Author Archives: bluedepth

It's silly, and you should stop doing it.

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Email confidentiality footers annoy me. I see them frequently on many emails that I get and I think of them as meaningless text that really should be ignored. That an email is somehow a private exchange of information is laughable. Email is sent in plaintext using an open protocol and on the wire it’s all unencrypted.

What really brings this to the forefront is when I see these meaningless bits of mental flotsam and jetsam clogging up my email box because someone set a vacation autoresponse and their membership on a email list is causing them to constantly reply with a “I’ll be out from…” email with this stupid block of text at the bottom asserting that the email is the property of blah blah blah.

Writing email has the same security protections as writing a postcard and tying it to a bird and letting it fly off. Your assertion that your communications are somehow proprietary or classified is utterly hilarious.

If people really wanted to make this not so utterly irrelevant, they should use public-key encryption or at least something like ROT–13 encryption so that the text isn’t readily apparent and takes some work to decode. Sending plaintext with this silly block at the bottom just musses up the display and doesn’t mean anything to anybody. So stop it.

The Passenger

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Amongst all the Christian saints that exist there really is only one that I really can identify with and believe in. That would be Saint Francis. I love the image of him in statuary, a monk in a garden with songbirds perched on his shoulders eating seeds out of his hands. There is something really quite gentle and special about someone of such faith being so kind as to attract and befriend animals. I’ve often said that how animals behave towards a person is one of the clearest indicators of what that person truly is. I think animals can sense the inherent goodness or lack thereof in human beings on some level that we are no longer a party to. If a dog avoids a person, perhaps there is a reason why, that sort of thing.

So, the saints are supposed to inspire the faithful to follow in their footsteps. I may not be a Christian, but I can appreciate the faith without getting hoovered into all it’s dogmatic thinking. Specifically speaking, this morning after I drove to work and parked my car in the parking lot in front of my building I looked at my rear-view mirror on the drivers side and noticed that I had a very tiny, very dangerous passenger who followed me to work, riding on my car. It was the business end of a yellowjacket. Apparently sometime during the night he struggled up to my side mirror and was trying to climb behind the mirror to get away from the chill in the air this morning as we had a light frost. I sat there for a minute or two and looked and he was not moving. So after I turned the car off I opened the door gently and closed it and blew a little stream of warm air at him to see if I could rouse him. He was alive. Very sluggish, but alive. He continued his trek to climb behind the mirror assembly and once he was there and safe I sat there talking to him. “I spared your life, so, when we meet again you won’t chase me and sting me, okay?” and I’d like to think that we’ve got a deal. Obviously bugs don’t speak english and you can’t make a deal like that with them, but a part of me did think that if there was some regard from nature that perhaps one good act, not stuffing a credit card into the slot to crush the bug but instead allowing him to seek refuge in my side mirror assembly might just be enough to earn me a “Get out of a yellowjacket sting” card from mother nature itself.

It’s a deal that I’ve made with all the creatures that surround me. If you are outside I will not kill you, but if you enter my home and you are either hazardous or frightful then your life is forfeit. This is specifically for the spiders that invade every spring and hide in the drains of the sink in my basement. They aren’t really hazardous to me, but to Scott they are little crawling chunks of pure nightmare and so, they die. The only thing I offer is that death is swift and complete, that there is a minimum of suffering. It may not be exactly Franciscan but it certainly beats dealing with a frightened partner gripping his chest trying to catch his breath.

I can only hope that the daily temperature rises enough, and the sun comes out. Once the sun hits the side of my car and that housing to the side mirror assembly, it should warm up in there quite quickly, as my car is a dark blue color and is apt to absorb heat than reflect it away. Perhaps when I get back out after quitting time I’ll check to see if my little yellowjacket friend got warm enough to fly away or if I have a lethal little buddy for the summer. I know that one yellowjacket is not lethal, in and of himself, but I have never been stung by any stinging insect so I always reserve a little latitude for them as I do not know for certain how my body will react to the toxins in their stings. It could just be an irritation or it could be anaphylactic shock. It’s really a toss of the dice and if you can avoid pissing off a stinging insect it’s in your best interest. Every time I see one I develop an intense case of the willies. I think it’s an instinctual response to avoiding the risk of a sting. Nothing makes me more keen to flee than the willies.

