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It is so easy to get caught up in all the chasing. There are the goals and dreams and aspirations. We pursue a vision, or our aim, or any other number of respectable things. To swing, as the poet said, “the earth a trinket at my wrist”. But after the…
For several years, I have been loosely involved with an online Buddhist community. About a year ago, I began to get more active and made some commitments to the group. I was going to meditate more. I would be more mindful in my eating. One night each week, I would…
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…
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?
Last week I wrote about three different approaches to work: Work as a job, a career, or a calling. The benefits of seeing work as a calling, to the individual and the organization, can be profound. In that article I pointed out that one way to shift to work to…
“Each one of us has at our fingertips, access to so much meaning and hope, goodness and beauty, in every moment, if we would only let ourselves see.” From Being Human by John Sean Doyle
In January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche went insane. Armed with metaphor, irony and aphorism, the German philosopher carved his influence deep into 20th century culture, criticism, literature and psychology. Freud, Mann, Yeats, Richard Strauss and countless other artists and thinkers were shaped by the “first Immoralist”. In popular culture, Nietzsche was…
“Go with your friends and loved ones to a park or a coffee shop or some other quiet spot and look them in the eyes. Discover once again their hopes, their wishes for the future and their fears. It is our dreams that make us different than the mud beneath…