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The world is out there, demanding that we do things their way.  And it will always get judgmental whenever it suspects we’re deviating from the standard.  It’s textbook tribal behavior. Whenever there’s a separation between one person’s thinking and values from the tightly packed morals of their community of origin, the natives grow restless. And they do everything in their power to reel the radicals back in, keeping them…

Cartoons made my creative life possible. From an early age, animation has always been a source of profound inspiration, joy and meaning for me. Schultz and Watterson shifted my inner geography from day one. In fact, one of my early career aspirations was to become a cartoonist. I even bought books and took classes. And you couldn’t pry the pencil and paper away from me with a crowbar. But…

We all live by a certain set of rules and habits that we wish everyone around us will adopt.  But we should never get our hopes up. As satisfying as it is to influence people to live by the lights of our worldview, we should never become enamored with our own ways of doing things.  Otherwise we’ll drive ourselves crazy trying to understand why everyone around us doesn’t share our preferences…

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.  This widely quoted scripture is called the word of forgiveness, which is theologically interpreted as the prayer for those who carried out the famous biblical crucifixion.  Jesus was asking forgiveness for those who put him to death.  But of course, the plea was for also for all of humanity.  And so, putting religion aside, it’s an important lesson in interpersonal…

Carlin once said that when it came to attracting the right romantic partner, a good sense of humor always showed a mature way of being in the world, as opposed to some humorless person who may just explode and kill you and your children.  Absurd, but true.  He who laughs, lasts.  That was one of the first traits I noticed in my wife. She had a laugh that made…

We should never feel guilty for having our own life.  Each of us is entitled to have our own needs met, from privacy to dietary to physical to psychological. It’s part of the universal declaration of human rights.  The problem is, we still guilt ourselves into thinking that other people might die if we abide by our needs instead of theirs.  And so, we people please to make everyone…

Gibran famously wrote that each time we experience sorrow, our capacity for joy increases. The deeper that sorrow carves into our being, the more joy we can contain.  And so, when life gives us the gift of a low, we ought to feel happy that something can even make us feel that sad. Because means that we’re alive and breathing and real.  That oscillation of dark and light is…

Everyone has a unique set of things that they obsesses over, live for and geek out on.  And if we’re lucky enough to learn about this thing that sets someone on fire, our job is to respond with gas, not water.  Because giving people the space they need to lock into their element, even if only for a brief moment, is a way of saying yes to their joys….

I’ve never been one to hold grudges.  Getting mad at people for making mistakes that they didn’t know were mistakes at the time is exhausting and insensitive.  It’s easier to just let them off the hook and accept their imperfect humanity, rather than wrap myself up in wrongs and prosecute people for crimes past.  But although I’m quick to let the actions of others roll off my back, I do have…

Control is an illusion.  Human beings are meat puppets, bone machines, moist robots, collections of atoms, accidental byproducts of nature and, my own personal favorite, chimpanzees with a firmware upgrade.  We’re guided and constrained and manipulated by systems that we cannot understand. And that’s precisely why people continue to do things that give them the false sense that they are taming their world, taking command of its complexity and…