Fifteen Hundred Dollars

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While actively pursuing the design I’ve had to make meditation a part of my daily routine I’ve been looking online to see what is out on the Internet when it comes to meditation. What I half-heartedly wished I’d see is clear resources on how to get started and free information, perhaps even courses that people could sign up for if they wanted. There are lots of resources online, including Wikipedia, which I quite enjoy. Much of the basic information is useful but many of the links on the first page of Google seem to orbit this semantic space that I like to characterize as ‘freaky eastern shazam’. It’s very reminiscent of the sites you run into when investigating anything that isn’t mainstream in the west. Reading about Tea leads you to bombastic hyperbole about all the health benefits of tea. Reading about Reiki leads you to similar bombast, Feng Shui, Buddhism, and really what this particular blog post is about, Meditation. All these topics have collected the flotsam and jetsam of bombastic hyperbole around them. A lot of ooohing and aaahing and almost always there is some old crusty personality featured that is an ‘expert’ or ‘guru’ that is supposed to lend the topic seriousness. It’s as if western thought is a nightclub and the only way to get beyond the bouncer is to have some sort of elderly expert you can name-drop which will unhook the red velvet ropes and let you in.

Specifically what I ran across that kind of upset me is the site for Transcendental Meditation. Now I have nothing against them at all, no real complaints or critiques to speak of, as they seem to be pleasant and upstanding people. What I do find rather irksome is once you click beyond all the chrome shiny you get to the brass beneath it all. I’ve noticed this quite a lot, this sense of having to pay to be taught, that ‘tuition’ costs some rather pricey sum that somehow justifies a buying-sight-unseen product which may or may not be for you. I’ve hashed this very thing out with the people who follow Reiki, and here we see it again, except for meditation. The cost is $1500! But because Oprah and her cult-of-personality is “underwriting” a portion of the wares that tm.org sell, they’re willing to lower the price to $975!

Selling what should be a basic part of human living strikes me as wrong. It’s upsetting. Everyone should be encouraged to explore their consciousness. They should be willing to explore the many porticos and hallways to their awareness and realize that it’s more than just being on and off, being awake and asleep, being active and maybe-I-dream-but-I-don’t-remember. I’ve gone exploring and there is more here that people should be curious about and explore along with me. So I see these sites and I note the cost and it strikes me with an almost angry emotional sense that something that is an inborn and fundamental part of living should be for sale. Everyone experiences meditative states at least briefly every single day of their lives. I maintain (alas have no empirical proof) that everyone passes through the state that I feel when I meditate right after they leave REM sleep and right before their first conscious thought which is almost always some sort of planned movement, to get up off the bed. If you bring on this particular state with your full awareness intact during the day and stay in that place for a time, it changes you for the better. There is something here that is good for people and I can feel it. I can’t prove it, but I feel it to be right.

There is a counter-argument that is usually made, especially by Reiki professionals who state that the cost is high so that people take it seriously. That in a way, the only way to impress upon a western mind that something is worthy of pursuit you must first make them pay for it, which in a way compels them to make it feel serious because otherwise it’s just a waste of money and wasting money is taboo. The mental garden path runs, “Well, I paid $1500 for this, so I should get my monies worth…” and I find this entire notion to be embarrassing. Shouldn’t you want to do something that may be good for you from your own values, for your own good? Why should money enter into it? Then again, I did pay over $15,000 for a “college education” so upon reflection, I’m as much of a guppy as these yokels paying $1500 for someone to teach them meditation. In many ways I think about the time I spent in college and what I got out of that experience. Was it about the “higher education” that stayed with me, or is it something else? It would be crass to basically state that I paid $15,000 for a beautiful piece of paper which I’ve never shown another living soul, but entitles me to letters that I get to tack on to my name, which nobody ever does because the letters B.A. are so common as to be meaningless. Perhaps what I got out of college wasn’t what I went there for, but for all the other things that happened to me while I was there. All the other things I did, the growing up, the learning, and none of it was done in a classroom. I try to remember anything I learned in a classroom for my college education and I can’t recall anything beyond a vague impression of stadium-style seating.

But what I can do now is explore without having to pay someone to teach me. At least in this I can do this on my own. I don’t need someone to hand me any paperwork I won’t ever really use. Because meditation is an inherent skill, and a ‘college education’ isn’t, then that may be the justification I use to both criticize tm.org for selling out and why I sold out to the SUNY college system in New York. The basis is flimsy, but it is something at least.

