industrialized countries—around 1,800 hours per year on average, compared to around 1,400 hours for Germans. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by now productivity would be so high, the average work week would be only 15 hours. And yet our material wants have outpaced even our dramatic productivity gains. Finally, we should take time to step back from our culture of busy-ness and getting ahead to appreciate what we already have. It may be human nature to want more, but the good life also rests on gratitude and purpose. This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been edited for YES! Magazine. ... posted on Dec 31 2018 (7,254 reads)

year, this photo went viral on social media: physics professor Bruce Johnson holding an infant while he teaches. Arkansas State University has a large adult commuter population, which means that sometimes students find themselves in a childcare bind. Rather than turns infants and toddlers away, Johnson welcomes them in and makes them a part of the class. “I hope that no parent ever feels like a classroom is an unfriendly place for their kids,” Johnson told CNN. Learn how nature equips men to nurture. The Thai cave rescue Credit: AFP At the end of June, twelve boys and their soccer coach were trapped by sudden flooding in the Tham Luang cave system in Thailand... posted on Jan 27 2019 (8,900 reads)

gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember -- grace always bats last. Eleven: God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great "Deteriorata," "the cosmic muffin." A good name for God is: "Not me." Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lidsbecause they don't look up, so they just wal... posted on Feb 12 2019 (844,386 reads)

to turning our vision into reality? And when will we reach the level of proficiency and excellence we aspire to? Anyone engaged in creative activity of whatever form is familiar with this terrain. Yet to overcome doubt and frustration, to master any craft or art, we have to cultivate a particular quality. It is one that appears opposite to what we want, which is usually immediate gratification: Patience, a virtue extolled by spiritual traditions around the world. Given the nano-second nature of our technological society, it seems harder than ever to be patient, to wait with calm rather than agitation, to not expect big or even small changes to occur instantaneously. Our expectation... posted on Jan 11 2019 (7,747 reads)

know, Mary keeps taking me back to the womb, to the eyes of a baby. Isn’t this a little regressive in a way? I don’t want to go back there. I’m an adult. I now have all this freedom and power. I don’t really want to go backwards.” MO: Right. And it’s not that we’re going backwards, it’s that everything that we took on—remember that we’re free-flowing aliveness. That’s our natural state. All you have to do is look at nature and you see that it’s free-flowing aliveness, and that when we were very young, we were connected to that great river of free-flowing aliveness. Then we began to hold on and run away into... posted on Mar 13 2019 (10,851 reads)

that give a taste of what's inside. If you're looking for thought-provoking reads in the New Year, look no further. Do you have any recommendations for books we should check out this year? Leave a comment below or drop us a note at info@shareable.net. Happy reading! Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff  "Team Human is a manifesto — a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff's most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together — not as individuals. ... posted on Mar 1 2019 (9,837 reads)

so perhaps one might say that the spiritual is that realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma and practice. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual -- but the spiritual lies beyond religion. Unfortunately in seeking the spiritual we may become attached to the bridge rather than crossing over it. The most important thing in defining spirit is the recognition that spirit is an essential need of human nature. There is something in all of us that seeks the spiritual. This yearning varies in strength from person to person but it is always there in everyone And so, healing becomes possible. Yet there ... posted on Feb 4 2019 (10,645 reads)

A human being is part of the whole we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself in the thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living beings and all of nature.[1] This is an idea that still seems fantastic to many people around the world. But it is a belief that has been held by Indigenous peoples since the beginning of time. Our songs, stories, a... posted on Feb 19 2019 (9,824 reads)

from Elegant Simplicity by Satish Kumar, New Society Publishers, 2019 Elegant simplicity can only be built on the firm foun­dation of right relationships. Our crises-mental, personal, social, economic, environmental, political, cultural, and re­ligious -- have their origin in disconnection and separation. The moment we see that all things are connected, that we are all related, that everything depends on everything else, we start to see solutions. Why do we have crises between Palestine and Israel, between Sunni and Shia, between America and Russia, India and Pakistan, Christians and Muslims? Because we see ourselves as being separate from others. When all our inter... posted on Apr 4 2019 (7,507 reads)

as $24,000/year for a family of four. When children come from an environment with such scarcity, there is often a residue of existential fear. Neighborhoods of poverty are harsh places to grow up, even if a child’s family is warm and loving. Neighborhoods of poverty are places where there’s a much higher incidence of gun violence; drug and alcohol addiction; homelessness; resource scarcity; and a basic lack of child-friendly, safe places for kids to play, green parks to enjoy nature, and wholesome food. Counteracting the effect of systemic, intergenerational poverty is a huge task. The mindful awareness, gratitude building, and love and kindness exercises we do as an integ... posted on Mar 11 2019 (6,086 reads)

not thinking but a vague symbol indicating a large domain or an assembly of notions which may even contain their negations. Suffice to think what God, truth, justice, honesty, communism, fascism, and so on mean in different human societies to see that much of our trouble lies in the fact that we confuse speaking with thinking. Thinking is a much wider function which contains many forms of possible expression. Speech is a serial event, as words come one after the other in time and by their nature cannot communicate the thought which may contain an immense number of aspects. There is always more than one way of expressing a thought. Most irate discussions and differences between humans a... posted on Apr 29 2019 (4,705 reads)

