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Days of Grace, Hours of Contemplation

By slowing down, clearing out the extraneous, and sharpening your focus, you have a better chance of succeeding

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Days of Grace is an autobiographical work by the late Arthur Ashe, a U.S. tennis player, sports commentator, and historian. Ashe died from AIDS at the age of 47, which he contracted as a result of a blood supply mix-up at a hospital lab. He was married and had a young daughter. He had finished writing a huge three-volume set on the history of the African-American athlete starting from the 1650’s.

While working to complete Days of Grace and spending time with his wife and daughter, he reflected upon the last few months of his life in a way that most people never do.

These were the Days of Grace, when time slowed down, and when each day was precious. Ashe said that he became profoundly thankful for each month, then each week, and then each day he had left.

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Sharpening Your Focus

Scheduling days of grace serves a real purpose. By slowing down, clearing out the extraneous, sharpening your focus, and becoming more in tune, on a higher level, as to what activities need to be handled, you have a better chance of succeeding than you would otherwise.

Contemplate the last time you were asked to tackle any project, on your own or within a small team. Someone, probably your boss, was waiting for the results, which you needed to turn in on a deadline.

What was your immediate reflexive action? For some people it is to clear the decks. They literally create space on their desks, conference tables, or other workplaces.

Give yourself the opportunity to work without disruption. Assemble the resources you need. For the time being, let other pressing issues fall by the wayside. Give the task at hand sharp focus.

To Win, Slow Down

Rushing through any task invariably results in down time, errors, and having to do things over again. The total “rush-through” time ends up equaling what it would have taken if you had proceeded more cautiously.

You’ve heard the old saw about not having enough time to do a job right the first time, yet having to make the time later to fix it. As I discuss in my book Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped Up Society, one of the great paradoxes of our age is that often, to flourish in our sped-up society, sometimes the first and most critical step is to slow down:

* to get your bearings,

* to read the instructions,

* to reflect, or

* to rest.

If you have to, read instruction manuals, books, articles, reports, briefs, or data sheets.  Allocate twice the time that you instinctively would to the organization, reading, and digestion of such materials.

Before sitting down to read or engage in any other information intake process, surround yourself with the tools that support your ability to capture the essence of what you are reading and aptly apply it.

What is it Like?

Here is an exercise for whatever you’ve been asked to handle and whatever results are to be achieved: Is there something else in your work, your life, or the world you can identify that is similar like to what you’ve been assigned?

Has there been a previous project that you can examine and learn from? Did you work on something in a previous position, come across an article or case study, or know someone who managed a situation that has some similarities to yours?

Going a step further, are there any processes in nature, politics, or relationships that have elements that you can draw upon? Looking for a metaphor is not some esoteric, airy-fairy type of recommendation.

After all, people tend to naturally do this anyway. We relate one or more things that we know to what we are presently trying to learn in order to make our learning task easier.

In the early days of personal computers, manufacturers and developers used a metaphor of the human brain in both the design and explanation of how computers work. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was sufficient to give most people an idea as to what computers could do, how they operated, and how to put them to work for you.

Giving yourself time and slack by scheduling days of grace increases the probability of seeing corollaries between what you have been assigned to manage and other things that you have come across in work or in life.

Pad Your Schedule

This sounds like heresy but to the degree practical, give yourself extra time at the start of a new week. This is time not merely for reading, but for thinking, reflecting, scheduling, and anticipating critical junctures.

Too often, you are thrown into a situation, often on short notice, and asked to perform miraculous results. Even in such instances, if you can maneuver for some extra time up-front, insights as well as genuine opportunities emerge that otherwise might not have.

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Jeff Davidson is the world's only holder of the title "The Work-Life Balance Expert®" as awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He is the premier thought leader on work-life balance, integration, and harmony. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the effectiveness of their people. He is the author of Breathing Space, Simpler Living, Dial it Down, and Everyday Project Management. Visit www.BreathingSpace.com for more information on Jeff's keynote speeches and seminars, including: Managing the Pace with Grace® * Achieving Work-Life Balance™ * Managing Information and Communication Overload®



 
 
 

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Elections

Election Fraud is Massive and On-Going in America

Across the U.S., the magnitude of voter fraud that occurs year after year, election after election, is staggering.

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Jay DeLancey is founder and president of the North Carolina Voter Integrity Project, and has much to say about voting in America:

Our system begs for transparency at all points along the election process. Who can vote, who did vote, how did they vote, and what was the tally? Today, unfortunately voter fraud is real and of enormous magnitude, as we saw in 2020 and 2022. Nowhere is this more evident than with absentee ballots.

Who, in any voting precinct, literally visits the homes of voters who filed absentee ballots to ensure that they are out of town? Even among those who have a legitimate quest to vote by absentee ballot, who can assure that their vote is counted properly and tallied accurately?

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The absentee ballot initiative started as a viable effort to increase the ability of qualified citizens to vote, but has now become into a primary tool of manipulation. The more we can see, the fairer the elections are likely to be. The less we can see, the greater the likelihood that fraud will occur. Centralized absentee ballot collection is exactly the opposite of local voting in a precinct where there’s a chance that those with whom you register or vote alongside are your neighbors.

Ensuring the Rights of Qualified Voters

The local voting precinct is better positioned to spot perpetrators of voter fraud. Local poll workers on the scene are better able to assess if you are not the person you claim to be. They will tell you to leave, but by law that’s all they can do.

They can’t retain someone and hold them until authorities arrive, even in the case of blatant voter impersonation. Why? Because in the 1960s, to safeguard the voting capability of those who had been disenfranchised, laws were passed to reduce the incidence of intimidation, accusation, and retention.

Those times have long passed, and now we need ways of ensuring that qualified voters’ civil rights are upheld. Every time an unqualified voter is allowed to cast a vote, it demeans and diminishes the rights of all citizens. As such, voter fraud is the civil rights crisis of our time.

Fraud Occurs Year After Year

If you hear from anyone or from any group that voter fraud does not exist, or that it’s minimal and inconsequential, rest assured most of these proponents believe they are in the right. As long as you vote for their candidate, they’re content to ignore the magnitude, of voter fraud that actually occurs, year after year, election after election, across the U.S. They know they are ‘right,’ so why forsake their ironclad view that voter integrity groups are secretly voter suppression groups?

We’re always asked, how do you know that voter fraud exists? We have case histories, anecdotes, cross tabulated data, eyewitness testimony, and more. Voter fraud is real and rampant. Yet, we will routinely encounter some academic, usually from some law school, saying, “The science is settled on this. Voter fraud is a myth.”

Professors will proclaim from on high declaring that few people ever engage in voter fraud. Such professors are people of influence, they teach students, write papers, give lectures, attend symposiums, and spew authoritative misinformation. Cognizant or not, the damage that they do to society is ongoing and significant.

A Mortal Threat to Democracy

“The science was settled” in the early 1500s, that the sun rotated around the earth. Copernicus and other brave souls risked death to proclaim that earth was not the center of the universe as we knew it, or even our solar system.

We swim against the tide of what was launched in the 1960s but today has morphed into a mortal threat to democracy. The challenge we all face is to guarantee transparency in elections so that everyone can see the results and, more importantly, accept the results when their candidate does not win.

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Life

Creating a Little Heaven on Earth for Yourself

When you carve out few moments for yourself, the world is a different place

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What would your life be like if you had the ability to drop back when you wanted or needed to do so? To have time for true rest and relaxation? To have time for quiet reflection?

Despite the pace of change in society, the constant development of new technology, all the paper and information that confronts you on a daily basis, and everything that competes for your time and attention, you have the ever-present opportunity to remain resilient.

Carve It Out

When you carve out even a few moments of breathing space for yourself, the world is a different place; it does not seem so hectic. Often, things work out for the best. You have a sense of control almost independent of your environment.

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The feeling of being in control of your life, while acknowledging that you are only a small part in the overall scheme of things, enhances your experience of the world around and within you, every day.

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