There’s a famous sign on top of a hangar at ATL (Atlanta Hartsfield Int’l Airport) which reads simply “Fly Delta Jets”. I’m pretty sure no one thinks about it much, but if they did they might ask, “What the hell does that mean? Does any airline NOT fly jets?” The apocryphal nature of that vintage sign got me to asking myself, what is my own equivalent sign or rule? What am I still doing that I started doing 60 years ago, back when it was a brilliant, new idea?
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I’m not going to lie to you.
It’s been a long, wild year. Macro, micro, and everything in between. During the sailing ship times, sailors would resort to tying themselves to the mast in heavy weather to avoid being washed overboard. Yet another example of the utility of "strings", at least in theory. My own "strings" with which I tied myself to the mast in 2024 were sixteen essays posted on the blog.
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La Lucha, Spanish for ‘the struggle’, was a term used by Tejanos to describe the Battle of the Alamo.
Mexican wrestlers, known for their iconic masks, refer to themselves as lucha libres, or luchadores.
Franz Klammer….a name now mostly forgotten by the passage of time. Yet, as I am about to elaborate, he remains the architect of one of the most remarkable moments in sports history, perhaps even in all of history.
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“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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