So what does it take to meditate? It seems straightforward to me, and I strip away the religious claptrap that surrounds the act, if you want to take meditation and clothe it in a religious context that’s fine and up to you. The basics as far as I consider them is to exercise your will and carry your full awareness into a state of consciousness without thoughts. The parts of the brain can be resistant to this because while we are conscious we pretty much are just an endless stream of thoughts and this is the problem. You are more than a stream of thoughts and meditation helps you explore what existence is without this constant stream of thinking. I find that concentrating on breathing is perfect. It’s something you absolutely must do at all times or you will die, so you might as well use it as a tool to manipulate your consciousness. I’ve found that concentrating and centering all my will and awareness on my breathing, the feeling of breathing is all that I need. I notice that my mind wanders off of breathing and the further I go the more unusual ‘junk’ gets thrown up and occurs to me. It’s just as if the thinking parts of me know I’m trying to quiet them and they don’t want to ever shut up, so they try to sabotage me. While I sit calmly trying to meditate my thinking mind, in a panic to keep me from leaving, digs up the scent of WD–40 and the embrace of my maternal grandfather. I’m sure if I were to anthropomorphize my thinking parts it would run something like this: “WHAT!?! You cannot leave me! I’ll fix you! Here, here’s a memory of your grandfather! See! You can’t live without me!” Throughout the entire experience I have discovered that trying to suppress these intrusive thoughts only encourages them to pop up, just like raising the heat on a pan of popcorn kernels. The more heat, the faster they pop. Instead of actively suppressing them, the key I’ve found is to apply my will to let go of whatever it is and calmly return to breathing. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not. In the end however, if I have enough time and willpower I can cross a barrier and as I’ve written about before, it feels like a different region of consciousness. The popcorn thoughts no longer appear and everything is serene, calm, and quiet in the most important place of all, inside my own mind.

So, why spend $1500, or even $975 if something like this can be explored and developed by sitting someplace comfortable, closing your eyes, and breathing? I think more people would enjoy it if they tried it. As I’ve characterized it before, it’s ineffable. There really aren’t words to convey what the feeling is, wonderful and magnificent and delightful don’t really touch the nature of what this space in your consciousness is. The only thing that really upsets me is that I’ve been carrying this around with me for 36 years and only now have taken it seriously. Instead of bemoaning the lost time I am going to make it a part of the life that remains to me because this is really really good.

Tearing Down

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While doing the usual weekend chores last Sunday I bumped the vacuum cleaner into the table where my old computer and desktop used to be. Ever since my iPad and iPhone the location and nature of much of my computing tasks at home have radically shifted. I no longer spend such long hours sitting in front of a huge machine playing online games. Now I just use my phone to tend to email and read for the most part.

This change in how I use technology isn’t reflected in this room upstairs in my house that has for the most part been neglected. So there needs to be a reckoning. I need to sort through this area and pitch what has to be removed and generally de-clutter that part of my house. It feels a lot like a callus that has built up over time and it’s a kind of clutter that you don’t really see any more except when you run the vacuum cleaner into it. There is a general sense of simplification that appeals to me and this table full of wasted technology needs to be figured out.

Along with this I have five closet areas that need to be generally gunged. There is a coat closet on the ground floor that needs to be seriously organized, the guest room closet needs to be exhumed and dealt with, then all the upstairs closets need to be gone through. There are things I no longer need, want, or can use. Clothing, knick-knacks, and various orders of past debris that all need to be evaluated and sorted and organized.

This weekend I think will be a fantastic opportunity to address these situations, at least for as much as I can do on my own. We’ll see just how much progress I can make.

Serenity

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At work I get two 15 minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I usually just work right through them paying no attention to the time I could be devoting to other things instead of work. I get into ruts where I put my head down at 8am and pick it back up at 5pm and the whole time in between I’m engaged with something work related.

This can sometimes lead to irritation, aggravation, and this maddening buzzity restless feeling that sticks with me and starts to wear me down. If the weather is good and I’m in the mood for it I will take a jaunt around the campus which can help. Recently however I’ve been trying to find room in my life for meditation and it struck me that if I could find the right place, that I could get away for half an hour. I figure nobody would have a problem if I bound my two breaks up together and used it for something possibly good for me.

