crystallize!

Two Coots in a Canoe: An Unusual Story of Friendship, by David E. Morine

The New North: An Account of a Woman's 1908 Journey through Canada to the Artic, by Agnes Deans Cameron

Two recent favorite reads, forming an interesting study in contrasts:

• The new North: an account of a woman’s 1908 journey through Canada to the Arctic, by Agnes Deans Cameron
• Two coots in a canoe: an unusual story of friendship, by David E. Morine

Cameron was a remarkable character. After a 20-year career as a schoolteacher in Vancouver, ended abruptly as a result of her flouting a rule she deemed unfair — she allowed a student to use a straight-edge to draw a straight line, in order that his otherwise promising academic career not be jeopardized by such a trivial requirement, and her superiors could not condone such misbehavior — she moved to Chicago, became a journalist, and thence undertook her impressive voyage, with her niece as traveling companion. She documents her nearly-six-month trip in crisp and vivid language, providing enough detail to paint an interesting story without ever becoming bogged down in minutiae. Her descriptions of the people who host her, the towns she passes through and their agricultural outputs, the culture of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the local flora and fauna, the river, the scenery, her fellow travelers — all are engagingly presented. Her discussion of the Eskimos she meets, especially, is a fascinating study, since they are quite unlike what she had expected: a tall, regal people, for whom she expresses great admiration.

Morine’s book documents a modern adventure, a trip down the Connecticut River from source to sea. Before he retired, Morine served as head of land acquisition for the Nature Conservancy; his traveling companion was an old friend from grad school whom he hadn’t seen in years. The gimmick for the trip was that instead of camping, they stayed each night with different hosts, “relying on the kindness of strangers.” Since I live right next to the Connecticut myself, midway along their route, many of the places he describes are familiar to me, so it was especially interesting to read about who he met along the way.

I wonder what Cameron’s journey would be like in this century, or what Morine’s would have been like in hers.

Pleased by this pair of recent articles, both about how to bring the experience of travel closer to home.

5 Ways To Travel More With Less at zenhabits suggests looking for nearby adventures, specific ideas traveling frugally (all tactics I can personally recommend as well), and remembering to relax (I’m still working on that one).

Rolf Potts writes at Tim Ferris’s blog about 5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home, “key ways in which the lessons you learn on the road can be used to enrich the life you lead when you return home.” These ring deeply true for me, and indeed reminded me that a large part of what I love about travel is that it really enforces living in the moment and stretching outside your comfort zone.

These are good challenges for me for right now.

Interesting recent NYTimes column by Nicholas Kristof: What Could You Do Without?, profiles a family’s startling adventures. They took the “crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring” step of “selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.” Their forthcoming book, The Power of Half, chronicles their story.

Also interestingly, they are evidently getting negative reactions from folks who consider them “sanctimonious showoffs,” when their actual goal in sharing their story is to demonstrate that an initially selfless gesture turned out to be of at least as much benefit to themselves.

Lots more about the project, the book, and an encouragement to find your own “half”: thepowerofhalf.com.

“There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.”
—Sogyal Rinpiche, Tibetan Dzogchen Lama (1947- )

(via swiss miss)

Payback, by Margaret Atwood

I’ve long admired Margaret Atwood’s writing, but this was my first foray into her nonfiction. The chapters of this book were first presented as a series of lectures on CBC radio in November 2008, so although they are of a decidedly literary-scholar bent, they also spin together an engaging series of stories, much as you might expect from Atwood as professional storyteller.

From this book I learned many interesting things, including:

• Capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees have a very clear sense of what constitutes fairness.
• In Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), the word for “debt” is the same as the word for “sin” — hence, among other things, the disparate versions of “forgive us our trespasses.”
• How Dickens’s A Christmas Carol can be read as a direct reversal of Marlowe’s (or Gounod’s) Faust.
• Why mills and millers carry a stigma in folklore.

I enjoyed this tour through religious, literary, and social history, and its insightful exploration of how humans have thought about debt from ancient times until today. Don’t miss the final chapter’s reworking of Scrooge into a contemporary setting, featuring Scrooge Nouveau and his alternate possible futures involving hemp suits and a giant cockroach.

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Everyone knows that offering incentives to employees yields better results, the same way we know that dangling a carrot in front of a horse will motivate him to walk toward it. The only problem is, it turns out that we’re wrong.

In a recent TED Talk, Dan Pink explains the mismatch between how the business world handles motivation, and what science shows about what really works instead. Carrots worked well for 20th century tasks involving mechanical manipulation, but once you shift over into 21st century tasks that are more about cognition, introducing an extrinsic motivator not only doesn’t help results, it harms them.

Fortunately, science also knows what does work instead: intrinsic motivators. You’ve seen the famous cases like Wikipedia and google labs. Watch this TED Talk for more insight into the way you think about rewards.

Learned from a recent NYT article about this interesting new start-up in Brooklyn. Kickstarter calls itself “a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers…,” and is quick to say that it’s not about lending or charity. Instead, it says it provides “a sustainable marketplace where people exchange goods for services or some other benefit and receive some value.”

Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers...

Which reminds that I’ve been wanting to post also about Kiva, which has had an enormous impact in its several years of “loans that change lives.” Entrepreneurs from all over the world (Lebanon, Nicaragua, Uganda) submit their project proposals and photos, along with how much money they need to raise ($230, $375, $1200). For just $25 (or more), you select an entrepreneur whose project and profile appeal to you. Kiva takes care of updating you on the project’s progress, and maintaining public records about how much of the loan has been repaid. When your money is repaid (current repayment rate is over 98% — see lots of interesting stats), you can withdraw it or reinvest in another project.

Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty

Sure, we talk about eco footprints, but how easily can you visualize how much of an impact you’re having on the planet? This thought-provoking interactive calculator may offer you surprising results. It asks, How many Planet Earths would we need if everyone lived like you? Then it lets you try fiddling with your various answers to create scenarios that would lessen your impact.

find out how many planets it takes to support your lifestyle

This interesting new program launched today: the Obama administration is calling for widespread volunteerism from “all Americans.” They’ve cooked up a new open-source app (called All for Good) that makes it easy not only for existing non-profit organizations to solicit help, but for anyone at all to announce a new project and drum up helpers. Projects are tagged, and thus searchable, by topic keywords and locations, and by date if applicable. It’s useful and nicely built — by volunteers, of course, from places like Google, Craigslist, and UCLA.

serve.gov site

It will be interesting to see how this plays. Are people who don’t volunteer their time really just waiting for an invitation? From the level of vitriol in the comments on the YouTube video (if you view it there instead of embedded on the official site), it seems there are other loud voices as well: “Volunteerism is slavery,” “I serve by paying taxes,” and a great many inarticulate remarks too rude to repeat, signed with usernames like “fartingpenguin.” So certainly we will fall short of participation by “all Americans.” On the other hand, the folks who do volunteer will find this tool useful, and they’re certain to gain some new recruits.

Layers of clarity:

“when i am confused, i look out & think the issue is money. when i take a breath and look in, it is always about time.”
—my friend Judith, on Facebook

“When I look at time and money, it’s often about breath.”
—her friend Gene

Both of these feel true to me. Though I am wanting to place “attention” in this equation as well. The concept popularly known as “time management” really turns out, for many people, to be framed more usefully as “attention management” — not the juggling of tasks into time periods, but the focusing on what’s most important. Breathing is a good start, and often helps you see where to focus next.

Breathe. What’s next?