Category: Blog

I’ve been trying to maintain a focal balance between what’s going on today, right now, in this moment, and what’ll happen next: where I’d like to be, what I’d prefer to be doing, where I’ll go and what that will…

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a traveler during a period in which travel is not just ill-advised, but also less possible. To be clear: travel is a very bad idea during a pandemic if you can…

There’s an organization called The Long Now Foundation that focuses on planting seeds for long-term thinking. Their most well-known project is the 10,000 Year Clock, which is a mechanical clock conceived back in 1986, a full-scale version of which is being…

One of the most disconcerting aspects of living through a pandemic is the assortment of unknowns we face on a daily basis. How many infected? How many dead? Transmission rate? Spikes, plateaus, curves? How many actually infected and killed by this disease,…

The other day I received an email from a student who attended a talk I gave at her school a few years ago. I remember chatting with her after the presentation because she was passionate about a specific artistic movement,…

The loss of peripheral perception—often called “tunnel vision”—is a common affliction faced by people in the midst of a disaster. It makes sense that if your home is torn apart by a tornado and you’re searching for loved ones in…

There’s a certain comfort in thinking about what we’ll all do when things get back to normal. I find myself retreating to that line of thinking, at times, as it allows me to perceive the moment as an interstitial: something…

The global status quo has been disrupted, local norms have been upended, and personal routines, habits, and goals have been unexpectedly shattered or understandably set aside as many of us struggle to understand and come to grips with our new,…

Change can arrive like a dropped bomb, converting your carefully constructed life into a pile of rubble in an instant. You look around, ears ringing, trying to figure out what happened, and as the reality sets in, your stomach clenches…

There’s a concept in psychology, locus of control, that refers to the degree of control we believe we have over our lives. The theory is that some of us see the world as a whirling mass of unknowable, external forces…