Last night, I attended a benefit for a young lady fighting lymphoma. She’s a member of my daughter’s theater company, a smiling thirteen-year-old named Ella. She was diagnosed in June, and now wears the bald head and scarf typical of chemotherapy patients. She has a long fight ahead of her, but she faces it with […]
An act of hate is something like an earthquake. An earthquake strikes suddenly, lasts a minute or so, leaves devastation in its wake. It draws the attention of everyone near enough to feel it. It destroys and kills on a massive scale, leaves the survivors scarred in body and mind, shocks even those who weren’t […]
Fifteen years ago today, the world most Americans thought we lived in came crashing to the ground. Fifteen years ago today, nineteen agents of an entity that had sworn to bring fire and death to the United States succeeded in that mission. They struck the heart of our commercial power, struck the heart of our […]
I recently read Ryan Holiday’s new book Ego Is the Enemy. I found it a fascinating read, filled with insight on how to achieve what we want without losing sight of who we are. He uses historical figures to illustrate his points: this one remained true to himself, allowing his name to fade after his […]
Yesterday was Labor Day in the U.S., a holiday we ironically enjoy as a day off work. It’s traditionally our end-of-summer celebration, a day we join family and friends for a trip to the lake or the park and eat barbecue and drink beer. It’s a day most of us spend as little time as […]
We’ve built a society on avoiding pain. We tell ourselves we can have what we want, and we can have it easily–with only a little bit of work, only a little bit of discomfort, only a few easy payments. We tell ourselves we have a right to the things we want, that we deserve them, […]
There are aspects of your life you do not control. You don’t control how others think or what they want. You don’t control how they treat you or how they respond to you. You don’t control the weather, or the news, or what the late-night hosts say on their shows. You probably don’t control the […]
A friend of mine killed herself last week. I don’t know why; I hadn’t seen her in years, and she wasn’t one to share the details of her despair on Facebook. I know she was distraught the last time I saw her, unable to let go of a wrong someone she loved had done her. […]
The Olympic Games just ended in Rio De Janeiro. I always love the Olympics, the two-week spectacle of the best physical specimens of humanity doing things with their bodies I can only imagine. It’s inspiring to watch their determination, their grit, their courage, to envision the years of training that go into a single effort […]
If there was a sure thing going into the Rio Olympics, it was that Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross would win gold in beach volleyball. The sports pundits told us all about it: she would be the first American woman to win gold in four straight Olympic games, she’d never been defeated in Olympic […]