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Showing posts with the label Ralph Waldo Emerson

For Just 20 minutes, I Can Wait For Anything...

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Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. --Ralph Waldo Emerson It is well documented that one of the major secrets to losing weight and keeping it off is waiting at least 20 minutes after eating a meal or snack before eating anything else. It takes at 20 minutes for the brain to catch up with the stomach (or is it the other way around?). I have talked about this before, but I have never really lived it until now. I always tended to eat desert right after dinner, and it seemed that I was never completely full. Now I'm trying something different: setting a timer for 20 minutes and waiting before reaching for that extra something. It DOES work because in the greater scheme of things, 20 minutes is not very long and waiting for a short period of time helps me figure out if I'm still really hungry or just hungry FOR something specific. If I'm really hungry, a carrot will taste good; if it just tastes blah, then I'm not really hungry. And it's o

Do You Believe in Fate?

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Jennifer Semple's bus ticket receipt and ticket envelope from May 1, 1969 ________________________________ Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence . --Ralph Waldo Emerson I'm not sure that I believe in fate per se , but I do believe that a series of small decisions can move people in unexpected directions. Forty-two years ago, I made a decision that dramatically changed the course of my life. The above images represent this major shift in my life, but it didn't occur all of a sudden--a series of events, some minor and some major--led me to leave Iowa and escape to Pennsylvania, where I have lived ever since. I wrote a memoir about this shift; if you're curious, I have posted some excerpts from it here . Had I not moved to Pennsylvania, my life would have been dramatically different--how, I don't know. I suspect that my life would have been less successful, but who knows? Maybe that "movie agent" who approached me on the stree

Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment