Viola Davis regards forgiving her father as her legacy.
While discussing her new memoir “Finding Me” with People magazine, Viola Davis hinted at one of the book’s main themes: the power of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is loosely defined as releasing resentment toward those who have harmed us. Most of us are at least somewhat familiar with how healing it can be. But what does forgiveness actually look like? What does it feel like? What do we do once we have forgiven?
During the interview, Davis shared a lot about her childhood: growing up in poverty, enduring bullying and even having an abusive parent.
Davis witnessed her father, Dan, regularly beat her mother Mae Alice during their 48 years of marriage.
However, before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2006, something changed within him. "My mom said he apologized to her every single day. Every single day, he rubbed her feet.”
And in that act of absolution between her parents, Davis realized that “forgiveness is not pretty … life is not a Thursday-night lineup on ABC. It is messy.”
Indeed, forgiveness does not equate to a fairytale ending. It doesn’t guarantee an end to pain. And it rarely happens effortlessly, or even quickly. It takes work, which can be seen as further unfairness.
Accepting the messiness allowed Davis to accept both realities. “He did hurt me then, but love and forgiveness can operate on the same plane as anger."
Davis chose to see her father not as a villain, but as a human, flawed and imperfect but also willing and loving. She chose to embrace it all with empathy.
“My dad loved me. I saw it. I felt it. I received it, and I took it,” Davis told People. “For me, that’s a much better gift and less of a burden than going through my entire life carrying that big, heavy weight of who he used to be and what he used to be and what he used to do.
Forgiveness is just as much about what we gain as what we give up. By shedding our identity as victim, life can once again be a series of choices. And in the process, we remember that now—in the present moment—we are free to make our own decisions. For those suffering from childhood trauma and seeking to break toxic generational patterns, this can be an invaluable gift.
"It's given me an extraordinary sense of compassion. It's reconciling that young girl in me and healing from the past—and finding home."
Davis, now happily married for nearly 20 years, has learned to cherish every part of her journey.
"I count it all as joy. I do. All of those things happened to me, but I own it. And it's a part of who I am."
Power and strength are attributes the award-winning actress is often associated with in her work, but after hearing her life story, it sounds like these qualities were also learned and developed through daunting challenges.
It takes courage to forgive, but as Davis exemplifies, it can fortify our spirit in profound ways. We might not all go on to star on the stage and screen, but perhaps we can all stand to live our own lives a bit more untethered.
Think about the illustrations you've seen of men and women of the Bronze Age who lived thousands of years ago.
Perhaps there's one you recall from your elementary school text book — in which men are probably depicted hurling bronze spears and strangling lions with their bare hands, while the women are most likely pictured leading children around, sifting through grapes or weaving tiny reeds into baskets (presumably to hold the fruits of their husbands' labor).
It's an idealized image for some. Men and women, dividing labor according to their relative physical strength. Women did important work, but entirely in the domestic sphere, in part because they were less equipped to handle difficult manual labor. Each gender in their natural place. A comforting image of the way the world is "supposed to be."
And according to new research, it's an image that's totally wrong in a major way.
According to a groundbreaking new study, Bronze Age women were jacked.
Bronze Age woman or 1980s champion weightlifter Karyn Marshall? Hard to say.
Armed with a small CT scanner and a group of student guinea pigs, University of Cambridge researchers discovered that the arm bones of Central European women of the era were roughly 30% stronger than those of modern women — and 11% to 16% stronger than those of modern women on the the world champion Cambridge women's crew team, who spend multiple hours a day training to rowing a 60-foot boat as fast as humanly possible.
"This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women," explained Alison Macintosh, research fellow at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, in a news release.
The paper was published in the open-access journal Science Advances.
Agriculture, it turns out, is hard work. Work that Bronze Age women handled on the reg.
Bronze Age huts offer a glimpse into life in Clare, Ireland.
