Imagine your life is a big canvas. Picture it in your mind and think about the beginnning of your painting of life.You're fourteen yours old, and you are lucky if you have one seventh painted. Now imagine the rest of the canvas is totaly empty. Every...
It's funny, I don't feel any older than I did when I was twenty. But I know I am, because recently some twenty-year-old called me 'sir.' Sometimes the only way you know you are getting older is by the way others treat you.
I don’t trust compliments. I’ve been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn’t. But generally when people give you compliments there’s one of two things wrong with them. Either they’re false, or what’s worse is ...
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in t...
The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there ...
If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were ...
The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker ...
One of the paradoxical and transformative aspects of implicit traumatic memory is that once it is accessed in a resourced way (through the felt sense), it, by its very nature, changes. Out of the shattered fragments of her deeply injured psyche, Jody...
Years ago I had realized I was blaming myself for it. People and doctors would tell me it wasn't my fault, but I couldn't “BELIEVE” it! Then I was talking to my friend Kieran and he explained to me in a way that I could PERCEIVE that I was not at...
I was 9 years old when I had my first glimpse of wholeness. It was early Christmas morning and I was standing in my pajamas in the living room and looked out of the large windows. Outside the white snow flakes silently singled down toward a snowclad ...
I like to call a spade a spade in politics and in everything else. That's why the zionists and the americans... The top officials hate Saddam Hussein. The White House is lying once again. He's a liar. He's the world's number one liar. He said there w...
For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to wor...
Being a reader has brought me much joy, laughter, and rich experience. But reading has also wounded me. The sacrament of reading has plowed me open and sown seeds of empathy that have taken root in deep soil. Over the years, reading has caused me to ...
As a kid I never knew what I wanted to be when I grow up, but the only thing I knew was that I wanted to create things. And then I wanted to be an astronaut. I would paint stars and the atmosphere and then frame and hang the universe up on my bedroom...
Serving my country was a life-changing experience for me. It was during those years that I realized the importance of commitment, dedication, honor, and discipline. I have never laughed so much; nor have I ever prayed so much. I made life-long friend...
We struggle and push and plant seeds deep underground, and it doesn’t look like much for a while. But then someone comes along and listens to your song or sees your painting or reads your poem, and they feel alive again, like the world is fresh and...
In spring training prior to his 1995 rookie season, Chipper was already so confident in who he was as a player that he famously deadpanned to veteran slugger Fred McGriff, after the Crime Dog grounded into an inning-ending double play, these two word...
And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women - except, of course —those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape ‘kit ‘n’ stuff, But for everybody else, it’s a win-win....
There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps...
An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certificat...
Tim Minchin's musings on Tony, the first 'fish' ever to have feet: Imagine what Tony would think, standing there on his brand new feet on the brink of the beginnings of mankind as we know it... if he could look forward just a few short... hundreds of...
