Bloemendaal aan zee, today. Dream [ reality ]

Min/max temperature: 7°C/7°C; humidity: 97%; precipitation: 1 mm; sea level pressure: 1012 hPa; wind WNW 43.0 km/h; visibility: 10.0 kilometres; Clouds: Few 548 m., Mostly Cloudy 731 m., Overcast 1066 m

"Foreword. The Importance of Being Important […] During the classic time of Greece a terrible thing happened in one of the temples. One night the statue of Zeus was mysteriously smashed and desecrated. A tremendous uproar arose among the inhabitants. They feared vengeance of the gods. The town criers walked the city streets commanding the criminal to appear without delay before the Elders to receive his just punishment. The perpetrator naturally had no desire to give himself up. In fact, a week later another statue of a god was destroyed. Now the people suspected that a madman was loose. Guards were posted and at last their vigilance was rewarded; the culprit was caught. He was asked, "Do you know what awaits you?" "Yes," he answered, almost cheerfully. "Death." "Aren't you afraid to die?" "yes, I am." "Then why did you commit a crime which you knew was punishable by death?" The man swallowed hare and then answered, "I am a nobody. All my life I've been a nobody. I've never done anything to distinguish myself and I knew I never would. I wanted to do something to make people notice me… and remember me." After a moment of silence he added, "Only those people die who are forgotten. I feel death is a small price to pay for immortality!" Immortality! Yes, we all crave attention. We want to be important, immortal. We want to do things that will make people exclaim, "Isn't he wonderful?" If we can't create something useful or beautiful… we shall certainly create something else: trouble, for instance. Just think of your aunt Helen, the family gossip. (We all have one.) She causes hard feelings, suspicion, and subsequent arguments. Why does she do it? She wants to be important, of course, and if she can achieve this only by means of gossip or lying, she will not, for one moment, hesitate to gossip or lie. The urge to be outstanding is a fundamental necessity in our lives. All of us, at all times crave attention. Self-consciousness, even reclusiveness, springs from the desire to be important. If failure arouses compassion or pity, then failure might become an end in itself. […] Without exception everyone was born with creative ability. It is essential that people be given opportunity to express themselves. If Balzac, De Maupassant, O. Henry, hadn't learned to write, they might have become inveterate liars, instead of great writers. Every human being needs an outlet for his inborn creative talent. If you feel you would like to write, then write. Perhaps you are afraid that lack of a higher education might retard you from real accomplishment. Forget it. Many great writers, Shakespeare, Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, to mention a few, never saw the inside of a college. Even if you will never be a genius, your enjoyment of life can still be great. If writing holds no lure for you, you might learn to sing, dance, or play an instrument well enough to entertain your guests. This belongs in the realm of "art" too. Yes, we want to be noticed. We want to be remembered. We want to be important! We can achieve a degree of importance by expressing ourselves in the medium which best suits our particular talents. You never know where your avocation will lead you. Even if you fail commercially, you might very well emerge from your experience an authority on the subject you learned so much about. You'll be richer in experience -- and if you have been kept out of mischief, that alone will be a great accomplishment. So the gnawing hunger to be important will be satisfied at last without harm to anyone."

Lajos Egri in 'The Art of Dramatic Writing', foreword, page x, xii, xii, first published in 1946 by Simon & Schuster, INC, USA

"The [director] concerned [ was ] rather surprised that I even asked for the [ script ] -- […] asking 'Since when do cameramen read scripts?' -- but only once have I accepted a film without seeing a script (or at least a treatment) first, and on that occasion I sorely regretted it."

Walter Lassally in 'Itinerant Cameraman', page 101, first published in 1987 by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, London

"Images, music and voice-over move independently.[…] The visual flow is […] varied. [ The ] film interweaves crucial New Wave principles: the pictorial space is moral space; that morality is an unstable equilibrium between audacity and prudence; that morality can be non-judgemental; that morales are not rules, but serious games with calculated risks; and that personal structures only intersect with the political."

