These are hard.
What would you take for yourself, that you know would help someone else more?
What would you give your child, that if you gave to another child instead would dramatically change their life?
These philosophical questions are ones that we don’t explicitly ask ourselves. They are by design difficult to answer. They pit our egalitarian principles and a belief in a fair world against our most basic desire to provide and protect ourselves and those we love. …
I recently finished reading the Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain. It was an especially difficult read as it conjured up memories from my own childhood that I don’t often like to revisit. A time when my mother’s struggles dominated our life.
If there was a silver lining in this brilliant but bleak book, it was to serve as a reminder of the absolutely pivotal role my brother has played in my life.…
What makes for a successful day? If you’re like me, you might take a look at your calendar, figure out in your mind what you have to get done, and what you’d like to get done. Depending on how many things you tick off your mental list, you’ll do some calculation and determine whether that day was successful or not.
On Friday, my day was destined to be tight, small windows existed in between various obligations that included bringing my children to and from school and most importantly taking my wife to a minor medical procedure an hour away and waiting until it was completed so I could escort her back home. …
I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately.
On Monday of last week, an essay series that I worked on with Fast Company and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched with this piece from Saru Jayaraman looking at the future of work for restaurant workers. In it, she asks us to imagine a future where “diners don’t just ask about where produce comes from but how well workers are paid.”…
In conjunction with Women’s History Month, my 11 year old daughter came home from school with an assignment to write a paper about a female member of her family that was no longer with us.
She chose her great grandmother, whom she never had the chance to meet but shares a middle name.
As part of this assignment she had to interview at least two members of our family who knew Nana using a series of questions supplied by her teacher.…
Last week, during winter break for my children, our family drove into New York City, for no other reason than to take our dog for a walk. While it was his inaugural stroll through the city streets, it was an opportunity for me to revisit old haunts and places that I called home for fifteen years.
My memory is not what it used to be. Presumably it’s preoccupied by short term demands for my attention that usually arrive these days via email, zoom calls and, more importantly from my children and family.…
If you rode the school bus when you were a child, do you remember who you sat next to? Can you see the faces of the other kids on that bus? Do you know or maybe wonder where any of them are today?
In his book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Pulitzer prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof talks about his number 6 bus in Yamhill, Oregon.…
If you rode the school bus when you were a child, do you remember who you sat next to? Can you see the faces of the other kids on that bus? Do you know or maybe wonder where any of them are today?
In his book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Pulitzer prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof talks about his number 6 bus in Yamhill, Oregon.…
There was a time when a snow day would bring the world to a stop. Schools would close and unless your job was deemed essential, you too would be given the day off to do as you would see fit. Days would be spent as a family, either out frolicking in the snow or relaxing inside with a good book, old movie and a beverage of your choice.…
What is the purpose of the fourth line of a short story?
According to author George Saunders, it’s quite simple. “Give the reader enough of a jolt to go on to line five.”
His new book, Swimming in a Pond in the Rain, is explicitly a course on writing and reading short stories. Implicitly it also serves as a metaphor for how we write our own lives.…
This Land is Your Land. America the Beautiful. Amazing Grace. Land of Hopes and Dreams. Here Comes the Sun. Lovely Day. Better Days. Let the Sunshine In. Feeling Good. Undivided
This was the score that played over the course of two days last week as our democracy witnessed a peaceful transfer of power without further incidence of the uncivil war we find ourselves trying to end.…
Consider the parable of the two fish swimming in the ocean. As one swims by the other it pauses to ask, “How’s the water?” The other replies, “What the hell is water?”
It is an admonition for us to stop and look at our surroundings. To not go about our days unconscious of the world in which we live.
In the daily deluge of information and activity, it is easy to miss what is right in front of us.…
I struggled with figuring out what to write this week. Conflicting instincts pulled me to either express rage at the events at the Capitol last week and look back at all that led up to it or to move past them and share some thoughts of hope or even beauty.
Stuck in the middle, I remembered this quote from the movie Wall Street. “Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him.…
I did not see the straw that broke the camel’s back. But the reasons that compelled my 9 year old to repeatedly whip a tennis ball into her sister’s masterpiece lego house on wheels presumably ran deep into the sinkhole that was 2020.
