In his poem “Born Yesterday”, Phillip Larkin looks at a new born baby and wishes, not that she is beautiful or smart or talented, but that she is ordinary. There is great value in our just being. There is something essential about remaining attentive to those around us, whatever the…
Are you ever stressed at work? Regardless of whether you see your work as a calling, a career or a job, you probably do experience stress from time-to-time. It could be due to unreasonable demands or expectations: the client’s, your boss’s or your own. It might be a lack resources…
Abraham Joshua Heschel said that our goal should be to live lives in radical amazement. ….to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. What everyday things still give you a feeling of beautiful astonishment?
A good friend of mine recently asked whether he should get a dog. Relatives and well-wishers were all offering advice, the good and the bad that we have all heard before. They would talk about unconditional love. Regardless of how your day went, whether your wife was mad at you,…
Something curious happens when we track satisfaction over the course of our lives. Couples meet, fall in love, get married and life could not be more wonderful. Then they have children and satisfaction falls. It plummets. Happiness only begins its rise once again after the little ones are hatched and…
I am intrigued by chess. I don’t understand it. My rank, if I had one, would fall somewhere between hack and tender beginner. I am regularly beaten by third graders who only play after school with milk and cookies as they wait for their mothers to pick them up. Yet…
In many ways this is the greatest period of history. Yet ours is a culture of longing. The world is of course the world, and it is filled with tragedy, hardship, pain, loss and indiscretion. Yet life expectancy and literacy rates have been steadily rising for decades. We are richer…
The days leading up to the New Year are often filled with a whole host of feelings and emotions. Excitement. Gratitude for the blessings of the past year. Dreams for what is possible. Regrets for the mistakes we made. Feeling of failure for things we neglected to do. We find…
At what point do you wake up and accept that your life has become a compromise? Over the course of days and years and decades all the choices you have made or half-made in a fog assemble themselves in a generally orderly fashion and we call them our “life”. We…
The costumes have all been put away and the trick-or-treaters are gone leaving only a few feathers or streaks of glitter on the walkway next to the sagging pumpkin with its memories of smiles. All we have is candy. Candy collected by our own children, or the leftover treats reserved for…