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Would you like more or have you had enough?

In his brilliant new book, We are the Weather:  Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, Jonathan Safran Foer recites a common definition of the American Dream as “having a better life than one’s parents – better primarily in the sense of affluence.” 

He describes how his grandparents had a better home than his great grand parents and how his parents had a better home than his grandparents AND how he now has a better and more valuable home than any of them. …


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What kind of ancestor do you want to be?

This powerful question comes from Rom Mokak,  Australia’s first Indigenous Policy Evaluation Commissioner.  It is a question that the Yawuru people ask when a major decision is to be made for their community.

When I first heard this question, it made me think of what kind of steward I am for not just my children’s future but for their children and their children and so on. I…


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What are you doing with your money…?

Whether you are an individual giving $50 to a small charity or a philanthropist giving $5 million to a large non-profit, how you look at this transfer of funds says a lot.
 
Are you giving it away or buying impact?
 
In the former, the agency is with the donor. Their giving assumes altruism or largesse. They have the power, control and responsibility.
 
In the latter, the agency is shared.…


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“And losing him was like losing the rain.”

When he plays Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out in concert, Bruce Springsteen pauses in the middle of the song, where his friend, the late Clarence Clemons, sax solo used to be.  He does so to honor a man that he was not embarrassed to say he loved or kiss publicly.
 
When he played the song during Springsteen on Broadway, he went one step further, pausing longer to explain his deep affection for the person he called, “The Big Man.”…


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Everything you need, some of what you want

This was how a recent contestant on The Voice described her childhood.  She said it with a smile and followed a profile of her journey to The Voice stage.  It described being raised by a single mom in a situation that was poor in material goods but rich in emotional ones. Second hand stores but first-rate parenting.

This phrase that summarized her experience,  “She gave us everything we needed and some of what we wanted,” resonated with me on several levels.…


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Is the force with you?

On a recent flight, I decided to watch the movie, The Last Jedi.

During one scene, Luke Skywalker dispels a long held myth about “the force.”  Over many films the assumption was that the force was something that one possessed, an internal feeling or power that was universally good.  Here Luke explains to the young Rey that the force is actually a connection we have with our world and with each other.…


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What to do?

This week I watched a two-minute video and read a ten-page magazine article that hit me like a punch to the gut and left me staggering and wondering, “What to do?”
 
The video was of the sixteen-year-old environmentalist, Greta Thunberg, who had sailed from Sweden to address the United Nations.  Her provocative and passionate speech left me feeling shamed and helpless.  Watch for yourself.  How do her words make you feel?…


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Wanted Dead and Alive

From the time I began writing this weekly note, at least five of its readers have died. Many more have lost a parent, family member, friend or co-worker during that same time.
 
Death, regretfully, is the ultimate fact of life.  Its certainty is inescapable.  Yet for many valid reasons we choose to put the question of our own mortality out of sight and out of mind.  …


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What’s on that post-it note?

In the corner of the sixth grade classroom, there was a chart with twenty or thirty hand written post-it notes attached. Each represented a student’s recommendation for their non-fiction essay. 
 
Approximately half were about global warming, several more about hurricanes.  A few would write about inequality or racism. By my estimate at least 80% of the suggested topics were about large societal problems.
 
My initial thought was how conscientious and social minded these students must be – which was admirable. …


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Are we measuring the right things?

This morning, like most, I stepped on the scale. This routine measurement is designed as a nudge to guide that day’s eating.  If I’m happy with my weight I might indulge more than if I’m bummed that I packed on an extra pound.

It also acts as a proxy for what kind of shape I’m in. The idea that if I am below a certain weight  (no I’m not telling) it indicates that I’m good health.…


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A Labor, then Love

In 1894, Labor Day became an official federal holiday.

The year before a different kind of labor inspired a 26-year-old nurse to become one of the most important social reformers the country has ever known.

Lillian Wald was teaching a homemaking class on the Lower East Side when a little girl burst in begging for someone to help her dying mother.  She had struggled in labor before giving birth but was now badly hemorrhaging blood.…


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Wisdom from William Shakespeare and Marc Maron

The irony of self-knowledge is that to gain it, you need to look outside of yourself. Recently I noticed that tucked inside the word acknowledgement are three smaller words – a + knowledge + me.

Yet science shows that we are wired not to see the broader context of our lives. While confirmed by modern research the sentiment goes back at least to the days of Shakespeare – who wrote in Julius Caesar:

Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.…


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The Drive

It was my first experience driving on the left side of the road.  A task made more challenging by the vehicle Enterprise had given us. Their self-proclaimed party van could seat eight comfortably and still have room enough for four suitcases and five backpacks.
 
