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Camus famously wrote in his notebooks about the remora, a fish that swims poorly.  He believed their only chance to move forward consisted of attaching themselves to the back of a big fish. They plunged a tube into the stomach of a shark, where they sucked up their nourishment and propagated without doing anything, living off the hunting and efforts of the beast.  Maybe you know someone like this. The kind…

Saying we deserve something feels empowering, but it’s really just entitlement in disguise.  It’s assuming that we are the center of the universe and cosmic justice revolves around us.  When the reality is, just because we have done the work and put in the time and paid our dues and built up our struggle points, or whatever other socially sanctioned requisite action we think will move our name higher…

There is no right way to believe.  Some of us hold that divine reason has ordained our life to serve a purpose in the overall economy of the cosmos. Some of us are completely free of the binding illusion that their fate is written in the stars. Some of us feel like riffraff on the tide of history destined to be washed away into a whirlpool of meaninglessness.  Fine….

We all seem to be kicking around the same question in many different ways.  How do we stay grounded? How do we restore our spirits when they sag? How do we maintain our center in this ocean of chaos? How do we keep our senses alive in a desensitizing and dispiriting environment?  It really sucks. The exhaustion and overwhelm in is palpable in our words.  And yet, maybe the…

Can you tell the difference between patience and procrastination?  It’s harder than you think.  Because it’s one thing to take your time and avoid rushing and ship quality work out the door; but it’s another thing to delude yourself with a brilliantly executed stalling maneuver.  It reminds me of my lawyer friend. God bless his extreme detail orientation, which is essential in the legal professional where there is zero…

The winds of work are variable in the extreme.  One day we’re operating at our highest point of contribution, creating significant value at within the organization, the next day we’re sneaking off during lunch to do job interviews with potential employers. It’s confusing and stressful and frustrating.  But the good news is, when we view our career as a long arc game, treating each of our jobs as stopovers…

It’s true that language is a powerful lever for changing the world around us.  But it’s also true that words can be twisted to match any desire we have, and interpreted to justify any action we take.  In fact, many of our greatest revelations occur in speechless moments when we perceive things greater and beyond the sum total of all words.  That’s one of the great joys of songwriting….

Emerson wrote that good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.  It’s a loving invitation for us, in whatever endeavor we’re chasing after, to push towards that precious point of no return. Where we stop longing and start making it a matter of transaction.  Sadly, some people never make it to that point. They remain trapped in their dream world, gradually grinding down their grand…

Everything in this country is extra, extra large.  We love our big cars, big houses, big food, big guns, big corporations, big brands and big personalities.  In fact, according to a recent study from the journal of female health sciences, even our women have a significantly larger mean breast volume than women born in other countries.  America is always trying to stay ahead of the curve, aren’t we?  But let’s stay…

We have a genetic reflex to avoid change.  And we are geniuses at inventing reasons to avoid change.  But what we don’t realize until we come out grizzled on the other side is, change isn’t actually what hurts. It’s our resistance to it that creates the suffering.  Bonnie sings one of my favorite songs about it. It’s obviously a breakup song, but what’s fascinating is, if you switch the pronouns from…