What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America
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At the height of his career as a journalist, Tony Schwartz hit an unexpected wall. Why did success suddenly feel so empty? How could he add richer meaning to his everyday life? What guides could he trust on the road to wisdom? During the next five years his search for answers took him from a meditation retreat in the mountains of Utah to a biofeedback laboratory in Kansas, from a peak-performance workshop at a tennis academy in Florida to a right-brain drawing course in Boston. Blending the hunger of a seeker with a journalist's hard-headed inquiry, he discovered the best teachers and techniques for inner development--and identified the potential pitfalls and false gurus he met along the way. What he found dramatically changed his life. It may change yours as well.
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I spent all last Sunday afternoon reading this book. It's an older book, with a copyright in the 90's, so some of it comes across as a bit dated. I grimaced here and there, reading about some of the “wisdom” Schwartz sought, using the power of brain waves, for example, acts I've always tended to regard as hocus-pocus mumbo jumbo. I carried away a lot of positive scientific evidence for meditation; I will seek more information about that. I also learned that one study found 75% of people have some sort of back problems but experience no pain. Curious. I was especially interested in the chapters that touched on dealing with cancer. A study showed that almost all cancer patients had undergone an exceptionally tramatic event in their lives in the year before they were diagnosed with cancer.
