Tag: lifestyle

“What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear — to others, sometimes even to oneself — trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.” There […]

“There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place… do the next thing with diligence and devotion.” In recent seasons of being, I have had occasion to reflect on the utterly improbable trajectory of my life, plotted not by planning but by living. We long […]

Uncommon consolation from the body to the soul. I know only three side-doors to the cathedral of consciousness, through which we can bypass the bewildered mind to enter the heart of the most unfathomable, shattering, and universal human experiences, emerging a little more whole: poetry, children’s books, and Bach. No human experience is more shattering […]

“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook one spring day in 1840. “It […]

“Eons must have lapsed before the human eye grew keen enough and the human soul large enough to give sympathetic comprehension to the beauty of bare branches laced across changing skies.” There is something about the skeletal splendor of winter trees — so vascular, so axonal, so pulmonary — that fills the lung of life […]

“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” A century before an encyclopedia titled Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know fell into Alan Turing’s child-hands and seeded the ideas that bloomed into the computing revolution, […]

“It may not be in contemplation of outer space that the greatest discoveries and explorations of the coming centuries will occur, but in our finally deciding to heed the dictum of self-understanding.” “Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will,” Stendhal wrote in his landmark 1822 “crystallization” model of […]