The roads seemed incapable of holding both this van and the oncoming traffic – which apparently consisted exclusively of campers, busses and eighteen wheel trucks 
 
They say that the drive from Edinburgh to the Isle of Skye is majestic but I couldn’t tell you, as my eyes were exclusively focused on the road five feet in front of me every minute for four hours. …


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You’ve got some nerve

Several years ago, I pinched a nerve in my neck. Unbeknown to be, this was cutting off signals that extended down through my left arm. When I finally went to see my doctor, we discovered that I had lost 50% of muscle strength in my left triceps.
 
My muscle had atrophied and there was some question as to whether that strength would ever be recovered.…


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What are you talking about?

On our bookshelf, there is a plaque with this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: 
 
“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
 
While I’ve always aspired to such an ideal, upon further investigation, I found two problems with this quote:

  1. Apparently, Eleanor Roosevelt never said it.
  2. When you say it out loud, you sound awfully elitist and judgmental.

Meaning in our lives is derived by what we actually do (events) and who we do them with (people).  …


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The Storm before the Calm

On a recent podcast, Kevin Bacon told a story about what it was like to act in a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. (It’s starts around the 1:49 mark)

On most movie sets, he described a pre-shoot experience marked by commotion, noise and stress. 

People chaotically running around, barking “quiet on the set” and “rolling” and then slamming down the slate board that marks the scene as loud as humanly possible before the director screams “action.”…


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Want to feel better about your day?

Within one 24 hour period last week:

  • Our dishwasher broke
  • Someone illegally charged my American Express card twice
  • Our laundry room flooded as a result of a major HVAC leak
  • I erroneously received a bill from the state government for $15,000
  • Our laundry room flooded a second time after the technician’s first “repair” didn’t work
  • My wife backed our car into a steel pole rushing to get our child to camp after our carpool partner canceled at the last minute.
…
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Could this be the best way to reduce stress?

While watching the Red Sox get shellacked by the Seattle Mariners on Opening Day, I grew so stressed that I decided to hit pause, record the rest of the game and turn my attention to something, anything else on TV.

Appropriately enough, the documentary One Nation Under Stress was on HBO. My first inclination was to take a hard pass. The title itself sounded stressful. Upon second thought, I decided I would watch for a few minutes and an hour later was glad I did.…


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What will you see when you listen to this?

Ira Glass has said “audio is the most visual medium.”  He was referring to the ability of gifted storytellers to paint pictures in our minds using the intimacy of their voice as a brush and words that provide color and form.

Another way to interpret that phrase is the ability to help us hear something that changes the way we forever see the world.

Throughout most of my life, this largely happened via music. Gifted…


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To stay out of the dark, capture the light

Last week, for the first time ever, we saw a picture of a black hole.  In this primer of the experience, the New York Times described a black hole as a region in space that “swallows up everything too close, too slow or too small to fight its gravitational pull.” The edge of a black hole is marked by a ring of light, called the event horizon, represents light about to be drawn into the black hole “never to escape.” …


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Polar Opposites

It stood almost ten feet tall and weighted close to a thousand pounds. We were less than four feet away, separated by two trainers and a steel fence. Feeling small in its presence, it was literally awesome.

While most of the onlookers were equally mesmerized watching the polar bear go through its training exercises, it was impossible not to notice the five-year-old girl who sat just in front of me.…


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Changing Lives is a Contact Sport

The opening of David Brooks new book, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life reads:
 
Every once in a while, I meet a person who radiates joy…They are kind, tranquil, delighted by small pleasures, and grateful for the large ones.  These people are not perfect.  They get exhausted and stressed.  They make errors in judgment. But they live for others, not themselves.  They’ve made unshakable commitments to family, a cause, a community or a faith.…


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Thanks to readers like you…

One of the best things about writing these weekly notes is the response I get from readers like you.

Some share a brief thumbs up or question, a related link or recommendation.  Other share personal stories or reflections on their own. 

All are so appreciated, so please keep them coming.

Among the emails I received recently were three that go to the heart of these Monday morning notes.…


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Would you like to know your score?

Would you want people to make broad assumptions about you based on where you live? Would you like it if strangers were talking about your struggles in secret?  Would you be ok if people used a formula to formulate your future?
 
I imagine most of us would not feel comfortable with any of the above. Even if the acts were well intentioned, your lack of involvement or knowledge would be troubling.…


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