1871-72
from Bloomsbury
-
billyjane:Masked Ballerina, c. 1880
-
“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing...”
-
“You do what you see other people doing. And then it gets stuck by the social expectations of everyone else.”
After spending years in Africa...
-
Rare Polaroids by Andy Warhol.
( Debbie Harry; Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono; John Lennon,Tina Turner, Liza Minnelli, Truman Capote; Gianni Versace,...
-
Nanna Hänninen