Particularly grinding grain into flour, which requires the use of ludicrously heavy stones.
Based on evidence from societies that still produce bread products this way, the researchers determined the prehistoric women likely spent up to five hours a day pulverizing the edible bits so their villages could actually eat food while the men were derping around trophy hunting hyenas.
"The repetitive arm action of grinding these stones together for hours may have loaded women's arm bones in a similar way to the laborious back-and-forth motion of rowing," Macintosh said.
In addition to grinding grain, researchers speculate ancient ladies got up to a range of other muscle mass-building activities...
...including hauling food for livestock, slaughtering and butchering animals for food, scraping the skin off of dead cows and deadlifting it onto hooks to turn it into leather, and planting and harvesting crops entirely by hand.
And, while punching bears and ceremonially tossing boulders at the sun weren't on the researchers' specific list, it's at least possible the women were doing that too.
"We believe it may be the wide variety of women's work that in part makes it so difficult to identify signatures of any one specific behavior from their bones," Macintosh said.
Study senior author Jay Stock said the results suggest "the rigorous manual labour of women was a crucial driver of early farming economies."
"The research demonstrates what we can learn about the human past through better understanding of human variation today," he added.
If nothing else, the findings should complicate the way we think of "women's work" going back centuries. Since the dawn of time, mankind has had boulders to grind. Animals to wrangle. Big, heavy things to lift, and arm muscles to build. And some woman had do it.
A study of nursing home patients found that residents who sang show tunes — specifically from "Oklahoma!" "The Wizard of Oz," and "The Sound of Music" — demonstrated increased mental performance, according to a report in the New York Daily News:
"Researchers working with elderly residents at an East Coast care home found in a four-month long study ... that people who sang their favorite songs showed a marked improvement compared to those who just listened."
Even better? There are tons of classic show tunes specifically about remembering.
Here are 23 tunes every Broadway fan needs to memorize for the day when it's not so easy to remember. It'll help to start brushing up now.
1. The one about remembering the good old days.
"Those Were the Good Old Days," "Damn Yankees"
If you're the devil in "Damn Yankees," that means the Great Depression, the Black Plague years, and when Jack the Ripper was running around. Good times!
2. The one about remembering a parade that probably never happened.
Any playlist of show tunes about memory has to include this standard from "The Music Man," in which Professor Harold Hill remembers the best day of his life, when "Gilmore, Liberati, Pat Conway, The Great Creatore, W.C. Handy, and John Phillip Sousa all came to town."
Whether or not any of it actually happened is ... up for debate, to put it mildly.
3. The one about remembering a really fun trip you took to a medium-sized Midwestern city.
"Kansas City," "Oklahoma"
"Oklahoma's" Will Parker is so psyched about his Kansas City vacation he can't help bragging about it to all the other cowboys. And why not? It's a neat city! Have you been to Joe's Kansas City Barbecue? Neither has Will Parker, since he was there in 1906, but you should totally go.
4. The one about remembering how fun it was to murder that guy that one time...
5. The one about remembering the questionable choices it's too late to go back in time and not make.
"Where Did We Go Right?" from "The Producers"
Looking back doesn't always go well for characters in musicals. It definitely doesn't for "The Producers'" Bialystock and Bloom, as they tear around their office wondering how their incompetently directed, poorly acted, aggressively pro-Hitler musical wound up becoming a massive hit despite their every attempt to make it fail.
6. The one about remembering the little things.
"I Remember/Stranger Than You Dreamt It," "Phantom of the Opera"
Perhaps the greatest testament to how emotionally transporting "Phantom of the Opera" is: Christine, removing the phantom's mask for the first time, can just straight-up claim to remember mist— like, one mist in particular — and no one calls her on it ever.
7. The one about remembering the worst day of your life.
"The Barber and his Wife," "Sweeney Todd"
No character in musical theater is more nostalgic than Sweeney Todd, who, just moments after we meet him, croons this delightful ditty reminiscing about the time he was framed for a crime he didn't commit and banished from England so that an evil judge could rape his wife who subsequently poisoned herself.