That’s exactly what I did this afternoon. Around 3:45 today I polished off the last of the tea I was drinking and grabbed my iPhone and found a little out-of-the-way place here where I could relax and meditate. I didn’t fall asleep, but I was able to get to that magical place. Each time I do it, it gets easier to reach it, each and every time. There are two apps that help keep me focused and keep me from running out of time. The first app I use to create natural sounds around me is called Naturespace and I went ahead and bought the “Entire Catalog” program option which unlocks all of their soundtracks. I especially prefer the track “Zen Wind and Water” as it features windchimes which I really like listening to. The program works with my earbuds to mask outside noises, so there is nothing to upset me while I’m trying to relax. The second app I use is Chronology and I set it for 30 minutes with a double-horn alarm at the end. When I prepare for my session I find a nice quiet place to sit, one that nobody is using and nobody would go looking for me in, and I start Naturespace and Chronology, get everything started and start to concentrate on my breathing. As usual when I’m coming down I can feel the relaxation hit my shoulders and neck first. As I’m trying to quiet my thinking my mind starts tossing stray noise at me to get me to do something else. At first it took a long time for that to quiet down, but after several sessions it doesn’t take that long and once I achieve my goal it’s as if my mind fits into a groove in my consciousness. The stray noisy thoughts are gone and they don’t bubble up. It feels almost like a physical ‘fwump’ as it clicks into place. I could try to bring in some noise but it doesn’t work. It’s just me and my breathing and nothing else. If I stay very still I can even slow my breathing down, I start to lose proprioception and unless I’ve got joints under stress I start to float away. It has nothing at all to do with falling asleep. There are no hypnic jerks, and there isn’t any loss of consciousness. I’m able to act if I must, but it’s quite nice just to exist in that state for a time.

When I hear the double-horn from Chronology I know that my 30 minutes are up. When I open my eyes and shift posture my proprioception snaps right back together but my mind retains this quality of serenity for a long while afterwards. I’ve found it’s easier to read and easier to concentrate afterwards, as if I’m still carrying crumbs of that meditative state around with me for hours afterwards. I still feel it even now, and it’s been about twenty minutes since I left that state. If nothing else, I feel much better afterwards than I did before. The maddening buzzity sensation is gone and I don’t feel quite as busy as I was just an hour ago.

If I notice any other differences, I’ll be sure to blog about them.

What's in a name?

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I have a Google Alert set to my name, “Andy McHugh” along with other terms like it and every once in a great while I’ll get traffic that the Google spider comes across that entertains me. This specifically gave me a terrible case of the giggles. It’s andymchugh.com.

I can’t help but wonder if he gets any cross traffic from all the outrageous things I post on the Internet. It’s one of the reasons why if someone does a simple name search they’re not going to find me. They are going to find the 8 Andy McHugh’s in Ireland, the 3 in England, and apparently a gaggle of us here in the States. Like this fellow. I have no idea who he is, but he’s got my name. I like to believe my middle name makes me unique, but I would bet money that over in Ireland there has to be an Andy McHugh with the middle name of Joseph. A batch of good Catholics, come on.

So anyways, it’s funny to notice my telemarketer-confusing last name out there in the world and really funny to see my name as a dot com. A part of me wants to write a comment on his site and say hello, but that may be just a smidgen stalkery.

Cloven Hoofywoofies

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Just finished the “2012 Great Colleges To Work For” survey sent from ModernThink, LLC. We received a message a while ago indicating that this was an important survey, and that it was important to certain people that we all fill it out.

When I got that email the first thing that came to mind was “Are you sure?”. So this morning I got the invitation to fill out the survey. I clicked my merry way through the questions and near the end there were two open-ended text-box questions. I wrote what I thought down, trying not to be terribly unfair or particularly abusive and came up with a rather compelling bit of text to include as a response for the survey. Then right before I clicked Next I thought I better re-read the invitation email, see if there was any fine print. The devil is in the details, are there any cloven-hoofywoofies behind ModernThink’s draperies?

This text immediately popped out at me:

"Please note, however, that your institution may have the opportunity to purchase a report that summarizes all employee responses to the two optional, open-ended questions at the end of the survey. The report will list all responses to those two questions in alphabetical order by the first letter of the response to ensure objectivity in reporting. In order to preserve your anonymity, please do not include your name or other identifying remarks in your responses."

