Running a race assigns a point to a sport that often feels very pointless. It's an exuberant payoff to months of tedium. It's a way of crafting an end boss for a particularly cumbersome video game. It's a fun, monstrous reason to keep putting one foo...
A friend tells a story about taking his ten-year-old son to a Jets game. The game was being played during a driving rain on a freezing cold day, and the Jets lost by twenty points to a team they were supposed to beat. As they headed toward the exits,...
It has been said at various points in history that the current sum of human knowledge is but a fraction of that which was once known, yet now is lost. Likewise, it is argued with simple mathematics that any sum of knowledge we may yet accrue must alw...
Kuan Yin Speaks on The Law of the Spiritualization (Transformation) of Matter: “The earth is trying to teach humans that everything is spirit…Being human is an opportunity to bring spirit into all that is material…The quality and intensity of r...
Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sen...
There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out fo...
I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includ...
Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad ...
How would your life be different if...you began each day by thanking someone who has helped you? Let today be the day...You make it a point to show your gratitude to others. Send a letter or card, make a call, send a text or email, tell them in perso...
Above and about me all was space. The sky was hazy blue, and from this vantage point, I could see all the way down the Via Roma, at the far end of the forum, to the bay. Its waters sparkled invitingly and I slowed, feeling my amictus fluid with my mo...
The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodi...
The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparin...
Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a...
When we look back from the vantage point of sobriety, many of us realize that when drinking we often felt like a fake, a fraud, and a phony. That’s because we were. – p. 74
Someday you will die. Because you are embodied through and through, at that point you will cease to exist. You will not meet death, because, as the sage says, "Where death is I am not; where I am death is not, so we never meet." When you die there wi...
I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen...
I can’t remember the moment I was labeled bitch for the first time, but it sure wasn’t in the blogosphere of 2008. It was well before the blogosphere, let alone the World Wide Web, existed. The first time I was called a bitch, the home computer o...
How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me ...
Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Ba...
It wasn't chance at all, Gilly. People are yearning creatures. They imagine and strive and hope. Stories about an enchanted band of vagabonds existed before the Carnival itself. But those fairy tales become the focal point of billions of daydreams, a...
The New Age movement, for all the validity of its protest and the value of some of its recommendations, is in truth a very old blind alley. There is a very long history to remind us of what happens when nature is our ultimate point of reference . . ....