A tune you can hum!
8. The one about remembering things differently than everyone else around you.
"Satisfied," "Hamilton"
Not sure if you've heard, but "Hamilton" is good, you guys.
After Alex and Eliza Schuyler meet and fall in love in "Helpless," Angelica Schuyler basically goes "Wicked" on her sister's song, recalling how agonizing it was watching her sister and the man who she herself is super into get together. But she sucks it up and buries it! Older siblings are the best.
9. The one about remembering that cute girl you just met like five seconds ago.
"Maria," "West Side Story"
A classic from "West Side Story." Sure, it's about remembering a meet-cute that literally just happened — Tony and Maria's orchestral-swell-assisted gaze across a crowded gym — but Tony is super jazzed about it, so it makes the list.
Gosh, I sure hope those crazy kids work out!
10. The one about remembering all the worst things from when you were a kid, and one kind-of-OK thing.
"At the Ballet," "A Chorus Line"
The ballet isn't that great, but it's better than devastating childhood trauma. Score one for the ballet! Thanks, "A Chorus Line!"
11. The one about remembering old hobbies.
"Dentist!" from "Little Shop of Horrors"
"Little Shop of Horrors'" Orin Scrivello, DDS, is just misunderstood. I mean, who among us didn't "shoot puppies," "poison guppies," or "take a pussycat and bash in its head" now and again as a kid? The '50s were a simpler time!
12. The one about remembering watching a dude die on the battlefield and feeling feelings about it.
"Momma Look Sharp," "1776"
47 years before "Hamilton" brought us the swaggery, ass-kicking side of the Revolutionary War, "1776" tore our guts out with this song, in which a courier to the Continental Congress recalls watching a mother comfort a young soldier as he dies at the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Hercules Mulligan does the guest rap. (Just kidding. There is no guest rap. It's just gorgeously somber for a while and then over.)
13. The one about remembering the best four years of your life.
"I Wish I Could Go Back to College," "Avenue Q"
Of course the sad-sack puppet man- and woman-children of "Avenue Q" want to go back to college! Who among us doesn't long for the days of term papers, humiliating romantic encounters, and crushing, debilitating debt? And meal-plan ice cream, too!
14. The one about remembering some A-plus advice from your best friend.
"Cabaret," "Cabaret"
Ladies and gentlemen, Sally Bowles from "Cabaret" is no fool! No matter how many lovers leave, or how much her career nosedives, or how nutty local politics get, she always remembers this important life lesson she learned from her good friend Elsie.
If only you had such a great, wise friend, maybe your outlook would be as good as Sally's. You could be so lucky!
15. The one about remembering last Christmas.
"Halloween," "Rent"
When it comes to the science of memory and cognition, "Rent" asks the big questions:
"Why are entire years strewn on the cutting room floor of memories? When single frames from one magic night forever flicker in close-up on the 3-D Imax of my mind?"
Poetic? Pathetic? We report, you decide.
16. The one about remembering everything and realizing how terrible it all was.
"Rose's Turn," "Gypsy"
Ah, yes. "Rose's Turn." The 11 o'clock number to end all 11 o'clock numbers in "Gypsy," the most musical of all musicals. Truly, there aren't many things more enjoyable than listening to Mama Rose replay the events of the last decade and change inside her own brain in a slow-motion nervous breakdown as the notion that her entire life has been completely worthless gradually dawns on her with ever-increasing dread.
Did I mention how fun musicals are?
Trivia time! You know that thing in music where trumpets go, "Ya da da da daaaa DA. Da DA da DA!" You know that thing? This is the song that thing comes from.
