Category: Practical Philosophy
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The Mental Hoarding of Identities and Story
Sometime in the last decade — I don’t follow or care enough to tell you more exactly — America discovered and fell in love with the idea of hoarding. A “hoarder”, as you might expect, is a person who keeps stuff — everything from old newspapers, to packaging from old purchases, maybe metal scraps, collectable memorabilia, whatever — to great…
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The Hidden Power of Acceptance
Most people think of power as assertive and domineering. That power rides up to the world and forcefully changes the way that it flows. Sometimes, power does look like this. And it’s undeniable that this kind of power is the most visible and compelling. But as many martial artists know, there’s a lot of power…
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“Simple But Not Easy”
I don’t remember quite where I first encountered the phrase “simple but not easy,” but after a recent encounter it’s been stuck in my head. I believe deeply that all the important insights in life are simple. Really really really stupidly simple. The reason the phrase is stuck in my head, though, is that there’s an often…
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“Ring the Bells that Still Can Ring”
I don’t listen to a ton of music. But I do get caught on songs. Most recently, I’ve been caught on Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” — here’s a great live performance of it. I discovered it not because I’m a Leonard Cohen fan, or that I heard it playing, but rather because someone cited a few lines…
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Thinking the Right Thought
It wasn’t very long ago that when I found myself feeling down I would think that I just needed to think the right thought. That whatever else was true, finding this one single specific thought would solve my problem. By containing clarity and beauty and simplicity, it would make whatever ache or pain or concern…
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The Value of Curiousity
There’s a saying I don’t much like; maybe you’ve heard it. It says “curiosity killed the cat.” The reason I don’t like it is pretty simple: it’s wrong. It drags the good name of curiosity through the mud for the sake of some supposed safety. It’s possible that curiosity contributed to the cat’s death, but…
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You Only Control What You Give
We idealize relationships as equal. We think that you should give others — your spouse, your child, your sister, your mother, your teacher, your boss, the world — a quantity of work and energy, and get back something of about the same value to you. That’s why we’re in these relationships. We know that relationships aren’t really…
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Simply Here. Simply Now.
We make life so complicated. We’re always ready to tell — to ourself or to others — our horror story. You know the one: where you explain why things aren’t as you really want them to be. Maybe you’re not rich yet, but need to be to be happy. Maybe you’ve been so slighted by the…
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The Two Most Important Truths I Know About the Universe
Here’s something I know: both of the following seemingly contradictory statements are profoundly and undeniably true. I am utterly inconsequential to the universe. It is so incomprehensibly large and vast, its time scale so unfathomable, that it is utterly certain that I don’t matter. Everything in the history of the universe, this entirely galaxy, this…
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The Bliss of Blamelessness and the Golden Rule
If we cede all moral theory, any notion of spiritual or religious rewards or justifications, or any through-going vision of philosophy, is there a rational case to be made for something like the Golden Rule, most often rendered in English as: “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”? The obvious answer is,…