A doc­u­men­tary on liv­ing hap­pily recently aired on PBS. A lot of the clips from the show (called This Emo­tional Life) are avail­able on YouTube (here). Here’s an inter­est­ing one on inti­macy: This par­tic­u­lar insight (from Eliz­a­beth Gilbert) was inter­est­ing to me partly because I’m read­ing her book Eat, Pray, Love at the moment. The […]

The new prob­lems of the world require fresh approaches. They require our inge­nu­ity and our care­ful, cre­ative con­sid­er­a­tion. You and I know this, but still most of us don’t often get mean­ing­fully involved. Why is this? I think there is a col­lec­tive feel­ing that these prob­lems are too big for any of us to make […]

These ‘’Com­mand­ments’’ are actu­ally just life  lessons. They are reminders to myself about my favorite insights into how to keep myself happy and mov­ing for­ward. 1) A clear tar­get I’ve found it’s not enough to try hard, if you’re not work­ing toward a clear out­come. Every­one says this, but I like it because, if I’ve […]

Check out this music video from the group Ok Go. Mes­mer­iz­ing. Cool, huh? It reminds me of Feist’s 1234 video and the tread­mill video –also by Ok Go. These guys have it fig­ured out. There is some­thing sub­tly com­pelling about these videos. I can watch them over and over again. I think we appre­ci­ate seeing […]

The gift is to the giver… it can­not fail. –Walt Whit­man Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift has taught me a lot; for one thing, it explains how gifts are the cur­rency of com­mu­nity. The les­son: if you want to make some­one a part of your com­mu­nity, be gen­er­ous to them. If they accept your kind­ness (and […]