Tag: Young Adults

Prejudice describes an attitude towards a person that is unjustified or simply incorrect, generally a hostile one, and held on no other basis than the social group that person belongs to.

Views of that sort may fasten onto a race or onto a gender. What the definition turns on is sequence: the group is judged first, and the individual is judged afterwards, by inheritance.

Where the word came from

As a concept it appeared early in the twentieth century, and it rose quickly to become the dominant term, both in social science and in ordinary speech, for hostility directed at people because of the group or category they fall into.

The argument inside the definition

Among social scientists the standard definition has been a negative attitude held by one group towards another.

A good many of them attach a condition to that. On their account the attitude must additionally be wrong, or unwarranted, before the word properly applies.

It is that wider version, rather than the narrow technical one, that has settled into everyday use. Which explains why the word lands as an accusation when we use it, rather than as a neutral description.

Careful thought is what a wedding outfit deserves. Looking your best is the requirement, so the materials and the designers you pick from should be the best available to you.

Start by taking it seriously

Accept first that this genuinely does deserve the attention. That acceptance is step one, and a surprising number of grooms never take it.

Let the theme narrow it down

The theme decides a great deal for you. An afternoon wedding, one held outdoors, one held at night: each of them cuts the field of options down.

The safe option, and its problem

Few choices are safer for the day than a well cut classic suit. Worn with any confidence at all, it reads as smart and elegant.

Its weakness is that every other man present is also in a suit, and this is your wedding. So put a twist in it with accessories nobody else will have.

Customise it

Personalising the outfit suits a groom particularly well. Cufflinks engraved with your name will do it, or anything else that carries a reference to the day itself.

Do not dress for a meeting

Leave the comfort zone, and resist anything that edges towards corporate. This is a wedding, and looking as though a presentation is imminent is not the effect you want.

Equally, remain recognisably yourself. Settle on a style that fits your own personality and wear what you can be comfortable in.

Tailor-made usually wins

Going to a tailor is generally the better route, because the suit or traditional outfit that results is built around your own taste and your own ideas, with a designer’s expertise added on top.

Do not rent it

A few hours of wear, admittedly. But those particular hours carry more weight than any others, and renting is a cheap option in every sense, given that the garment has almost certainly been worn by somebody else already.

Stretch a little beyond your usual spending. Weddings are infrequent things. If fortune is kind, you will only have the one.

Celestial objects, the phenomena surrounding them and the question of where they came from: those together make up the subject called astronomy.

Few sciences are older. People have been practising it since prehistoric times.

What it rests on now

The modern version of the subject leans very heavily on established physics, the laws of motion set out by Newton and the general theory of relativity among them.

That dependence is recent. For most of its history astronomy was open to anybody, and reputations were built by seers and sages who put the stars to practical use.

The uses were practical indeed. Working out where you stood in the year. Steering a ship. Sailors crossing the Atlantic in the age of Columbus navigated by the same lights.

Where it goes next

Whatever comes next in astronomy will come from new ways of observing.

Interferometry is the one to watch, sometimes described as the hypertelescope, in which a network of telescopes is made to work cooperatively so that images resolve.

Pushed far enough, that technique could let us look straight at planets orbiting other stars, instead of inferring their presence from the gravitational signature they leave behind. The difference is between deducing a planet and seeing one.

The cheerfullest gathering can be reduced to a miserable one by negativity alone. And the trouble a negative thought causes is never worth whatever it was supposed to be warning you about.

Several approaches will break the pattern.

Not everything needs to be maximised

Younger people fall prey to this so easily for one reason: the molehill gets built into a mountain. And by the end, whatever happened has somehow been turned into evidence about our own faults.

Suppose a subject was failed. The world has not ended. Gather yourself and do better at the next attempt.

Picking over the problem to no purpose helps nobody. That habit is exactly what lets one small negative thought swell into a black hole large enough to swallow a person. Meet the thought early, while it is still small, and the swelling never happens.

Shutting yourself away does not work

We do it without deciding to. Nobody is spoken to. Trouble arrives, or the mood drops, and we say nothing at all.

But a head that never gets emptied out loses its grip on the problem itself, and thinking narrows down to a single track.

Speak to friends. Speak to family. Speak to whoever you trust enough to think out loud in front of.

List and cherish positive thoughts

If your conclusion is that nothing in your life is right, give it one minute of proper thought first.

Breathe in slowly and go back to the last occasion you smiled. Then find what caused it, no matter how brief the smile was or how trivial the thing that produced it.

Open your eyes, and write that cause down, along with anything else attached to that happy moment. Then do it again, and keep going until the page has no room left.

What you are holding is your positive list, and its function is to demonstrate that something good is always in there somewhere.

