I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time — no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding. I know that. Even if I knew [...]
A human being is part of a whole…[but] he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest…This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison [...]
These young men are waving goodbye as they start the 1000 mile trek from Pittsburg to New Orleans. They’ll skirt the Allegheny Mountains, pass into Tennessee and pick up the Jackson Military Road for the final 400 mile descent to the Mississippi Delta and the bayous and great swamps surrounding New Orleans. They are following [...]
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau The enemy of our soul is the experience of anonymity. Thoreau was misguided in his instinct to separate himself from the people around him and to envision their lives as empty and useless. The [...]
The conception of the library in Stockholm has wormed into my imagination. Then I stumbled upon a curated sampling of bookshelves from Desire to Inspire. Here are two of my favorites. Just like the Stockholm conception, these images create kinesis in my imagination. I grew up surrounded by books — literally, surrounded by books, in [...]
I don’t like sharing writing here that’s ill-considered and unformed. The excerpt below is an exception. It’s a recent note from my workbook. I’d seen a picture of T & me from Mother’s Day and was discouraged by how swollen and weighted down l looked. My physical reality had separated from my self-perception. That kind [...]
Last night I made a start at writing this down, then faltered when I saw how late it was, realized that my mind wasn’t nearly quiet enough to go to sleep and questioned whether the first few phrases that had formed in my mind were going to lead to anywhere. This morning I got out [...]
When my great-great-great grandfather William Candlish was born in Virginia in 1804, there were 1 billion people in the world. It had taken thousands of years for the world to reach that milestone of human saturation. When my father was born in the 1930′s, the number of people in the world had just passed the [...]
Yesterday I flew from the east coast to Los Angeles and watched two movies that were uncanny in the similarity of their view of the human condition. The moral synchronicity was more startling for the cultural chasm between the two films: the uber-Wasp corporate reality of the Reitman brothers’ Up in the Air and the [...]
Frequent and substantial conversations with others creates a sense of well-being, according to a psychology study reported in Science Daily this morning. Greater well-being was related to spending less time alone and more time talking to others: The happiest participants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talking than the unhappiest participants. In [...]