We all want somebody to share our life and love with. But if there are an odd number of people on the earth, and there’s a 50% chance there is, then somebody is going to get left out. And that somebody isn’t going to be me, even if I have to kill...
When your life feels like you're on a sailboat, with no wind to fill your sails, there are still choices. You can drop anchor and enjoy your surroundings. Start your motor, if you have one. Grab an oar and start paddling, or wait for the wind to fill...
Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of s...
On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka “nested dolls” that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making ...
No one ever said your life would be easy. The nature of being human makes life for all of us a challenge. The most important thing to consider here is this. Your life is only as challenging as you think it is. Think of challenge as a teacher and your...
When men evaluate each other as men, they still look for the same virtues that they’d need to keep the perimeter. Men respond to and admire the qualities that would make men useful and dependable in an emergency. Men have always had a role apart, a...
Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve onl...
Once your words fly out of your mouth, you sometimes can't control whether they fly straight or crooked, Grandma Augustine says. "They can get bent in the strangest ways." Grandma Augustine says that the only way to straighten out bad words is to kee...
The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily id...
A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming ...
What you are, and who you are should provide greater clarity about where you have been and where you are headed. Although one distinguishes spiritual from physical nature, the ultimate unification of the two is the consequence of the struggle for int...
When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror ...
Right now fear, doubt, anxiety, tension and disharmony are reigning supreme. But there shall come a time when this world of ours will be flooded with peace. Who is going to bring about this radical change? It will be you: you and your sisters and bro...
Sincerity like this staggers me; I've seen too little and too much of it one way and another; I've valued it so highly that when someone hands it to me as directly as you have, I'm not sure whether I should jump for joy or burst into tears. — Gwend...
So slip on your goggles and your reading trunks, for the sun is high. Let me leave you with one more thought. In what season of the year do we find ourselves - I'm speaking for a moment in terms of the physical world - wading through things? Surf. Ke...
A young man held a young woman in his arms, her head leaned to one side, her eyes empty and still. He was shadowed, but I saw that the figure was kissing the girl's neck. No that wasn't it. As I moved closer I saw what it was. She was unmoving, a sta...
First, no qualms. Not the thinnest sliver of misgiving about the value of his work. He was able to feel that the most important job in the world was putting over . In the second place, he was as uninhibited as a performing seal. He never questioned h...
She leans over Roop the way Sardarji leaned over Satya the years she cried for children, brushing tears from Roop's heavy lashes with her lips. She strokes her head as a mother would, says. "Slpee little one, we are together now." And Roop sleeps, ov...
Most of us, I believe, admire strength. It's something we tend to respect in others, desire for ourselves, and wish for our children. Sometimes, though, I wonder if we confuse strength with other words—like 'aggression' and even 'violence'. Real st...
You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to se...
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable th...