Positivity stems from genuine happiness

Real happiness is not issued by other people or by circumstances. It is generated internally.

Manufacture your own through singing, through dancing and through smiling. Only the negative make bad singers and bad dancers, so the saying goes. Singing releases a remarkable amount of stress. Lyrics can be forgotten and steps can be wrong, provided the time is enjoyed.

Singing and dancing are, in their way, feelings let out. Let feelings out and a smile appears on the face. And a smile a day is what keeps the negative thoughts at a distance.

Genuinely try to keep negativity away

Where does negativity come from? From negative people, and from negative situations.

There may be a friend who brings nothing but bad news, a relative whose pleasure is putting you down, a teacher who enjoys singling you out, a colleague who enjoys irritating you. Before you meet any of them, take a breath and decide in advance that what they bring is not getting into your head.

Where avoiding them is impossible, apply the effort deliberately and keep their negativity from arriving at all. In at the left ear, and straight out of the right.

Mindfulness does wonders too

Meditation helps, and so does a yoga class. Both move the focus off the problem and onto the pattern of your own breathing.

Yoga is treated by many as a relaxing form of exercise whose purpose is a brain at ease. Staying in the present matters enormously, and meditating is the most reliable route into it.

The instruction is to stop rehearsing what might happen, and to hold the attention on what is happening. Whatever it is, it is now.

Pretty pictures and silly animal stories is what people assume children’s books amount to. A good many of them are timeless instead, and they are inspiring, insightful and wise.

Sharing, the force of love, the business of becoming what you could be: none of these lessons were ever really aimed at children alone. They were aimed at the child that survives in everybody. Take the cue and see where the messages land in your own life.

We must take care of the planet

Nothing improves until somebody cares an enormous amount. Absolutely nothing.

Nearly all of us met that message early, in books and in cartoons about rescuing the world. It was among the first lessons we were given, and among the first we put down.

Love is powerful

How a thing was manufactured has no bearing on whether it is real. Realness is something done to you, by somebody who loves you over a long stretch of years.

Every story in which a toy or an animal longed to talk and dance the way people do rested on that. Somewhere a character loved without limit, and the unreal wanted to cross over because of it. That was the message underneath all of them.

Happiness has no value unless it is shared

Give away more, and what comes back is more delight, not less.

Certain books left something lovely here, which is that friendship and happiness both consist of handing your joy to other people rather than hoarding it.

Face challenges head on

Over is not an option. Under is not an option. The way out is forward, through the middle.

Hard times have unpleasant sections and no path goes round them. You plough into them instead. Book after book puts its characters in serious trouble, has them face it with courage, and has them make peace for themselves and for their friends.

Learning is a lifelong journey

Why travel from one place to another? Chiefly to see everything lying between the two.

Arriving is not the valuable part, and neither is the satisfaction that follows a milestone. The value is in the travelling, and in whatever gets learned along the way. That learning is meant to continue for as long as the journey does, which is to say for life.

Make things up as you go

No moon to see by? Then draw one. Hungry? Draw a pie. Lost? Draw somebody who can point you the right way.

Grown up, we tend to forget the point being made. The best chances life offers are usually the ones a person invents.

Few animals display social intelligence at the level elephants do, and alongside it they show individual reasoning and a long memory.

So where does their health and their contentment come from? Speech is not available to them, but a great deal about a well-rounded life gets communicated all the same. What follows are wellness pointers, tusk to tail, from the largest mammal walking the earth.

Be a social creature

Whatever their age, elephants lean on close friendships inside the herd.

Shyness is the thing to drop. When your own reserves are low, go and find other people.

Listen up

Ears that size were not issued for decoration. Take the counsel and the accumulated sense of the friends and teachers you love.

Set off alone and the cost is everything you might have heard from somebody who has already covered that ground.

Eat lots of plants

Three hundred pounds of food a day and upwards is the elephant diet, made up of roots, of leaves, of twigs and of fruit.

The quantity is worth scaling down. The principle is not. Greens in volume do humans as much good as they do pachyderms.

Drink plenty of water

Heat makes hydration urgent, which is why something near eleven gallons of water goes into a grown elephant across a day.

There is a second use for the watering hole. A trunk dipped in now and again is simply a way of staying cool and refreshed.

Take the rest you need

Rather than work through the heat, elephants nap in the middle of the day beneath trees and in the shade of rocks. Their nights are slept properly too.

Which settles an argument. However grown up a creature is, recharging time is still part of the requirement.

Take your time to grow

A young elephant stays bound to its immediate family for up to three years.

Healthy development, in other words, is not something that can be hurried or forced. Grow into your tusks at the speed they grow.

