Blog Archives
An 8-minute phone call.
We normally ignore articles with names like “The 7-Day Happiness Challenge.”
But this New York Times Day 2 headline caught our attention: “Try the 8-minute phone call.”
Such calls are exactly w hat Cville Village volunteers will offer when we are operational! Even though the Times article refers largely to calls between good friends, it cites this article in JAMA Network Psychiatry that supports the value of phone calls just from person to person.
So let’s get our Village going!
Altruism
Here’s a timely article from the Guardian, in the season of giving.
It tells us, “…people often underestimate the willingness of strangers to engage with, or even befriend them. Then I came across a study that suggested news coverage of current affairs tends to be more negative than positive because humans tend to give negative stimuli more attention.”
You know, “if it bleeds, it leads.” You’ve seen it.
When our Village is going, we’ll see plenty of strangers meeting and engaging with each other, and maybe down the track they won’t be strangers any more but a community of neighbors helping neighbors, just as intended.
Happy New Year!
We wish we’d written this
Perfectly expresses this editor’s beliefs about politics and what that means.
from 7/10/22 The Marginalian newsletter [brainpickings.org]
True politics are not ideologies to discuss, but an attitude to your relationship with the world which is enacted in your daily life. Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform. It is here that hypocrisy and vanity fall away, as the reality of your politics is revealed in the countless decisions that you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity work, if you become a landlord, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money and consumer goods — these are the types of decisions in which our true politics are expressed…
John Higgs, William Blake versus The World
CvilleVillage 