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The Science of Waiting and the Art of Delay
Exploring the intersection of time and decision-making to shine a light on what it means to be human. “We never live; we are always in the expectation of living,” Voltaire famously lamented. This...
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Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup
“I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing.” “A friend,” wrote the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue in his beautiful meditation on the...
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Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy
Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced...
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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to...
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” “No one can build you...
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Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get...
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Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s...
Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide...
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The Stoic Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Time Spent vs. Saved vs. Wasted
“Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time.” “How we spend our days is, of course, how...
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The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness
On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter...
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On Losing a Parent
We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to...
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Actuality vs. Possibility and How to Hear the Signal of Your Life
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion...
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The Canon of Solitude: 200 Years of Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on...
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is...
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The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the...
“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.” “On how one orients himself to...
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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions...
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Virginia Woolf on Creativity
“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” “Only art...
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On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran
“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house...
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J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life
In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small,...
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Thomas Bernhard on Walking, Thinking, and the Paradox of Self-Reflection
“There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking… Walking and thinking are in a perpetual...
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The Peace of Wild Things: Wendell Berry’s Poetic Antidote to Despair, Animated
On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief. UPDATE 2022: For more soulful animated poems, see my collaboration with On Being on an animated season of The Universe in Verse. Two hundred years...
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How to Reconcile Your Most Painful Mistakes: The Life-Shaping Difference...
You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, wincing. You know the...
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The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the...
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a...
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