owner, and Marion. By this stage we were a couple of years in and I was in my second facility. And I finally had enough space to put in a second hand commercial dryer at a really good price. So I installed that and had a bunch of things I was going to manufacture like kale chips and Buckinis as well as gubinge. I figured, okay if I could dry the gubinge, dehydrate it, then we could commercialise it as a shelf stable whole food powder high in natural vitamin C and all the other goodies that nature bundles together. So that’s what we did. We funded the harvest and started small, working with Bruno and Marion to create the product, gubinge powder, and co-brand it with our brand and t... posted on May 19 2019 (5,486 reads)

paid; a young girl who needed braces for her teeth, a friend, down on his luck, who needed a car and a place to stay. And while Mary’s generosity to others is its own legacy, what I want to emphasize here is her strength, for more than anything, Mary Oliver was courageous. We now know, through some of the later poems, a few of the details about the abuse she endured as a child, and we also know that she used her craft to transform not only her own suffering, but also the heartbreaking nature of the world—the fact, say, that everything and everyone is going to die—into a thing of beauty. Think of “Night and The River;” think of the snapping turtle she found a... posted on May 26 2019 (31,798 reads)

Atwood describes The Gift, by Lewis Hyde, as ‘a book about the core nature of what it is that artists do, and also about the relation of these activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society.’ Bill Viola has called it ‘the best book I have read on what it means to be an artist in today’s economic world.’ Robin McKenna is the writer, director and producer of a new feature-length documentary inspired by Hyde’s bestseller. Her film, GIFT, takes us to settings as varied as the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, a potlatch ceremony in British Columbia, and an art museum in Melbourne, to explore some contemporary ways of being wher... posted on May 23 2019 (5,451 reads)

yawning and expressionless. The atmosphere, to his surprise, wasn’t what one would expect of an anarchist militia camp: The dominant impression was that of boredom. Boredom and sleep. The power of concentration of these men seemed exhausted. I almost wished for a sign of hostility, as a human contact. But … they gazed at me without any reaction, as if they were looking at a Chinese fish in an aquarium. (One has to wonder whether that desire for contact, whatever its nature or cost, might be a universality of the human condition — the same impulse that drives trolls to spew the venom of hostility as a desperate antidote to their own apathy and existential bo... posted on Jul 7 2019 (7,583 reads)

What do you say? How do you respond to that? Mr. Ricard: Well, clearly, by first saying, yes, outer circumstances are important; I should do whatever I can. But I should certainly see that at the root of all that, there are inner circumstances, inner conditions. What are they? Well, just look at you. If I say, “OK, come, we’ll spend a weekend cultivating jealousy,” who is going to go for that? We all know that, even say, “Well, that’s part of human nature,” but we are not interested in cultivating more jealousy, neither for hatred, neither for arrogance. Those will be much better off if they didn’t have such a grip on our mind. There... posted on Jun 19 2019 (8,932 reads)

believers in forgiveness. And that gives them the strength to do what they have to do.    RW:  You mean the killer as well as the victim?   RK:  Both. They believe deeply and I understand. They have to have something to hang onto because what's happened is so horrific. But not many of the victim's mothers or family members are willing to meet with the guy in prison. Many still want the guy to be killed. I'm not surprised. It's against the law of nature, the old people go first and then... Things got turned around here. Backwards. But for some reason, I have good boundaries. I can go into that kind of stuff and I'm not scared.   ... posted on Jun 26 2019 (3,783 reads)

to say, I was in a bit of a panic. Nobody answered the phone at my Mom and Dad’s house and as my sister pointed out, her phone was out of minutes. I debated calling my Grandmother or my Uncle in Vermont but decided against it as I figured if they didn’t know anything, they would end up being as panicked as I was. After what could have been ten minutes or an hour, I finally got in touch with my father and I got the information as to what happened. True to the optimistic nature of my family, my Dad told me that everything was fine and there was no need to worry. One thing is very clear about what my family refers to as “The Incident”, due to the quick ... posted on Jun 29 2019 (9,268 reads)

begin to express concern about their weight or body shape, with 40-60 percent of elementary school girls being worried about their weight or about becoming too fat. Moreover, over 50 percent of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys employ unhealthy weight control behaviors such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives. Rachael witnessed several of her peers suffer from eating disorders and poor body image due to the “aesthetic nature” of sports like figure skating. "Unfortunately, being in the spotlight, and when you're getting judged based on how you look in an arena full of 18,000 people and nine judges, it... posted on Jul 1 2019 (4,480 reads)

eccentricities. We can offer compassion and tenderness toward that which is challenging. We can practice beholding rather than belittling, befriending rather than begrudging. We can hold ourselves as we want to be held, as we were once held, and as we can sometimes feel ourselves held in the largest embrace of felt-belonging and Oneness. One way to initiate ourselves into the practice of befriending is to explore and come to know ourselves as if beholding an exquisite newborn. Our essential nature is so much more available to us in the state of infancy. If we can come to treat ourselves with the unconditional tenderness and cherishing that we bring to a new life, we can know ourselves an... posted on Jul 28 2019 (8,903 reads)