If you stick around long enough writing books and essays and giving talks, people come to you for advice. Very often, the requests I get turn on choices between alternate futures. Graduating students, youngish artists and activists, members of an older generation considering “encore” careers or avocations—sometimes, people seek me out for advice on what …
It’s been one of those times when the pace of events—both interior and exterior—accelerates almost beyond reckoning. Granted, these days I get much of my news from “The Daily Show,” but still: Inauguration! Republican vote-rigging! Somalia! Egypt! I had a birthday with all the attendant thrill and agony, met a bunch of deadlines, and—big news …
These are tender times. The usual end-of-the-year retrospective ache has been amplified in the aftermath of so many storms, inner and outer. It’s often hard to know whether an ambient mood is the aggregate of personal response to the brokenness we are perceiving in world events or the opposite: a projection of personal angst onto …
Of this I have no doubt: the U.S. urgently needs meaningful gun control. I support the four-point platform of the Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence shared in Benjamin Van Houten’s Yes Magazine piece (written after Representative Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting in 2011). It’s been making the rounds again after the massacre perpetrated by Adam Lanza …
Few things make me as happy as discovering a way of seeing the world that illuminates both large political events and my own inner voices. I’m happy right now, because I’m ready to add another name to my list of uncolonized minds—the thinkers who have most inspired me through their willingess to engage reality, interrogate …
My lack of interest in sports competitions is so total that I’ve sometimes wondered if it is dangerous, un-American, or both. You know the World War II movies where the German spy is discovered among war prisoners in the Stalag because he can’t say who won the most recent World Series? All through my childhood …
Every spiritual path has its core stories, signposts that point to new directions under new circumstances. I went to a wonderful retreat for Yom Kippur, and in a very old story, I found a fresh reminder of possibility. (The retreat that enabled this deep work was created by my friend Rabbi Diane Elliot, a remarkable …
Two truths: (1) Since time immemorial, people have been decrying the death of courtesy. “What once were vices are manners now,” wrote Seneca two thousand years ago, and I’m betting some Egyptologist can point me to the equivalent in hieroglyphics. (2) Just because a kvetch has been repeated in the past, that doesn’t make it …
Years ago, at a time when I felt trapped by circumstance, when the way forward was anything but clear, a wise friend asked me this: How seriously can you take yourself? What would it look like to take yourself one hundred percent seriously? There’s a sort of superstition that if something comes up three times …
One of the many reasons I hope I am granted long life is that I think it is going to take me quite a while to finish rewiring my brain. For instance, if you are like me, a cache in your mind holds a photo album crammed with snapshots of decisive moments from your personal …