17. The one about remembering the first time you knew what you wanted to be when you grew up.
"Ring of Keys," "Fun Home"
There's nothing better than a song that makes you want to shout: "I am so glad I'm watching a musical instead of a basketball game right now." This moment in "Fun Home," where Alison recalls seeing a delivery woman — the first person who looked like the woman she felt like — is really, really one of them.
"This is a song of identification that is a turning moment, when you think you’re an alien and you hear someone else say, 'Oh, me too,'" composer Jeanine Tesori told Variety. "It’s a gamechanger for Alison. And that’s just Musical Theater 101."
...And the entire audience bursts into happy tears forever.
18. The one about remembering a nice dream you dreamed.
"I Dreamed a Dream," "Les Misérables"
When your life isn't going so great, it's good to remember the positive! Things didn't exactly go super well for Fantine in "Les Mis." But, hey, she had a pretty good dream once!
19. The one about remembering your single greatest regret and vowing to never remember it again.
"Turn It Off," "The Book of Mormon"
What's the ticket to living as fun-loving and guilelessly as the Mormon elders in "The Book of Mormon?" Don't just bury those traumatic, scary, impure memories — CRUSH THEM, OK?!
20. The one about remembering a really successful first date.
"Sarah Brown Eyes," "Ragtime"
Ah, young love. Even in "Ragtime," a musical that features racism, state violence, attempted child murder, and terrorism, at least we have this song, in which Coalhouse Walker Jr. recalls how he got his beloved Sarah to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with him with his peerless piano skills? So romantic.
Gosh, I sure hope those crazy kids work out!
21. The one about remembering a scary dream.
"Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat," "Guys and Dolls"
With, perhaps, only a smidge more credibility than grifter-from-another-mother Professor Harold Hill, "Guys and Dolls'" third-most-degenerate gambler Nicely-Nicely Johnson recalls a terrifying dream where he had to convince a group of skeptical evangelical crusaders that he's decided to give up the dice once and for all.
Side note: People in musicals are unbelievably good at remembering dreams. This is, like, full detail. I'd be like, "Um, I was at the Statue of Liberty, and you were there? I think? It wasn't really you, it was like a combination of you and my dad. And we were in prison. But at the Statue of Liberty."
22. The one about remembering how it used to be when you were young and full of hope instead of old and bitter and jaded.
"Our Time," "Merrily We Roll Along"
The closing number of "Merrily We Roll Along" is actually the first chronologically, since the musical goes backward. It's the play's happiest moment — Frank, Charley, and Mary on a roof watching Sputnik go by, giddily talking about how thrilling, perfect, and successful their futures are going to be. It's so hopeful! But so sad, 'cause you already know all the achingly bittersweet stuff that's going to happen.
You're probably familiar with the literary classic "Moby-Dick."
But in case you're not, here's the gist: Moby Dick is the name of a huge albino sperm whale.
(Get your mind outta the gutter.)
There's this dude named Captain Ahab who really really hates the whale, and he goes absolutely bonkers in his quest to hunt and kill it, and then everything is awful and we all die unsatisfied with our shared sad existence and — oops, spoilers!
OK, technically, the narrator Ishmael survives. So it's actually a happy ending (kind of)!
Basically, it's a famous book about revenge and obsession that was published back in 1851, and it's really, really long.
It's chock-full of beautiful passages and dense symbolism and deep thematic resonance and all those good things that earned it a top spot in the musty canon of important literature.
There's also a lot of mundane descriptions about the whaling trade as well (like, a lot). That's because it came out back when commercial whaling was still a thing we did.
In fact, humans used to hunt more than 50,000 whales each year to use for oil, meat, baleen, and oil. (Yes, I wrote oil twice.) Then, in 1946, the International Whaling Commission stepped in and said "Hey, wait a minute, guys. There's only a few handful of these majestic creatures left in the entire world, so maybe we should try to not kill them anymore?"
And even then, commercial whaling was still legal in some parts of the world until as recently as 1986.