Anyone who even has a passing knowledge of me can spot my writing style and my passionate bluntness right off the bat, so anything that I write really has my mental fingerprints all over it. In a way, anything that I had written in those optional boxes would have been an “identifying remark” so I highlighted the passages I spent about five minutes each writing and blanked them out. I did consider, just briefly putting in a Lorem Ipsum block, but I didn’t. I’ve learned the lesson from Facebook. It’s a lot like Fight Club, in so far that the chief rule about Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. I just extended that to the survey. It’s far better for me professionally to deflect questions, change the subject, and… oh! isn’t this a pretty flower! 🙂

In a rather tongue-in-cheek way, a white anglo-saxon protestant knows how to ford those kinds of rapids. 🙂

I’m glad I read the fine print. I’m glad I spotted the hoofywoofies. I finished the survey and I can move on with my life.

P.S. I have to give props to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for the term “hoofywoofies”, it’s from their collaborative fiction book titled “Good Omens”. If you get a chance to read it, I highly recommend it.

Spinning Governor

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I’ve come up with ways to cope with the network connection throttle that I recently discovered was behind a lot of my network woes here at work. In my regularly scheduled workaday use of the Internet I usually find myself consuming at least 150 connections if not more because everything I use was built with the assumption that establishing multiple connections is free and easy. There is no parsimony when it comes to using the network, and you see this exemplified most of all in the design of browsers like Firefox. When you fetch a page, most modern browsers will attempt to also-fetch possible pages you may want so that they can appear faster. This is fine if you have an unlimited number of connections that you can make to the network. That isn’t the case here.

I can live with the throttle. I understand why it’s in place and knowing that it exists helps in that it keeps me from questioning my sanity when I didn’t know it existed and thought the problem was with me or my computer. It’s neither. So there are some ways to address my problem. Specifically the route to a better life is ironically through the same devices that are at the center of the entire ‘running out of IP space’ problem, iOS devices. My iPhone and iPad have apps that can bring me interfaces to Internet resources that I need to use, and they can free up my computer so that I can help avoid the connection quota throttle. For example, instead of opening up Toodledo in Safari I can open up the Toodledo app on my iPhone. Different device, different connection quota. My iPhone doesn’t make so many connections and if I did need that feature I could very easily drop wifi and use the 3G data circuit. I can do a lot of other things too, like manipulate Asana, run my eMail through my iPad, that sort of thing.

So, in a way, the connection throttle has shifted the load from one device to three. At first this was kind of a pain in the ass, but over time I’ve come to see that this could become more efficient. It frees my computer up for the heavier things, like Google Reader and such. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Horizon Met

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My horoscope suggested that I try to include a regular new thing in my life, and that now is the perfect opportunity to not only begin, but to make it a habit. So I immediately thought about the things that I always wanted to try to include as a regular practice in my life but never really got it to stick.

That thing is meditation. I’ve read a lot of articles on it, it comes up over and over in Buddhist and Zen texts, and I’ve even gone so far as to get applications that help support it. The articles read a lot like the Chinese websites do about their tea, all about the benefits and nothing to point at any detractors. Much like tea, there is little that exists that could harm me. In fact, meditation contains nothing at all that could harm me beyond perhaps being eaten by some sort of apex predator while I’m meditating. The only downside that I can see to drinking tea is frequent bathroom visits. A lot of the sites I’ve seen and articles I’ve read approach meditation from various angles. Some approach it from a spiritual side, here you have the line that I think I remember Deepak Chopra saying about it, that what lies between thoughts is the thinker and if you stop thinking you can exist all by yourself. There are other articles that I’ve read, books too, that go on at length regarding the neurochemistry of meditation. That neurons that fire together wire together, and that meditation can actually increase the speed of cognition. For that I have no proof and it smells like a placebo, however it’s tea all over again. Even if the claims are bunkum, it’s not like I’m going to harm myself at all so if there is nothing to lose, perhaps anything gained is what I was always after from the beginning. I also remember reading a LifeHacker article regarding daydreaming and how if you just stop trying to drive your mind to unravel a question that sometimes the answer comes ready-packaged and drops into your lap if you back off the whip and let the mind work on it’s own. Do I believe any of this? I am skeptical however over my life and over the times I’ve tried to meditate I have to say that something is indeed there.