Raymond Durgnat in the introduction to Francois Truffaut's 'Jules et Jim', first published in English in 1968 by Lorrimer Publishing Inc., reissued in 1989 by Faber and Faber Limited, London

"With tea, just like wine, you are dealing with terroir. The composition of the terrain and climate are crucial for the development of certain characteristics. Handpicked, traditionally produced tea from a reliable region are at the base, always. Quality tea is affordable luxury. You can drink great tea for the same price as bad wine."

Robert Schinkel in 'Exclusief, informatie magazine Sligro, Nr 15', page 29, published by Sligro B.V.

Isnello, Sicily, a few days ago. Physical training is mental training: the mind is but an organ to experience experience [Why let bad stuff in trough 'TV' and poisonous food?]

"Recent research has shown that our moods are far more strongly influenced by the people around us than we might think. All of us, as part of the Palaeolithic heritage (where we needed to be on the lookout for predators at all times), have a tendency to converge emotionally. We all seem to be programmed to be receptive to other people's emotions. And all have a tendency to recognize and feel emotions that are similar to our own. [T]the urge to mirror others is hardwired into our brain trough a neural feedback mechanism […] because cooperation leads to more food, better health, and economic growth for a community. [W]e automatically mimic and synchronise facial expressions, vocalisations, postures, body language and other behaviors with those of other people. We also experience the emotions associated with the particular behaviour we are mimicking. [T]he moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends (people three degrees of separation away from us whom we have never met) can influence us trough our social network like a virus. A diverse range of phenomena are transmitted trough networks of friends in ways that are not enterily understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. [T]hese feelings ripple trough networks like pebbles thrown into a pond. […] In a team situation, it is often the mood of the leader that sets the tone. If the leader is upbeat, the mood of the other team members will rise. But is if he or she is down, everyone is down. And these changes in mood can occur very rapidly. […]
A shift in attitude and behaviour culminates in the redefinition, and even reinvention, of our self. […] However, even when there are clear signs that change is required within an organisation, it is often resisted because people know it will involve moving into the unknown. Some of these resistances can be unconscious, and can even contribute to self-defeating acts of sabotage. For any organisation to change, the degree of dissatisfaction has to be greater than the degree of resistance. […] Nelson Mandela said, "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world," but it can take time to educate people about the benefits of the change process. The company may have been drifting -- with many employees feeling like helpless bystanders, watching the situation -- and now is the time to give them "voice", to make them feel that they can be involved in making a difference. [Here] is a good example of learning and unlearning, of rules and norms that have become institutionalised, to the extend that the team members can no longer trace their origins [ , ]

Once upon a time there were six monkeys living in a cage. One day they awoke to find a ladder had been positioned right in the middle of the cage and from the top of it a bunch of bananas dangled invitingly from a rope. One of the monkeys immediately climbed the ladder, but as soon as it reached the bananas, ice-cold water was prayed down on all the other monkeys. This happened every time a monkey climbed the ladder and tried to grab the bananas. Very soon each monkey was on the lookout for one of its companions to climb the ladder. Whenever one of them tried, the other monkeys would stop it. As time went by, the monkeys simply learnt to ignore the bananas. Nothing would tempt them to try to get them, even after the bunch was lowered and within easy reach. The monkeys stayed well away: the last thing they wanted was another freezing shower.
Then one day a new monkey arrived in the cage. When he saw the bananas and tried to scale the ladder, all of the other monkeys attacked him and trashed him severely. The new monkey quickly discovered that the bananas were taboo. As time went by more monkeys from elsewhere found themselves in the cage. Each in turn learned their lesson: stay away from the bananas. When they tried to climb the ladder, the others (including the newcomers) would attack them. Typically, it was the most recent victims that punished the new transgressor most.
In fact, the monkeys were so busy punishing each other that they failed to notice that despite the regular appearance of newcomers, their numbers mysteriously remained the same. For every new monkey that appeared in the cage, one of the originals was removed. It didn't take very long before all the six original monkeys had been replaced. Nevertheless, no monkey ever tried to climb the ladder again, despite the fact that all the original monkeys had gone and none of the remaining ones had ever received the icy shower. Ignoring the bananas had simply become a fact of life. If the monkeys could have replied, when asked why they attacked anyone who went fro the bananas, their answer would almost certainly have been: "Well, I don't really know -- it's just the way we do things around here." As can happen to many of us, the monkeys had gotten stuck in their ways, and change was no longer an option. They had reframed the situation and the organisational system had gotten the better of them."

