I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of extending human life. As a boy, my favorite characters in the Bible were those like Methuselah who lived for hundreds of years. (Noah, of ark fame, was reportedly 600 when he built his boat, and he lived for another 350 years after the flood!) I’m also drawn …
For most of my adult life, I’ve been a pretty rational guy. I’ve prided myself in a scientific mind, one unclouded by spirituality and mysticism. Yet as I’ve experienced profound personal changes over the past few years, I’ve found myself more and more fascinated by abstract (or “spiritual”) questions, the likes of which I haven’t …
On Saturday, our book group met to discuss Ernest Hemingway’s 1941 classic For Whom the Bell Tolls. Most of us thought it was great. I loved the language in the book; I hadn’t read Hemingway since high school, and I’d forgotten that he used to be one of my favorite authors. Here’s how he opens …
“We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them.” — M. Scott Peck One reason I enjoy dating Kim is that although superficially we’re unalike, and although we’ve had vastly different life experiences, deep down we have similar values and life philosophies. This means we have some interesting conversations about the way the world works, …
Today, while sorting notes for a big project I have planned for 2013 (my biggest project for 2013, actually), I found a scrap of paper on which I’d copied three excerpts of a buddhist poem. (Well, not a poem precisely, but close enough.) Each of these three verses comes from a different place in a …
Earlier this week, I mentioned Do the Work!, Steven Pressfield’s small book about overcoming procrastination and getting things done. Today, I want to share something I read recently in The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. My parents loved The Road Less Traveled when I was a boy, but I’ve never read it myself. …
My wife knows me pretty well. At a recent garage sale, Kris picked up the November 1939 issue of American Cookery magazine. She wanted it for the recipes. But after she was finished, she handed it off to me. “You’ll want to look at the ads,” she said. She was right. Fun trivia: American Cookery …
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” — Aristotle For a long time, I was unhappy. I used to think that this was because of my overwhelming debt. I believed that if I were debt-free, happiness would come to me. It didn’t. After I paid …
I don’t know much about Sarah Vowell. To me, she’s the female David Sedaris on This American Life. She’s a funny writer with a funny voice. But then Craig went and picked Vowell’s new book The Wordy Shipmates for our February book group discussion. Although I should be reading January’s book (the tedious Main Street …
There are things that everybody else loves but which, whether due to character flaw or discerning taste, I do not. I’m always baffled by this phenomenon. Recently, for example, I decided that I’d waited long enough. After five years, I was ready to watch The Lord of the Rings films again. Surely they had improved …