Front Rock:
Mariners stadium in Seattle, Photo by Ben Wall
Our friends up at 35th North in Seattle partnered with their local baseball team as well as the ever-awesome Skate Like a Girl and Nike SB. The result was this ramp plus in-stadium skate lessons for kiddos.
With that, here are four books with great potential to expand your worldview.
Book One:
What Happened to You? by Dr Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D and Oprah Winfrey
Bruce and Oprah look under the hood and do a brilliant root-cause analysis of why our emotional systems behave the way they behave.
It’s structured as a conversation and reflects on real-life stories of human adversity cross-referenced with straightforward neuroscience.
This book flipped the light on for me and many others on:
- How our bodies function and how our experiences growing up shape us—by shaping the neural networks that drive us.
- Why and how things like skating and cycling, meditation, breathing techniques, stretching, music and a myriad other activities all help us regulate our stress response.
- How we can take some control back and start to steer the ship more intentionally.
Book Two:
The Biology of Desire by Marc Lewis, Ph.D
Talking of steering the ship more intentionally, Marc Lewis analysis of addiction is rooted in personal experience and also unpacks the subject in the sobering light of neuroscience.
Through various case studies Lewis paints a hopeful practical picture of how addiction works and what we can do about it. A lot depends on conditions but—for better and/or worse—we humans are creative creatures. Understanding the underlying mechanics can allow us a better chance at creating more favorable conditions.
Book Three:
Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins
Talking of getting under the hood to see what’s making us tick, David Goggins is a serious mechanic. His empirical method has involved driving himself to breaking point and then…continuing.
He lays out his life and dissects it with us. He encourages feeling each painful piece fully so that we can learn from it.
His story explores the positive growth that can come from pushing ourselves beyond perceived limits.
Goggins does seem to have particularly extreme limits but the lessons are valid.
I think so anyway.
Book Four:
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien
I like this quote from the wise rat elder, Nicodemus, as he tells Mrs Frisby about a story he read.
“The story was part of a book of essays,” Nicodemus recounts.
“The reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race”—which, I learned, means a race where, no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere.
But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race, and no sensible rats would ever do anything so foolish.”
All that to say, there’s something about pumping around on the curves of a ramp that hooks right into the deepest parts of the brain and grounds us back to earth.