World Toilet Day.

Today is World Toilet Day. Yep, that is an actual day, and why is it important? Well, if you’re reading this you likely have rather effortless access to the loo, but consider this: there are nearly 7 billion people on the planet, and 2.5 billion of them do not have access to a toilet. As someone with Crohn’s disease, this totally blows my mind and all I want to do is help change that latter number to zero billion!

So what the heck can you do about such a massive problem? You can start by helping out on this OpenIDEO challenge: How can we improve sanitation and better manage human waste in low-income urban communities?

Unilever and Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor have teamed up withOpenIDEO to come up with sustainable sanitation concepts for poor urban areas like Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city.

Go on, give it a shot! And remember one of my favorite Emerson quotes (when I need to be reminded that even the smallest things can make a huge difference): “The creation of a thousand forests is from one acorn.”

1 out of 25,000.

With an orphan disease like Wegener’s, no one (in my daily life outside of the hospital walls) ever seems to understand what the condition is really like or how it manifests itself.

This may be my most boring post yet, but I thought this was one of the most straightforward and articulate descriptions of Wegener’s I’ve yet to see: merckmanuals.com

No more I, Me, My (or how compassion can make you a healthier person)

I was lucky enough to see the Dalai Lama speak at Stanford a few weeks ago (thanks Linda!) and while I expected it to be enlightening, I had no idea it would have me thinking about my everyday language.*

He talked about the centrality of compassion in human life and society which pretty much boils down to: be kind and compassionate toward others and you will be a complete and happy person. Pretty simple, right? Yep. Got it.

What I found even more fascinating is the work — which he referenced throughout his talk — being done at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford. CCARE studies the effects of altruism on people via neurology, science, physics, medicine, etc. and recently received the largest donation from the Dalai Lama ever given to a non-Buddhist organization. Here’s a quick, but intriguing snippet as to how he became so involved in the center’s work:

...scientific research has shown that constant fear and hatred are eating away our immune system while individuals who are calm and compassionate sometimes even show an increase in their positive body elements.

His Holiness recalled attending a conference at which a paper was presented in which it was stated that people who continued to stress on “I”, “me” or “my” had greater risk of heart attack.

If that isn’t one more compelling reason to be compassionate, I don’t know what is. Here’s to more “we”, “theirs” and “ours” in your everyday discourse. Cheers!

*Watch the video here: dalailama.stanford.edu/webcast

Photo by Bruce Bortin / Creative Commons