Nick Cave answers his fans questions, beautifully, on a regular basis. Below is his Nov 2022 “The Red Hands Files” post. It reminds me of the Craig Ferguson quote I have posted in my kitchen: “Does this need to be said? Does this need to be said by me? Does this need to be said by me – right now? 

Enjoy.

Best, Vicki

The Red Hand Files

ISSUE #212 / NOVEMBER 2022

Is it better to keep quiet, or to speak one’s mind?
LAURA, RICHMOND, USA

I have heard you mention ‘good faith conversations’ several times now. What is a good faith conversation and how do you have one?
RAY, LEWES, UK

Dear Laura and Ray,
 
A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.

Hello All,

Today I’m featuring excerpt from Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist.

Best, Vicki P.

(…)

People have occasionally objected, in response to that 2014 blog post (“Everyone is just winging it, all of the time”), that “everyone is winging it” is something only a journalist could write about politicians, other journalists, and people in similarly mushy lines of work. Surely airline pilots, heart surgeons and deep-sea oil engineers are very much not making things up as they go along?

This objection helps clarify what “winging it” really means. Of course pilots and doctors and engineers – people highly skilled at navigating complex bodies of specialist knowledge – aren’t just bumbling randomly through life like idiots. But in another, arguably deeper sense, they’re totally winging it. Like anyone else, they can never grasp the whole of the situation in which they find themselves; and like anyone else, they can never be certain about what’ll happen in the very next moment, let alone a week or a month from now. Like all of us, they’re just crossing bridges as they come to them: they can’t depend in any absolute way on the bodies of knowledge in which they’re trained. Life is always bigger, and more unknowable, than any set of concepts we use to try to make sense of it.

The Lazy Way to an Awesome Life: Backed by Research

by Eric Barker

A lot of men were dying and nobody knew why.

In the late 70’s, the CDC realized that a shocking number of Hmong immigrants, ages 25-45, were dying in their sleep. They would gasp for breath but before help could arrive, they were gone. Autopsies revealed nothing. Perplexed, epidemiologists started calling it “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome.” SUNDS was killing more Hmong men than the top five causes of death combined.

But someone had an idea. Oddly enough, she wasn’t a doctor; she was an anthropologist. Shelley Adler knew that in Hmong folklore it was believed that the “dab tsog” – an evil demon – could paralyze and smother victims at night. In their home country of Laos, shamans would perform magic to fight off the spirit. But here in the US, shamans were few and far between. And most Hmong no longer practiced the religion they had been raised with.

Enter “Sleep Paralysis.” A very real but usually innocuous medical condition that 8% of people experience. For most of your sleep cycle, your body “switches off” movement. In Sleep Paralysis, your body delays switching it back on. Briefly, you’re conscious — but unable to move. Very scary though harmless. But Shelley thought the men were interpreting this as the dab tsog attacking them. They’d panic and some would have a heart attack. And as word spread about the deaths, more and more Hmong men became afraid, and thereby susceptible.

Shelley turned out to be right. However, Western medicine wasn’t very effective in getting the Hmong to give up the ideas they’d been raised with. And the deaths continued…