And yet by some miracle, there are whales who were born before "Moby-Dick" was published that are still alive today.
What are the odds of that? Honestly it's hard to calculate since we can't exactly swim up to a bowhead and say, "Hey, how old are you?" and expect a response. (Also that's a rude question — jeez.)
Thanks to some thoughtful collaboration between researchers and traditional Inupiat whalers (who are still allowed to hunt for survival), scientists have used amino acids in the eyes of whales and harpoon fragments lodged in their carcasses to determine the age of these enormous animals — and they found at least three bowhead whales who were living prior to 1850.
Granted those are bowheads, not sperm whales like the fictional Moby Dick, (and none of them are albino, I think), but still. Pretty amazing, huh?
This bowhead is presumably in adolescence, given its apparent underwater moping.
Unfortunately, just as things are looking up, these wonderful whales are in trouble once again.
We might not need to worry our real-life Captain Ahabs anymore, but our big aquatic buddies are still being threatened by industrialization — namely, from oil drilling in the Arctic and the Great Australian Bight.
This influx of industrialization also affects their migratory patterns — threatening not only the humans who depend on them, but also the entire marine ecosystem.
And I mean, c'mon — who would want to hurt this adorable face?
BOOP.
Image from Pixabay.
Whales might be large and long-living. But they still need our help to survive.
If you want another whale to make it to his two-hundred-and-eleventy-first birthday (which you should because I hear they throw great parties), then sign this petition to protect the waters from Big Oil and other industrial threats.
Imagine you're working at a school and one of the kids is starting to act up. What do you do?
Traditionally, the answer would be to give the unruly kid detention or suspension.
But in my memory, detention tended to involve staring at walls, bored out of my mind, trying to either surreptitiously talk to the kids around me without getting caught or trying to read a book. If it was designed to make me think about my actions, it didn't really work. It just made everything feel stupid and unfair.
But Robert W. Coleman Elementary School has been doing something different when students act out: offering meditation.
Instead of punishing disruptive kids or sending them to the principal's office, the Baltimore school has something called the Mindful Moment Room instead.
The room looks nothing like your standard windowless detention room. Instead, it's filled with lamps, decorations, and plush purple pillows. Misbehaving kids are encouraged to sit in the room and go through practices like breathing or meditation, helping them calm down and re-center. They are also asked to talk through what happened.
Meditation can have profoundly positive effects on the mind and body
Photo from Holistic Life Foundation, used with permission.
Meditation and mindfulness are pretty interesting, scientifically.
A child meditates
Photo from Holistic Life Foundation, used with permission.
Mindful meditation has been around in some form or another for thousands of years. Recently, though, science has started looking at its effects on our minds and bodies, and it's finding some interesting effects.
One study, for example, suggested that mindful meditation could give practicing soldiers a kind of mental armor against disruptive emotions, and it can improve memory too. Another suggested mindful meditation could improve a person's attention span and focus.
Individual studies should be taken with a grain of salt (results don't always carry in every single situation), but overall, science is starting to build up a really interesting picture of how awesome meditation can be. Mindfulness in particular has even become part of certain fairly successful psychotherapies.
After-school yoga.
Photo from Holistic Life Foundation, used with permission.
Back at the school, the Mindful Moment Room isn't the only way Robert W. Coleman Elementary has been encouraging its kids.
The meditation room was created as a partnership with the Holistic Life Foundation, a local nonprofit that runs other programs as well. For more than 10 years the foundation has been offering the after-school program Holistic Me, where kids from pre-K through the fifth grade practice mindfulness exercises and yoga.
"It's amazing," said Kirk Philips, the Holistic Me coordinator at Robert W. Coleman. "You wouldn't think that little kids would meditate in silence. And they do."
A child meditates at the Holistic Life Foundation
Photo from Holistic Life Foundation, used with permission.
