Visigoths, Happiness and Middle Age

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…

Continue reading

Endgame

Hope Chess

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…

Continue reading

Naked Truths

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…

Continue reading

Sisyphus and the Path to Meaning

Sisyphus-Meaning in Life

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus retells the ancient Greek tale of the king Sisyphus who was condemned to forever push a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again.  Despite an eternity of “futile labor”, in the end Camus concludes “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” …

Continue reading

Dreams Undusted

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…

Continue reading