Love Risks

Love can hurt, and preferably not. It is much as with fire and ovens in a little country cottage. If you can handle them there may be warmth and a cosy home regardless of many dangers. In the long art of living we maximise the benefits and chances for good love, and at the same time we seek to minimise the losses, dangers and grumbles. Below are tips on how to, but you are likely to be on your own -

Lovers Beware

Once a village was very scared of a sorcerer, a troll. He looked ugly and scaring. But a wise man among the villagers said:

"This troll is not the worst there is, he is not much to be feared. Fear instead the trolls that seem lovely and make you love them. They are likely to be the more dangerous ones."

◎ It is good to detect a disguised troll (heartless ones) in time to counteract its harmful schemes.

◎ Preventive measures can and should be taken to offset offences.

The Life Events Scale

There is ample reason to take a look at many of the common effects of love. They are not all pleasant, and not all give rise to love songs. The art of living consists in increasing the boons and good sides to things, and reducing the harmful sides too. Filering work of such sorts may work well, actually.

One out of two Danish marriages end in divorce. It stands out from the list of stressful happenings below, that love leads to much pain in time - not just divorce troubles - and makes many people ill and worse. But it is possible to combat disease and a bad love life. Much depends on who you choose to be with in the first place, what you cater to, what you invest time and main resources into.

Diving within your mind is a figurative expression. It means meditating deeply. Regular TM (Transcendental Meditation) can alleviate much stress and results of stress in the course of time. A million persons have learnt TM in the USA, and the last world-wide estimate is sevem millions. Many have been helped by TM, statistics show. [◦Link]

In the light of stress research, consider the widely used Life Event Scale devised by Holmes and Rahe. The top fifteen stressors are given these ratings - and love and its fruits go into two out of three of them:

1. Death of a spouse — 100 points
2. Divorce — 73
3. Marital separation — 65
4. Imprisonment — 63
5. Death of a close family member — 63
6. Personal injury or illness — 53
7. Marriage — 50
8. Dismissal from work — 47
9. Marital reconciliation — 45
10. Retirement — 45
11. Change in health of family member — 44
12. Pregnancy — 40
13. Sexual difficulties — 39
14. Gain a new family member — 39
15. Business readjustment — 39
    [Source: Smith et al 2003, 497]

The scale does not discern between good spouses and bad ones, between death of a lousy spouse and a noble one, and so on. A happy marriage is great. To be dismissed from injurious work may be considered a blessing too. In other words, this averaged scale is not perfect, but gives some interesting indications. You need to take more of the individual's situation and stress resistance into account.

But anyway, the scale averages have been found to predict diseases: If you score 300 and over, you are at risk of illness. A score between 150 and 200 gives only a moderate risk (reduced by 30%), and a score less than 150 has only a slight risk of illness. There are 26 more stressors in the scale than the top fourteen shown here.

Holmes and Rahe examined the medical records of 5000 patients that had recently suffered illnesses. They then asked the patients whether they had experienced any life events preceeding the illness. Patients were then asked to rate the events with a score. It was found that many had suffered major life events preceeding their illness. As I mentioned, the created scale does not allow for individual differences; people perceive and react to life events differently. What the scale does is that it creates a simple way of rating the amount of stress, though, and how likely one is to suffer illness.

To make your marriage top pleasant is much to go for. A congenial and pleased mate and fit home life count a lot. For the lack of substantial thriving together - or whatever it is - two out of three Swedish marriages break, and more than 70 percent of the marriages in Oklahoma, for example.

A modified scale has been developed for non-adults. Stress points for life events in the past year are added and compared to the rough estimate of how stress affects health. The top 10 out of 39 are:

1. Getting married — 101
2. Unwed pregnancy — 92
3. Death of parent — 87
4. Acquiring a visible deformity — 81
5. Divorce of parents — 77
6. Fathering an unwed pregnancy — 77
7. Becoming involved with drugs or alcohol — 76
8. Jail sentence of parent for over one year — 75
9. Marital separation of parents — 69
10. Death of a brother or sister — 68

"Entering a sick and feigning cult," "discovering one is a member of a cult," and "leaving a cult" are not categories on the list, but may involve "Change in acceptance by peers (67 points), getting a "Serious illness requiring hospitalisation" (58 points), and some more stressors, like "Arguing with parents", "Isolation from parents", both of them not on the non-adult list either.

Balancing Work and Contemplation Could Lead On And Up

Garlic may not seem impressive, but has a good influence on the arteries according to medical science. You can improve your odds of survival by adding it to the customary diet. Not that it may keep the vampires away - that is superstition. But unlike an apple a day, which "keeps the doctor away", eating garlic may "keep everybody away," unless the others eat it too, or you happen reduce the smell by some means.

We can improve our odds for having a sound and happy life by other means too. There are many of them. I just tell of a selection of them.

To balance work and ◦deep meditation in the TM way or similar, is heartily recommended. TM helps the heart -

Also consider, "Better be alone than in bad company (British)," so long as you are not a too bad company yourself, and "The best remedy against an ill man, is much ground between (British)." And if you are that ill man, try to remedy your moral as long as it is not a diseased man we are referring to.

To flounder is easy, to steer well is the needed thing.

Reconsidering one's core beliefs may be hard, stressful, really tough. The nervous system of a duped group member may break down too. Consider these factors:

• heredity,
• individual inner make-up,
• lack of helpers and friends,
• adaptation plots,
• estrangements,
• isolatedness in the urban setting, etc.

Hinder the worst from happening

A sane mind that breaks down instead of conforming to common vice, could have been the sanest around, is akin to something the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing considers. A thread in a tightly and faultily woven loom (cult, etc.) may break. The poet Kahlil Gibran: "If a strand in the carpet breaks, it may not be the fault of the string; the whole carpet might have been woven to become too tight," or askew, and so on.

If you get interested in a movement, investigate discreetly about it first. In many cases it is hard to tell what is a beneficial or largely accepted movement and what is a benign or not benign cult. Apply the duck test: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it might as well be a duck." Replace 'duck' with 'cult' and induce from good evidence. Otherwise refrain and keep the matter at arm's length; that could be very wise.

The reasonable thing to do is to increase the odds for survival and success in life, and do it well. Meditation can help, and ◦Transcendental Meditation, TM is number one among the most tested methods in the West.

Your personal freedom is a big asset; hard to come by, hard to regain if you lose it. You could to worse that keep your main assets to yourself and reserve them for your family if you have any - or better still.

Go for gathering evidence; that could be smart. Thereby accomplish better too. Otherwise there are the last words by the French philosopher Bernard de Fontanelle's (1657-1757): "It is high time for me to depart, for at my age I now begin to see things as they really are."

The wisdom that is made use of, put into practice and bears good fruit for the right persons, is the wisdom that you should become proficient in.

Sound adaptations rely on some form of wisdom at their roots. Such wisdom is in the culture, the tact, the customs, the ways of doing things too.

Prudence is a form of wisdom too. "The function of a prudence is to point out which course of action is to be taken in any concrete circumstances. (WP, "Prudence")"

Aim well, go for long-run concord

Let good play prepare for the later demands. So does the tiger mother and the lion father in a good mood and other mammals too. Play and enactment serve getting into maturing life. These are very common ways.

There is little you can do to befriend a lion unless you befriend it when it is young, and even then the long-run results can be risky. If you want to befriend someone, consider the exchanges, and try to find someone of your kind, someone congenial to be with. Similar aims in life count too.

"If history repeats itself, the prices might have gone up." Defeats may go from bad to worse in time.