Thus, again, marriage is comprehensive in some basic ways, not in every sense. But the same holds of most revisionists' master principle: a spouse cannot be your "number one partner" in every activity, or your "soul-mate" in every domain.
Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind cha...
And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was missing from my experience of Christianity growing up was a sort...
I see a sense of unity in the universe. Spirituality is not limited to only one religion. One can experience it across different religions. I am fascinated by philosophy of Advaita and philosophy of unity. We have to get over the illusion that God is...
I have a sense of urgency, of time. I am a woman and am always running between work, doctors' appointments, school meetings, filling up the fridge, then going back to work. Like everyone who combines professional and family life, I am always doing se...
Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and th...
I didn't get a ton of interest from colleges in baseball and football, but I was outstanding in track and had the sense that this would be my meal ticket... Track was a sport where I saw immediate improvement, and I had a lot of good support behind m...
I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It's the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense th...
Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker cor...
As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open. We believe that the bad guy always loses and that the tooth fairy sneaks into our rooms at night to put money under our pillow. Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possibl...
The Project Angel Food Program's mission is to nourish the body and spirit of men, women and children affected by HIV/AIDS and other serious illness. The Project Angel Food Program delivers free and nutritious meals prepared with love. We act out of ...
I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a ve...
My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own...
I've been a fortunate girl: I grew up in a family that loved me from day one. I feel well grounded and lucky from that. So everything else is a bonus, because I grew up in this family that I adored, and adored me, and I think when you have that, you ...
If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is...
I don't think it ever does any harm in any business to feel that there is someone there who cares about it. If you look at any business, fashion being the most obvious, the aura, or the reality of the designer, is part of what creates it. It's true i...
Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn whil...
I think I've got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn't read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anythin...
I used to sneak up to the 8th floor and watch Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo rehearsing 'Saturday Night Live' and could only wonder if I would ever have the chance to be funny. It took me five years to go up the two stories, but it is such a sense of f...
My mom is just someone who's easy to talk to and hang with. My sister, it's always cool to be able to help her out with things. My brother is fun when we're just joking and messing around. And my dad is someone who's helpful with my music and easy to...
I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the...