People come to a gym regularly and they come in numbers, which makes it a public space. Public spaces run on a few basic courtesies, and here those courtesies also keep everybody safe.

Several things, then, are best not done.

Do not interfere with equipment in use

Somebody on a machine has the machine. Should you need it, the polite move is to ask whether you may work in between their sets.

Do not use your phone on the floor

Phones and gym floors go badly together. Take emergencies only, and when one comes, step outside, deal with it there, and return to your training afterwards.

Do not swing the weights

Control them through the whole movement. Swinging is how people injure themselves, and dropping heavy plates is how floors get ruined.

Keep a spotter close enough to be useful.

Do not improvise on the machines

The leg press is not for crunches, and equipment generally is not for experimenting with.

Have somebody show you, at least while you are starting out, and carry on alone once you can do it comfortably.

Do not raise your voice

Shouting and loud conversation both carry. Other people are training all around you, and the room belongs to them as much as to you.

Do not sing or whistle

It irritates people, and in a quiet room the sound travels a great deal further than the singer imagines.

Networking sites and the applications built around them have worked their way into ordinary daily life. We talk to the people near us through them, we look for work through them, and we find others who care about the same things.

A few habits will make the whole experience a better one.

The things to do

Pick a strong password and switch the privacy settings on. Then press your friends to do the same, because their carelessness eventually arrives at your door.

Hold things back. Anything you would not want the whole world looking at should not be uploaded at all.

Never take it on faith that a post is secure simply because the settings say so.

Check who is asking before accepting a request to connect. Be certain whose hands your information is passing into.

Read what the network itself publishes about security, and read what trusted security professionals say about it too.

The things not to do

Never hand out a password, and never let one password cover every service you use.

Put no more about yourself online than the thing genuinely requires.

Announcing your travel plans is unwise, and so is showing off the expensive item just bought. Both are useful information to precisely the wrong reader.

Watch for automatic geotagging. Certain services will attach your location to an update without troubling to ask.

Two things worth remembering

Whatever is posted, shared or uploaded remains out there. The internet does not really let go of things.

And at work, guard against the accidental disclosure of something sensitive. That particular slip is the one that ends careers.

At her dining table one evening, a young woman sat worrying. Taxes were owed. The house needed work. And the following day the whole family would be arriving.

Gratitude was not what she was feeling.

The homework

Glancing to one side, she saw her small daughter bent over a notebook, writing furiously.

The class had been set an unusual paragraph to write, the girl explained, on the subject of negative thanksgiving. They were to list things they were grateful for, but only the ones that feel unpleasant at first and turn out well in the end.

Curious now, the mother leaned across and read what her daughter had put down.

Grateful for final examinations, on the grounds that they mean school is nearly finished. Grateful for medicine that tastes horrible, on the grounds that it works. Grateful for being woken by an alarm clock, on the grounds that being woken means being alive.

The same list, read again

And the mother realised that her own evening would take the same treatment.

So she went back through it.

Taxes were owed, which meant there was employment to owe them from. The house needed work, which meant the house was hers. A family had to be fed, which meant there was a family to sit down with.

The habit underneath

Complaining about the bad things comes naturally to most of us. Turning them over to see what is printed on the other side does not.

Which makes one question worth putting to your own day. Inside your negatives, where is the positive?

Find the better half of today, and let today be a good one.

Anybody who wants a life of better quality has one important job in front of them, which is to throw out as much waste as they can find. The purpose of the clearing is space, and the space is for whatever genuinely matters and genuinely adds value.

Opening the bags

It starts with a warrior taking charge of where their own life is heading. Somewhere on that road a teacher or a mentor will encourage them to unfasten the bags and inspect what is being carried.

What follows is a sequence of realisations, arriving one after another.

That a great deal of this stopped being necessary some time ago.

That hauling it about for no reason has been slowing us down.

That we have been complicating our own lives and exhausting ourselves in the process.

That further along the road a good deal would have been lost, if nobody had looked inside the bags when they did.

And that without the teacher, the bags would never have been opened at all. Which produces the uncomfortable question: why was the teacher not listened to sooner?

The questions to sit with

How long has it been since you last looked inside? How long since anything unnecessary was taken out? And what is the argument for not doing it this minute?

Unfasten what you are carrying and take out a single item that has outlived its use. One is enough to begin with.

Suppose that every morning we were handed only the things we had given thanks for. On that basis, the unwanted can go.

Why it usually takes a shock

Illness will teach it. So will a relationship coming apart. Suddenly the business of putting things in order of importance makes complete sense.

An enormous share of our limited and valuable hours goes to tasks that do not matter. The encouraging part is that where your attention is spent remains yours to decide.

Wake up now, and spend it on the essentials only.