“Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart."
-Vaclav Havel
This is my mother, Dora, throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain in Rome in 1963.
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Reflecting back on the essays posted this year, I can’t help but notice that each piece plays its own unique note, yet contributes to a harmonious whole—a collective symphony of insights that transcends the sum of its parts.
Dive back in or catch up on what you’ve missed, and see if any of these strike a chord…
If you’re reading this, you already know I have a little problem keeping my big mouth shut.
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I'm not talking about reduced fruit preserves here. I’m talking about how we define who we are and what we are into—what makes us feel alive. It’s our jam. And oh, how we love to protect it.
Read MoreThere’s a reason "if it bleeds it leads" works. Coined in the 1890s by William Randolph Hearst during a period when yellow journalism (a reporting style that stooped to new lows) was at an all-time high, the phrase meant sensational, violent stories got prioritized in the evening news.
And it holds true today.
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Oops...I may have just lost half of my readers. Who am I referring to? Everyone wrapped up in “hustle culture,” of course.
Read MoreLast week, I was on a business trip visiting one of my old haunts—the Marylebone district of London. It was a place that became the center of my business operations for a while. It’s also where I learned that there’s an art to failing.
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This summer, I discovered that I have way too much stuff. I first found this out after we sold our house; seventeen years of accumulated junk—er…stuff—gone.
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Some say we are living in the “post-truth” world—an age in which people are making things up right and left. Allow me, dear readers to be brazen; I am tired of all of the nonsense being labeled as “real.”
Read MoreHave you ever felt lucky? If you are a human who has lived on this planet their entire life, then you have probably had an encounter with it at some point. But is it actually luck? How do you know?
Read MoreWhen I was a little kid, one of the best things I could get was an old cigar box.
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There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who want to hear your story, and those who could not care less. Which kind of person are you?
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In my friend's culture, dancing was such a common and natural activity. So, when someone stopped, it was alarming enough to take them to the local healer to search for the cause. So, lately, I’ve been asking myself: Have I stopped dancing? If so, why?
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We lived through this freeze, and the subsequent rebirth of our garden at the exact same time we were living through the pandemic. Like the freeze, Covid-19 decimated my sense of community. So, how can we get it back?
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One of the strange things about Zoom calls is that you can literally see yourself as part of the conversation. And what do we do instead of looking at the speaker? We watch ourselves! So, with that I ask…is it unnatural to stare at ourselves all the time, or is it just me?
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Triptych—a fancy art world term used to describe a piece of art which has been split into three. When something is presented in three parts, it often gives us the space to tell a longer story in just the right way we want to. In this series, I’ll be doing just that: a story about my personal journey through the pandemic, told in three parts.
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West Texas is like a big sponge. There’s plenty of sky out there to absorb whatever it is we wish to discard, and there’s plenty of land to soak up whatever spills out.
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When you combine vision, a leap of faith, and intense calculation, you achieve flight.
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It’s a trick, I admit. You are tricking yourself into anticipation and gratitude for things large and small, for simply having life, love, and comfort in whatever form it might take over the next few months.
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That’s the thing about hindsight: it works every time. Just like our glorious past, it’s flawless.
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