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We romanticize the young, idealistic artist or entrepreneur who has their creative moment of conception at the tender age of nineteen and earnestly announces to themselves: I shall now proceed to never do anything else ever again.  Because so many of our heroes tell this very type of origin story. How they had a dollar and a dream and no backup plan in place, and through dedication and hard…

It’s deeply healing and liberating to stop hiding from ourselves.  That’s where real freedom comes from. The courage to be fully seen. In all our imperfect glory.  But the tricky part is, hiding takes many forms.  Shady disguises. Convenient excuses. Tidy narratives.  That’s why we are often the last ones to realize that we’re hiding. Our vision is obscured.  Yossarian comes to mind, the protagonist in one of the…

Comparison with others are a futile game with no winners.  But then again, we’re no picnic either.  Being better than our former self sounds like a noble personal development crusade, but all that judgment gets out of control when we start evaluating ourselves according to who we used to be.  It’s like the famous commercial with the football player watching his video game avatar getting tackled from behind on…

Hyde’s seminal book on the magic of the gift economy showed that most of the people who were asked to donate kidneys to loved ones rarely took time to deliberate their decision.  They just said yes. There was no decision to make. There were no sides to weigh.  The author explained that instantaneous decision is a clear mark of an emotional and moral life.  Unlike that friend of yours who has…

Armed with the desire to be helpful, we immediately try to provide a solution.  But the reality is, if we really want to be providers for the people in our lives, leaping in to solve or save or treat or fix the problem isn’t an effective as just becoming the solution ourselves.  After all, most people most of the time want affirmation, not information.  I once heard a marriage…

Just because we’re not visibly harsh to each other, doesn’t mean we’re not hurting each other.  The cut of subtle unkindness is insidious, and if we’re not careful, each of those tiny little nicks can add up and translate into serious relationship problems.  Every time I walk past a couple hashing it out in public, I always walk away confused. Not about the fact that people have conflict, but…

Because of my codependent, workaholic, love addicted personality, I’ve always had the tendency to do this: Fall in love very easily and too quickly, smother people within an inch of their lives, and then chase after the ones who reject me and try desperately to change their minds.  It’s that earnest but unhealthy and overwhelming form of passion that involves persistence at all costs, where the relationship controls me…

I once read a fascinating sermon about the burning bush.  The pastor proposed that the fire wasn’t the divine suddenly showing up in the middle of the desert. The spirit was there the whole time. Moses simply wasn’t aware of it.  Maybe he assumed that he knew the land like the back of his hand. Or maybe he was in too much of a hurry to notice the flame. Or maybe…

Wherever we go, we take everything we’re made of.  All the things that happened in our life are a part of us, and we carry them with us into the future, whether we want to or not.  Even the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff.  And in fact, if we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re just average people with typical experiences and the things that happened to us weren’t bad…

Cameron’s uplifting book of prayers to the great creator tells us that all sense of loneliness is a forgetting.  Forgetting that we are part of life. Forgetting that life is a part of us. Forgetting that we’re never alone in this world unless we want to be.  And until we remember that we do belong and we are loved and we have connection and community, loneliness will continue to visit us and try to take up residence…