A few days ago a close friend of mine died. John and I first met in 1967 in the office of the president of Cleveland State Community College. Each of us had come to the office that day to sign a contract to teach at this new school, the first community college established in East Tennessee. For the forty-two years since that afternoon, John and I remained close friends, never losing touch, never going very long without visiting in person, talking, writing, and/or emailing, although we ended up living more than a thousand miles apart for many decades. I’ve inventoried the friendships in my life since John died; and the forty-two years of friendship with John is the longest active friendship I have been privileged to have in my life. 

This long friendship-and now the loss of that dear friend-was on my mind one day this week when I saw an article in The New York Times about friendship. The journalist described a study done last year with thirty-four students at the University of Virginia. The students were taken to the base of a steep hill and fitted with a weighed backpack. The students were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the experiment, and some stood alone. (more…)

Daniel Amen, M. D., has written a book called Change Your Brain: Change Your Life. It turns out that some of my friends have known about this book for years and have found Dr. Amen’s suggestions very valuable. I, however, only recently discovered the book when it was listed on the home page of Amazon.com. Based on decades of research at the Amen Clinic for Behavior Medicine, Change Your Brain: Change Your Life offers simple and practical ideas for improving the quality of our daily lives by knowing more about how our brains work.

How It Feels to Have a Centered Brain

When I read some of the suggestions, I thought about Einstein’s assertion that some of the most elegant things in the universe are the most simple. Dr. Amen’s recommendations for “good-brain” health are simple…and I can attest that the ones I have already tried for myself do make a difference.

Let me give you an example:

One morning recently I started my day feeling lethargic and, generally, off-kilter. My mood was low, although I had no explanation for why I woke up feeling this way. Having just read Dr. Amen’s chapter on the temporal lobes of our brain—areas of our brain that affect our emotional feelings—I decided to go to his book and read what “prescriptions” he gave that would produce “good-brain” health in the temporal lobes. (more…)

I’m about to share with you a personal email. But before I do, I’d like to talk first about plumb lines. Because this email that you will read shortly is so much more than a message I received from a friend. This email will remain forever a vertical reference line that allows me to measure the center of balance of my life on any day.

And that takes us back to plumb lines.

The dictionary tells us that the word plumb comes from the Latin word for the metal lead.) A plumb line is a string or line from which a weight is hung. (The weight is called a plumb bob.) This plumb line is suspended from above to determine or test whether something below is or isn’t vertical. Plumb lines determine the vertical on an upright surface. Think of an ancient cathedral. Probably a plumb line was centered over a mark on the floor; and, as the building proceeded upward, the plumb line would be taken higher, insuring that the building stayed straight as it grew in height. (You can still see these marks on the floor of many old buildings.)
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