When starting KonMari, the now-famous method to help purge possessions, Ilona worried that losing her possessions would mean losing her memories. One year later, she reflects on what actually happened....
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Every week on The Wisdom Daily, we bring you our favorite reads from sources around the web. Topics on this week’s list include Sarah Silverman’s candor about weathering depression, the far-reaching resonance of Bob Marley’s recordings, the lessons learned by living more simply, the memory improvement that requires forgetting… and more. Whatever’s transpiring in your life, may you find the words of wisdom you need. 1. Peaks and Valleys “I still have downward spirals, days when I have to drag myself onstage to do stand-up or I’m just tweeting Morrissey lyrics......
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On The Wisdom Daily this week (Sept. 21-25), we discussed the beauty of saying “I don’t know,” the difficulty we feel in forgiving ourselves, the vivid moments that your memory holds onto, the problem-solving perspectives that fuel innovation and more. Did you grow wiser this week? We hope The Wisdom Daily played a part. The Courage to Be Vulnerable – Adam Lavitt Imagine a world where instead of saying, “I’m right and you’re wrong!” people say, “I don’t know.” Imagine a world where we have the courage to pursue dreams and......
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This month, the Whitney Museum of American Art opened the doors of its new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. One of the inaugural exhibitions, America is Hard to See, includes my favorite work of art: The Artist and His Mother, which?Arshile Gorky worked on from 1926-’36. There are two popular interpretations for why Gorky, an influential pre-abstract expressionist, spent a decade and ended up depicting his mother’s hands as white circles. Some say Gorky’s loose, painterly style was conducive to leaving parts of the work incomplete, because his memories of his mother......
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Our memories are the things that make us who we are.” So says neuroscientist and New York University professor Joseph LeDoux in this brief, very fascinating article which aims to explain the way our brains store our sad, glad and bittersweet memories. In other words, the memories we feel most strongly about. To quote this piece further: “When a memory is stored at a time of emotional arousal, the imprint is more powerful, possibly due to the neurotransmitters — comparable to hormones in the endocrine system — that the brain secretes in......
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Where were you the morning of September 11, 2001? What was the cycle of thoughts and feelings that churned through you that day? How do you tell the story of those events today? While many people say that it was a day that “changed everything”, do you think it really did? These are just a few of the questions I find myself thinking about as New York City’s September 11 Memorial Museum has its official opening today and opens to the public next Wednesday. Given the various needs and expectations which this......
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Have you ever sat behind someone at a concert who seemed to be watching the concert through his smart phone screen, incessantly Instagramming? Have you taken more pictures in the past few years than in your whole life? Well, there’s a karmic snafu to our technology-enabled, snap-happy attempts to preserve every “amazing” “meaningful” moment in our life. While our intention in photographing everything from the banal to the momentous is to remember, the net result on our brain may be the opposite. Taking too many pictures of something might make us forget......
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