Just about every spiritual tradition preaches it; just about every psychological tradition teaches it. So why is it so hard to learn to separate one’s desire from expectations of its fulfillment? Why is it so tempting to give up wanting what doesn’t seem to be forthcoming?
One of my strongest desires is help potentiate a paradigm [...]
I’m not in classrooms every day, only dipping in occasionally when I’m on a campus to give talks. But I came up K through 12 in the California public education system, I vote here now, and I have more than a casual interest in the future of the human species, which gives me ample reason [...]
Be forewarned: if you don’t feel like a rant today, save this for later. For the last few days I’ve had the strangest sensation. It’s as if I’ve been struggling to emerge from some intensely sticky substance—a vat of rubber cement, perhaps, or a freshly spun spider web as it might appear to a hapless [...]
I don’t know if this is a political problem, a spiritual one, or a psychological one: I’m fairly certain it’s all of the above. Or maybe it just feels that way based on all the space it’s taking up in my mind. How do people overcome the obstacles—fatigue, disappointment, magical thinking—that make them reluctant to [...]
This is a profoundly confusing (and almost irresistibly depressing) moment in our political culture. Reactivity is at such an all-time high, a visitor from outer space could be forgiven for concluding that in the U.S., anyway, we humans lack any access to the neocortex, while our reptilian brains and limbic systems are shooting as many [...]
My friends tend to a few views of President Obama and the Democrats at the end of Year One. They seem different, but actually, all are part of the Disappointment System, my new name for the combination plate of hurt and response which has become our national dish. As is so often the case, what [...]
It is intrinsic to my nature to see possibility, to see it with precisely the type and intensity of focus a donkey brings to the carrot swaying on a stick before its eyes, and like the poor donkey, to follow it until I can’t.
Some of my hopes went on past the point of possibility, wearing [...]
Dear President Obama:
I appreciated your Rosh HaShanah message to Jewish Americans last week, especially the line that read, “Let us resist prejudice, intolerance, and indifference in whatever forms they may take.” You declared that on this occasion, “We rededicate ourselves to the work of repairing this world.”
The time has come to translate these words into [...]
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Dr. Martin Luther King
In the Hebrew calendar, this is the time of t’shuvah, literally turning, but often translated as repentance. In preparation for the new year, [...]
We humans are good at condemning other people’s sins of omission. There’s a whole publishing industry around how much the average German knew about Nazi atrocities, for instance, calibrating ordinary people’s exact degree of culpability for what was done in their names. But it’s much harder to admit the same faults in our own and [...]
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