"Worry is usually about the future and most people are extremely good at worrying and often fail to stop and think how useless and absurd it is. Worrying about the future is meaningless. The person who's worrying is not the person who is going to experience the future. There will be change, not just having grown older and hopefully a bit wiser, but a totally different set of circumstances with different thoughts and different feelings. Quite useless to worry about the future... That doesn't mean one can't plan. Planning and worrying are not the same thing. Planning turns into worrying when one starts thinking whether the plan is going to materialize. Planning is fine, and then dropping the plan until one can actually put it into action, without being concerned with the future results." -- Ayya Khema, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere

"Over the years, I've noticed that sometimes the Dalai Lama is asked to boil his philosophy down to a single fundamental principle. To this difficult question, he often replies, 'If you can, serve others. If not, at least refrain from harming them.'" -- Howard Cutler and the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness at Work

"When two people talk, they don't just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they'll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in muscular changes so fleeting that they can only be captured with electronic sensors. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they'll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy. we imitate each other's emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other... Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive. All of us have had our spirits picked up by being around somebody in a good mood. If you think about this closely, though, it's quite a radical notion. We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes inside out." -- Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

The first quote, the Ayya Khema, is one I return to when I start worrying too much about what's going to happen... Miguel is concerned about what will happen with my employment (as it's all over the map at the moment) but I keep telling him I'll deal with it when I have to.

The second quote has been rattling around in my head since I read it a few weeks ago. Is it enough to serve? It's all I'm really doing at the moment.

The third quote made me think that it's possible that we're wasting our time trying to convince our program participants that "you have to take responsibility for your own feelings, no-one can make you feel anything you don't want to". The men especially always argue this point, and I know that on some levels I agree with them. Someone who knows you well, who knows all the right things to say, can piss you off whenever their little heart desires....