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries in The Hedgehog Effect', page 100, 101, 102, 173, 174, 176, 177. First published in 2011 by John Wiley and Sons, USA

Kennemer dunes 360° today. Catch [ the edge ]

Min/max temperature: 4°C/12°C; humidity: 55%; precipitation: 0 mm; sea level pressure: 1028.33 hPa; wind: SSE 22.0 km/h; visibility: 10.0 kilometres; Clouds: Few 426 m.

"Lucid dreams are also symbolic -- yet in quite a different way […] Their symbolism takes the form of beautiful landscapes -- different luminous phenomena, sunlight, clouds, and especially a deep blue sky. In a perfect instance of the lucid dream I float through immensely wide landscapes, with a clear blue, sunny sky, and a feeling of deep bliss and gratitude, which I feel impelled to express by eloquent words of thankfulness and piety. Sometimes these words seem to me a little rhetorical, but I cannot help it, as it is very difficult in dreams to control emotional impulses. Sometimes I conceive of what appears as a symbol, warning, consoling, approving. A cloud gathers or the light brightens. Only once could I see the disc of the sun […] I awoke fresh and cheerful, better in spirits than I had been for a long time."

Frederik van Eeden in the first extensive English-language scientific report on lucid dreams 'A Study of Dreams', published in the 'Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research', Volume 26, 1913

"[T]here is the story of the great Taoist master Chuang Tzu who once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering around. In his dream, the idea that he was a person was alien to him: he was only a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke and found himself lying there, a person once again. But then Chuang Tzu thought to himself, "Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?"

Manfred Kets de Vries in 'The Hedgehog Effect', page 53, first published in 2011 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., United Kingdom

"In whatever the domain, the movements of a good, accomplished practitioner do not appear fast. For example, there are messengers who cover forty or fifty leagùes at the run in a single day, but they do not run fast from morning till night. Whereas, a beginner cannot cover such a long distance, even if he has the wind to run the whole day. […] Whatever the domain, the movements of an expert never appear hurried."

Miyamoto Musashi, in Kenji Tokitsu's 'Miyamoto Musashi. His Life and Writing', page 192, 193, first published in 2000 by Editions Desiris in Francepage

"[A]thletes need to gird themselves against […] contamination. Humility and gratitude seem to be the only effective shields against the onslaughts of […] exploitation. Athletes in the traditional martial arts employ specific exercises to overcome any tendency towards egotism. The dedication of one's skill, performance, or career to a higher principle provides the only absolute protection. [P]ower is characterised by grace, sensitivity, inner quit, and paradoxically, gentleness in the non-competitive lives of even fierce competitors."

David Hawkins in 'Power vs Force', page 182, first published in 1995 by Hay House UK Ltd

Kennemer dunes 360° today. Fun [ run ]

Min/max temperature: 7°C/11°C; humidity: 69%; precipitation: 0 mm; sea level pressure: 1029 hPa; wind: WNW 17.7 km/h; visibility: 10.0 kilometres; Clouds: Few 914 m., Mostly Cloudy 1005 m.; Moon: Waxing Gibbous 79% visible

"When we see things from another person's perspective, we can usually understand better why people behave as they do. [ We ] gain more knowledge about complicated issues, clearing the way to take the next step. [...] We become more confident and resilient when facing challenging situations. It is trough courageous conversations that a team can adress the undiscuseables that have to be verbalized."

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries in The Hedgehog Effect', page 199. First published in 2011 by John Wiley and Sons, USA