Many of us listen to music as we work, study, exercise, or read, and this can enhance our enjoyment of these activities. However, when I want to truly enjoy a song, especially an instrumental piece, I sit back and listen to it with my eyes closed. Focusing on the...
The Stoic philosophers, including the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, lived some 2,000 years ago and didn’t have the benefit of more recent schools of philosophy, such as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Among other things, they didn’t...
Are you ready for intelligent, benevolent comedy? Let me introduce you to Freaked Out with Tom Papa. So much comedy is cynical or mean spirited or just not funny. This one-hour routine from 2013 is a beautiful exception. Tom Papa: Freaked Out appeals to the...
Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. —Helen Keller. In 1882, when Helen Keller was nineteen months old, an illness left her blind, deaf, and consequently dumb. For the next five years, she lived essentially as a wild animal in the...
Ira Glass on Closing the Ideal-Actual Gap in the Creative Process Several years ago, while procrastinating in graduate school, I discovered a short video clip that helped me at the time—and has now helped me again. The clip, posted below, is of Ira Glass, the...
Eleanor Roosevelt on Being an Individual(ist) “Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.” – Eleanor Roosevelt. What is an individual? The Cambridge Dictionary gives us a few definitions, the first two...
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