Mexico City, Day 9 - Monday

My first day with a new teacher, but I only had an hour at school.

Today was a workday.  

7 hours in the chair.

There's not much to write about for a day like today. Except, this does test another theory I have about remote work.  I was able to attend those meetings and I was able to participate remotely. It worked well.

On a personal note, while I did not study a lot of Spanish, I did manage to add some more quotes to my buffer queue.  I'm kind of surprised at how wide the distribution is becoming for these quotes.

Here's a quote from the day.  I find this to be extremely practical advice.  And recent psychology backs it up.  Trying to stop yourself programs your brain to think about the thing you don't want to think about. It's better to focus on something else.

And I love this quote from the Second Mountain by David Brooks.

David Foster Wallace grasped the importance of wanting well in his famous commencement address at Kenyon College: In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. ​Everybody worships​.

​The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship​—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that ​pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive​. 

​If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough​. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly,​ and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you….

Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

I have said many times that "I have been to the church of intellect, and I have found it lacking".  Adam Grant calls some groups of thought "idea cults."  I guess you could say that I'm a secular Christian. I don't know.  But I'm not recruiting.  I love Rob Bell's perspective. We're all just trying to figure it out. I can certainly relate to that.  Some of us are trying to figure it out together.  That can be called bible study, or even worship. It seems to work for me.