I’ve been subscribed to the Pictures for Sad Children blog for a while.
I like it’s slightly dark and off-beat humour.

This particular strip reminds me how easy it is to get into cycles of worry.
Sometimes worrying can become even more comfortable than taking the risk of dealing with our junk and learning to rest.

I’m trying to take that less travelled path – the one that takes Jesus seriously when he says things like:

Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?
And why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you.

This is a beautiful video from Amnesty about the Power of Letters. Of course, they’re trying to encourage people to support their campaigns, but it reminded me of how much I love writing and receiving real, hand written messages myself. It’s far more pleasurable than opening an email.

Being back in Cape Town has reminded me of the letters I used to write Sofia when we were apart for 6 months during our courtship. I always felt like my letter writing did more justice to what I was thinking and feeling than did my emails or Skype conversations.

I spotted this guy on Sunday on one of the squares in Stockholm.
He was totally at one with the hula hoop.
I couldn’t resist capturing it for posterity.

I heard about this study ages ago: the Stanford psychology professor who tested the self control of 4 year olds by leaving them alone in a room with a marshmallow. He told them that if they could wait 15 minutes before eating it, he’d give them a second marshmallow. What I didn’t realize was that this psychologist followed up his research at different stages of these children’s lives and noticed that those who lacked self control in early life, tended towards it in later life:

Thirteen years later Mischel did follow-up research that found dramatic differences between the two groups (the gobblers and the resisters). The gobblers, now high school students, were more likely to have behavioral problems and low attention spans, and they found it difficult to maintain friendships.

Read the full summary at Adbusters.org

Self control is not something we praise in our culture, unless it comes to sports personalities or the extremely wealthy, and I think we’re poorer for it. Our media continuously overloads us with the message that: if we don’t respond to our every urge, there’s something wrong – we’re boring, frigid, or “restrained” (with a negative intonation of the voice).

This is incredibly ironic, considering that self control could play a major role in combatting the ills that plague our various societies: environmental degeneration, slavery, obesity, violence against women, to name just a few.

(image source: Adbusters.org)

There was a great post on the Adbusters blog earlier this month by someone who reflectively quit using Facebook:

For the vast majority of people experiencing the fragmented, fast-paced modern world of 2008, a Sunday pause at the end of a hectic week may cause them to become all too aware of the lack of content in their lives. So we update our online profiles and tell ourselves that we are reaching out.

…the time we waste on Facebook only makes our search for comfort and community more elusive. Online networking sites are marketed as facilitators of community-orientation but when I think about the millions of people – myself included – who spend large portions of their waking lives feeding off an exchange of thousands of computerized, fragmented images, it doesn’t add up to community-engagement…

Read the full article here