Be Careful What You Worship

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my de...

 There is No Such Thing as "Rest"

It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, 'rest'. We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial 'door-nail', say, is actually forever in motion. We have merely become accustomed to judge by outward appearances; by the deceptive impressions we get through our senses.

 There's No Such Thing as Overdue

In healthy, normal mothers with healthy, normal babies there is no such thing as overdue. This term carries a dire connotation that unjustly scares the daylights out of uninformed people. More women have been unnecessarily forced into long, hard, unprepared labor, more b babies damaged by being made to come through a tough, "green," unripe cervix, because everyone was ready except the baby. It takes an obstetrician with a firm backbone to withstand the onslaught from anxious relatives—"Why do...