After going all Godzilla on her sister’s prized creation, she ran down the hall and locked herself in her room. I had been getting ready for the day and missed the fireworks and the twenty minutes of sequestration that followed.…
With just a few days left in the year many, if not most, of us are ready to consign 2020 to the trash heap of history. Eager to look to 2021, we will set goals, make plans and share our hopes for a brighter future.
If you believe that everyday is a blessing or understand recency bias, you will realize that by looking ahead we may be missing an opportunity right in front of our face. …
On any given day, approximately 800,000 people in the United States will celebrate their birthday. When we are young, we sit with a birthday cake before us, surrounded by friends and families and we make a wish to blow out the lit candles marking our years.
In any given year, many of these wishes bear some semblance to one another despite the diversity of the wish makers. …
While walking my dog in the woods nearby, I stopped to marvel at a giant fallen oak. Uprooted from the ground, it was hard to surmise what had toppled this mammoth tree. I was full of wonder at the extensive roots laid bare for all to examine the many connections severed. Feelings of both loss and hope filled me as I was reminded that soon that tree would decompose with its nutrients revitalizing the soil that it would soon become part of.…
When I was a young boy, I loved to listen. I would saddle up next to my Mom, eavesdropping on grown up talk, while cigarette smoke filled the air. I would hole away in my room, laying on the top bunk, listening closely to the lyrics of every song on a new album. Late at night, I’d strain to hear the static filled voices of talk radio hosts, broadcasting from AM stations hundreds of miles away, until I eventually drifted off to sleep. …
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as blessed as I did this Thanksgiving. It was a day of almost complete harmony among my wife and I and our three daughters.
Our day began with a simple exercise of writing down the many people and things we were grateful for this year, in spite of all that has engulfed our nation and impaired our daily lives.
Under different circumstances, this request could have been met with eye rolls and pleas to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.…
Daddy, 2020 sucks.” It is this year of sickness, sacrifice, sadness, sucktitude and overall political jackassery, my youngest daughter succinctly summed up what has become all too obvious.
Thanksgiving will soon join the long list of traditions, celebrations, holidays, and rituals that must be adjusted to conform to our new “less than” reality.
Perhaps, though, Thanksgiving is uniquely suited to be “more than” during these times.…
When your children misbehave or act in a way that that drives you crazy, it makes it difficult to follow the guidance of Mr. Rogers to “love your children exactly as they are, without any conditions attached.”
This type of acceptance becomes hard when confronted with a child, or an adult for that matter, who seem defiant or uncompromising. But that is exactly the point.
Accepting someone exactly as they are is a choice.…
Consider this. If you voted in the Presidential election, then regardless of its outcome, there would be 70 million people who disagreed with you. These are not 70 million idiots, socialists, extremists, racists, or rioters. They are your fellow Americans who have different lived experiences, concerns and priorities than you. People who receive their information from different sources than you and are often surrounded by similar folks that reinforce their opinions, knowledge and biases.…
In the 2016 election, over 110 million Americans who were eligible to vote did not. To be more precise, 110,178,918, people over the age of eighteen sat out a race that was decided by less than 80,000 votes.
To put that in further perspective, it is the equivalent of the entire eligible voting populations of the United Kingdom, France AND Belgium deciding not to vote in their respective elections. …
To support someone or something can mean many things. The definition can be either to provide material assistance – often in the form of financial help – or “to bear the weight of something or hold up.”
The former is clearly a lighter lift. We can make a phone call, donate a few dollars, provide a reference etc. The latter is literally a heavier commitment .
If I asked you how many people, causes or organizations you support according to the first definition, it might be a pretty expansive list.…
Which word do you use more often, “We” or “I”?
David Brooks’ column “How to Actually Make America Great Again” reflects on the new book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett called The Upswing. It chronicles America’s swing from solidarity (we) to individualism (I) over the last fifty years.
As one point of evidence, the authors cite that the use of the word “I” in American books has doubled between 1965 and 2008.…
