“Später ist zu spät.“ (Later is too late) — Peter Altenberg This morning I’m driving my daughter to the airport. Once again our time together was all too brief. We each pack a lot into our days, which means never enough time in the same attentive moment, but we make the time that we do…
And in the shadow of our human dream of falling, human voices are Creation’s most recent flowers, mere buds of fire nodding on their stalks.— Li-Young Lee, Dying Stupid Working through the gardening shed, I found a terra cotta pot sporting hints of old root filaments, betraying its previous occupant from last season. Each life…
The more I travel, the more I believe there are two types of people in this world: those who would block out all the noise and retreat into themselves, and those who are actively engaged with everything and everyone around them. This might be best observed on a plane, where the window seat becomes a…
“He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course. This sham diving into…
And consider, always, every day, the determinationof the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.— Mary Oliver, Evidence We are change agents, creating new iterations of ourselves with every action. But so is everyone and everything else, which makes change exponential and complicated. There are some things we simply can’t control. One moment we’re celebrating…
I could feel at the timeThere was no way of knowingFallen leaves in the nightWho can say where they’re blowing?As free as the windHopefully learningWhy the sea on the tideHas no way of turningMore than thisYou know there’s nothingMore than thisTell me one thingMore than thisOoh there’s nothing— Roxy Music, More Than This Life keeps…
“Several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wall “Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo…
“A person totally wrapped up in himself makes a small package.” — Harry Emerson Fosdick It’s human nature to see the world through our own lens, but that doesn’t make it productive or particularly informative. So how do we reconcile this with a blog published daily? At what point does it become a vanity play?…
Change is good, but it can also be a pain in the ass. This is exemplified by the forced version upgrades Apple puts us through before we can resume our regularly scheduled activity. Microsoft has their own version of upgrade hell, and I’ve recently undergone the process of re-learning everything I thought I knew about…
‘You only go around once in life, and I’m going to grab a handful of it.’ — Steve McQueen The world is not back to “normal” post-pandemic, for there’s an increased state of madness and fragility buzzing around us all, but it’s clear that people are living larger lives. Who’s to blame them? Shouldn’t we…