Just about every week, we find something useful in Kevin Kelly’s newsletter Recomendo, a handful of “cool stuff” from really smart people. The latest is The Immediacy Filter.
Read MoreVarieties of YES: A Zen View, John Cage, Mary Oliver, James Joyce and the Katz’s Deli Orgasm
Thirty + years ago, the world witnessed Meg Ryan’s perfection of a faked orgasm in Katz’s Deli, we’ve been thinking about great, transformative yeses we’ve written about or experienced.
Read MoreOpened at Random: ‘Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
This morning, we opened Bill Hayes’ “Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me” to this…
Read MoreComputer Screens are Hurting Our Eyes; Trees Can Heal Them
Computer vision syndrome is the narrowing of vision that reading off flat screens, handhelds and desktops cause without our even realizing it. Here’s a cure.
Read MoreA Lost Computer’s Lesson in YES
When her laptop got marooned for a week in Grand Central Station’s Lost Luggage Department, book editor and writer Harriet Bell discovered what it is like to live without it.
Read MoreMary Oliver: Taking Yes for an Answer
Mary Oliver’s Morning Poem starts our week with the recognition that it can be challenging to embrace even the simplest aspects of life that we ALL deserve. If we look around, we find that the goods were delivered despite our best efforts at self-sabotage. Brene Brown described it:
Read MoreCommunity Starts with One, Saying YES
These three surprising examples of communities reminds us that community starts with one person reaching out, taking action…and then another, and another….
Read MoreWe’re BACK from Yesterday’s Outage w Apologies + Thanks
In the wee hours of Monday morning, our server went down, causing the morning’s post to go undelivered and Improvised Life to be offline for most of the day. This was the worst of a number of outages that occurred during the past month. Although it wasn’t our fault (it was a DDoS attack designed to…
Read MoreJohn Cage: Saying YES to Unpredictability
We opened the John Cage’s enduringly great A Year from Monday and found this extraordinary set of questions*: How immediately are you going to say Yes to no matter what unpredictability, even when what happens seems to have no relation to what one thought was one’s commitment? The kind of YES he’s talking about is full committment:
Read MoreThe Practice of Seeing Through New Eyes (Proust + LSD)
This quote reminded us of a stunning video of a 1950’s housewife who took part in an early LSD experiment. As the drug takes hold, she glories in the colors she sees and says “Everything is one. Can’t you see it?” Without taking LSD, we find there is still a great deal of unexpected beauty to see IF we practice noticing what’s around us.
Read MoreTo Be Able To Say Yes, You Need to Be Able To Say No
We’ve come to love the word YES, and post it often as a reminder to embrace the opportunities that come along, and go with them. But we realize that there is a very important other side to YES, and that is being able to say NO.
Read Morehow to use fabric to disappear eyesores and clutter
I frequently do Skype consultations with people who need clever, inexpensive fixes for their spaces and are having difficulty envisioning possibilities. Often, they are only able to describe the change in feeling that they’d like to achieve. In the many spaces I’ve looked at, I’ve seen a common problem: there is a lot of visual…
Read Morewood coffee table with ‘yes’ + other signage furniture
We first posted furniture designer Roxane Beis‘ work last march after we stumbled on her unique stenciled tree trunk side tables whose splits and cracks were vividly painted red. Only we didn’t know whom to credit. When a reader sent us an email with a link to Beis’s site, we discovered a trove of interesting furniture, like…
Read More‘yes to all’
It’s amazing how good this sign makes us feel. via uncopy Related posts: ‘yes yes yes yes…oh..oh…oh.. yes yes’ (nora ephron) what happens if you say ‘yes, and…’ (instead of ‘no’)? salvador dali says ‘yes’ to everything ‘there is no such word as “no”‘
Read More‘yes yes yes yes…oh..oh…oh.. yes yes’ (nora ephron)
We didin’t realize how much Meg Ryan’s soliloquy from Nora Ephron’s “When Harry Met Sally” is the epitomy of YES, JOY, BEING IN THE MOMENT until we saw artist Rachel Perry Welty‘s wonderful sign. Using letters cut from Ephron’s obituary, she transformed a sad passing into a its much bigger view. via The New York Times’…
Read Morewhat happens if you say ‘yes, and…’ (instead of ‘no’)?
After Scott McDowell attended a class in theatrical improvising with Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere, he faced a quandery: how to reconcile a basic tenet of productivity – saying “No” and setting limits – with the essential principle of improvising – saying “Yes, and…”. “Yes, and” is a protocol that allows for anything to happen,…
Read Moresalvador dali says ‘yes’ to everything
(Video link here) We are totally charmed by this video of Salvador Dali on an episode of What’s My Line, an old tv game show in which blindfolded contestants had to guess the occupation of the special guest by asking yes/no questions. Here are all of the questions that Dali answered yes to (we’ve boldfaced ones that…
Read Morepracticing yes
(Video link here.) This week I’ve been contemplating the challenge of saying yes. I was sent a TED Talk in which Sasha Dichter discusses a neat experiment: for a full month, every time he was asked for something, he said yes. Dichter works in philanthropy, so cultivating personal generosity and connecting it to his work has…
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