Tag: life
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Choosing Not To Change
One of the more valuable lessons I’ve learned in my life is that leaving things as they are is a choice as important and powerful as changing them. This never would have occurred to me five years ago, but it’s central to my understanding of who I am today and how this thing called life […]
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Life, Uncertainty, Courage
One of the harder-to-deny truths about life is that it’ll always contain uncertainty. We can, seeking solace from this fact, strive to minimize the number of things we don’t know. In doing so, we hope it allows us to act with greater confidence about the kind of outcomes we can expect. And indeed, the more […]
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Prioritizing the Truly Important
Whenever I start to think seriously about the obstacles to accomplishing goals and doing cool things, I always come back to a deceptively simple phrase I heard from Merlin Mann: “First, care.” (His essay of that name is super short and worthy of your time. Even if you’ve read it before, it’s worth reading again.) […]
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Decreasing Fear by Increasing Trust
The thing about fear is that you feel it. Every part of your body is animated when you’re afraid. There’s a sound reason for this: you’re probably scared because you’re in danger. You’re probably in danger because something bigger, stronger, or more powerful than you is threatening. And in the face of this threat you’d […]
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Moving Beyond the Fear Mindset
In a contemplative mood last night, I made a few tweets about fear: Most things we don’t accomplish in life have one root cause: fear. We fear failure, success, humiliation, poverty, etc so much we don’t try. Most cruelty is a reaction to fear. Few harsh actions come from a place that isn’t afraid of […]
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Presence not Presents
My war on gift-giving earns just about as much criticism as it does confusion, so I think it makes sense to lay the argument out here. To start: there is a strong economic case against gift giving. It’s based on things like gift-givers routinely paying more for their present than the receiver values it at, […]
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“Work is More Fun than Fun”
This quotation, whose owner I’ve seen cited repeatedly as Noel Coward, strikes me as largely true. Not completely, always, and unequivocally, but certainly for the right type of work it can be in a way we tend to underestimate. When your wife, friend, or boss commands you “to go have some fun,” they obviously don’t […]
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Art as Art
I was a alerted to a new facet of my reality after taking a breather while reading my old review or the documentary Born into Brothels. And it’s essentially this: I have little or no interest in a piece of art as a piece of art. I think this gets to the very core of […]
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OPW: “Testimony” by Rebecca Baggett
I want to tell you that the world is still beautiful. I tell you that despite children raped on city streets, shot down in school rooms, despite the slow poisons seeping from old and hidden sins into our air, soil, water, despite the thinning film that encloses our aching world. Despite my own terror and […]
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OPW: Charter for Compassion
I’ve recently decided that I’m gonna play it a little looser around here, which means I can bring back an old feature: Other People’s Words. The document doesn’t list an author, but it’s pretty deeply related to everything I’ve been trying to say when I’ve used the Life category in the last year. Built from […]