So earlier today I took a break from work. I plugged in my iPhone earbuds, set the volume low and ran one of the apps that I recently acquired, it’s called Naturespace. It had 109 reviews in the Apple App Store and the overall rating was almost five out of five stars. Since the app was free I tried it, loaded up one of the sample tracks and sat back in my chair. At work there is a problem, if you sit with your eyes closed, even if you are not pursuing a nap it looks nearly indistinguishable from actually sleeping on the job. I found meditating with my eyes open to be very difficult, but not impossible. The natural sounds helped mask the office noises that surround me in my workaday world and I had a bit of time to myself and thankfully nobody walked in on me and felt at-odds about seeing me sitting attentively in my chair with my eyes closed. One thing I did do was join my hands near my face and steeple my index fingers and rest them lightly against my philtrum, which I’ve heard referred to as a fairy-saddle. The book I read about the neurochemistry of Buddhism went on at length about the existence of an accupressure point right in this spot that supposedly activates the parasympathetic wing of the central nervous system. The parasympathetic slows and relaxes everything and it seemed to be a great way to help push myself along the path to entering a meditative state of consciousness.

My skills for this are picked up like trivia from lots of different places, when I’m bored I tend to graze on information on the Internet and I find myself reading lots of different things so the way I begin is to sit comfortably, make sure I don’t sense any ‘biological imperatives’ coming from my body and then I really should close my eyes to quiet the visual field. The natural sounds help bring on relaxation which I always think of as the foyer or antechamber to a true meditative state. The constant light touch against the philtrum may or may not be anything useful but earlier this morning I found that if I concentrate on my breathing and make it very natural and regular that I can figuratively imagine my mind as a surface of water. As I come down from the natural jitter and jump of being “online at work” I imagine the surface of water that is my mind getting more and more calm as time goes on. There is definitely some kickback as random things pop up out of nowhere and break the surface of the water image in my imagination. As I sat there I actually slipped into a meditative state and it felt ineffably wonderful. Thankfully I had a timer set on my iPhone that would send an alarm after 15 minutes so when I heard it I had to stop what I was doing and get back to work.

Now the only question is, where do I fit this into my life? Do I only spend about seven minutes in this state twice a day or do I devote an hour a day to it and give up something else? I have to admit that the experience was something incredibly positive and rewarding and was so inherently wonderful that I find myself craving to get back to that state. Then I start to wonder if it’s better to fix such a thing at a specific time or is it better to simply assert that I will intend to devote an hour to it and then find the time each day to fit it in. There may be a higher chance of me actually integrating the practice into my life if I give myself a small bit of flexibility without letting myself be totally floppy with timing. If I have no discipline for it I’ll never do it. Like a lot of things in my life, only time will tell. I’ll blog as I progress, which might inspire others to try what I am attempting.

Childhood's End

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I saw this opinion article on the New York Times: Children’s Books… and I have the exact opposite opinion as the author that the New York Times published. He states that adults should not read kids books. That they are beneath adults and that there are better things that adults should read.

I don’t want to know anyone who has this opinion. Wadding up your childhood and locking it in the basement of your soul is the quickest way to become an autumn person. Courting the death of joy should be anathema to any vibrant living human being. There is more than enough room, and respect, for anyone wanting to read “The Lorax” at the tender age of 36! The ability to embrace childish things means you have not let your soul ossify with the banality of our cold and horrible world.

People who judge and then sniff imperiously when they see an adult reading “The Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter”, or even “Horton Hears A Who” are in my opinion spiritually bankrupt and repellent. They exude the ardent seriousness of stupid adults. Life is best led reading whatever it is that you want to read. Judging puts you in hell, with the pedants, grammar, and spelling nazis. This cold and desolate region is filled with angry bitter shades who refuse to axe anyone a question. They refuse to deal with anyone who ain’t like them. And they burn with rage when you express alot of affection for anyone who doesn’t toe the strict line that English doesn’t have.

Your childhood is a diamond. It has to be loved. It’s as much a part of every passionate living adult as rationality. It’s your inner child that powers your curiosity. He or she is the gatekeeper to your imagination and your creativity. Denying him or her damns you to a life lived in shadows of gray. In that state you might as well be dead for all the good you are to anyone else.

Everyone needs to keep doing things that are good for your inner child. Don’t turn into an autumn person. They are animated corpses who don’t know they are dead.