There was a Christmas party, for example, where the kids knew they were going to get presents but were still expected to do meditation first."As a little kid, that's got to be hard to sit down and meditate when you know you're about to get a bag of gifts, and they did it! It was beautiful, we were all smiling at each other watching them," said Philips.
The kids may even be bringing that mindfulness back home with them. In the August 2016 issue of Oprah Magazine, Holistic Life Foundation co-founder Andres Gonzalez said: "We've had parents tell us, 'I came home the other day stressed out, and my daughter said, "Hey, Mom, you need to sit down. I need to teach you how to breathe.'"
The program also helps mentor and tutor the kids, as well as teach them about the environment.
Building a vegetable garden.
Photo from Holistic Life Foundation, used with permission.
They help clean up local parks, build gardens, and visit nearby farms. Philips said they even teach kids to be co-teachers, letting them run the yoga sessions.
This isn't just happening at one school, either. Lots of schools are trying this kind of holistic thinking, and it's producing incredible results.
In the U.K., for example, the Mindfulness in Schools Project is teaching adults how to set up programs. Mindful Schools, another nonprofit, is helping to set up similar programs in the United States.
Oh, and by the way, the schools are seeing a tangible benefit from this program, too.
Philips said that at Robert W. Coleman Elementary, there have been exactly zero suspensions last year and so far this year. Meanwhile, nearby Patterson Park High School, which also uses the mindfulness programs, said suspension rates dropped and attendance increased as well.
Is that wholly from the mindfulness practices? It's impossible to say, but those are pretty remarkable numbers, all the same.
Within weeks of his first audition, the musical savant became a viral sensation—wowing judges and audiences alike with his almost supernatural musical abilities.
Though legally blind and diagnosed with autism at an early age, Lee easily masters multiple styles of music and has been blessed with a rare "audio photographic" memory, meaning he can recall music he hears after just one listen, according to his website.
Lee has once again returned to the stage for “AGT: All Stars” with a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” and it’s nothing short of spectacular.
The lyrics to “Heroes” were inspired by a real-life couple Bowie would see every day outside his apartment window in Berlin in 1976. The Thin White Duke had become creatively burnt out in Los Angeles, but after witnessing the lovers meet every day to share a kiss under a gun turret on The Berlin Wall, his mojo was recovered, and he went on to create what would be one of his most enduring songs. Though originally intended as a love story, “Heroes” encapsulated much bigger themes of the time, even becoming forever linked with the dismantling of the infamous Berlin Wall.
Similarly, judge Simon Cowell remarked that Lee’s rendition gave the lyrics “whole new meaning” after his performance.
“You have this real gift and every time you perform there’s just silence. Everyone’s focused, and then they’re listening to every word and then we’re wondering what you’re gonna do with the song. And then you hit those big notes, and you’re so cool, and just so brilliant,” he said.
Howie Mendel echoed the sentiment, saying, “The lyric is ‘We can be heroes just for one day,’ and Kodi, you are a hero every day.”
Watch the All-Star performance that received a standing ovation below. Somewhere, David Bowie is smiling while listening to this.
Marcos Alberti's "3 Glasses" project began with a joke and a few drinks with his friends.
The photo project originally depicted Alberti's friends drinking, first immediately after work and then after one, two, and three glasses of wine.
But after Imgur user minabear circulated the story, "3 Glasses" became more than just a joke. In fact, it went viral, garnering more than 1 million views and nearly 1,800 comments in its first week. So Alberti started taking more pictures and not just of his friends.
"The first picture was taken right away when our guests (had) just arrived at the studio in order to capture the stress and the fatigue after a full day after working all day long and from also facing rush hour traffic to get here," Alberti explained on his website. "Only then fun time and my project could begin. At the end of every glass of wine, a snapshot, nothing fancy, a face and a wall, 3 times."
Why was the series so popular? Anyone who has ever had a long day at work and needed to "wine" down will quickly see why.
Take a look:
All photos by Marcos Alberti, used with permission.
