Four Powerful Phrases
There’s a quartet of phrases that I use a lot, but which I don’t hear as often as I believe their usefulness justifies. The first is “I’m open to it.” I most frequently use this phrase when faced with information…
Compelling or Addictive
Even a week after returning home from a family visit to Seattle, several of the songs my baby nephew loves are still stuck in my head. Many of these songs (Baby Shark, classics by Raffi, those featured on Cocomelon) are…
Lines
I’ve been using a little grammar app while editing my new book so that I have a visual sense of what I’m doing wrong (according to someone else’s standards) as I trim, delete, rearrange, and rewrite—my words passive aggressively underlined,…
Marble
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth, sometimes called the Bicycle Problem, refers to our tendency to assume we know more about something than we actually do. That second monicker is derived from an example commonly used to illustrate this bias: most…
Then What?
When we’re making plans and setting goals, in some cases the desirability of the outcome will be assumed, our only real question being how to accomplish it. That reflex isn’t always ideal, though, as many of our efforts—our hard fought…
Everyday Kairos
One interpretation of the Greek term “kairos” is that it represents a point of maximal leverage for some kind of undertaking. So while “chronos” means objective, undifferentiated time (measurable seconds, minutes, etc) kairos refers to moments that have a more subjective value.…
Vague Footpaths
I’ve been thinking a lot about aging, of late, and the way we perceive it, deal with it, and respond to it. It’s been interesting working through the concerns and considerations of growing older because while most of us have…
Capacity and Application
I tend to believe that a life well lived (by most standards) involves a consistent increase in one’s personal capacity. In practice, this means we’re more capable of doing and feeling and comprehending: fixing things, parsing the unfamiliar, understanding our…
Simmer or Sear
Some creative work requires the application of quick, definitive force if you want to take what’s in your head, commit it to a distributable medium, and get it out the door in a shape that’s true to what you pictured…
Some Final 2023 Thoughts
I decided at the last second to do away with my usual newsletter format for this final newsletter of 2023 (I’m taking next week off to work on my new book, avoid the news, and eat unhealthy volumes of green…