One thing I know about happiness is that it comes from the narrative of our life. The story we tell ourselves. But too often, we let others write that story for us. Unhappiness and discontent inevitably follow. The only person who can write the story of your life properly is you. In order to change our narrative to an authentic one, one we write ourselves, we must change our perspective, and thus our perceptions of our world. This is not a new idea. Plato explained it in “Allegory of the Cave” over 2,300 years ago. A small change in perception can mean a huge change in what we see. And changing how we see lets us write a new narrative. The Dalai Lama also explores this idea of the relationship between perception and a good life in his book The Art of Happiness (99¢ in the remainder bin . . . maybe you can buy happiness after all!).
Some would-be jihadists, who had traveled from the U.S. to Iraq and joined ISIL, are quitting the cause. It turns out the WiFi signal isn’t strong enough in Syria so their IPods quit working. These American teenagers can’t tolerate such torturous living conditions, and they want to come home. It’s a story that makes you […]
The Reality of Santa Read More »
Scientists recently announced the discovery of a stupid virus called ATCV-1. People infected with the virus score ten per cent worse on mental tasks than they did prior to being infected. This is a serious health issue. Not many people can afford to lose ten percent of their mental abilities. An awful lot of people
The Stupid Virus: There Oughta Be a Telethon Read More »
This is the time of year when I am buried underneath catalogs of all shapes, sizes, and descriptions. It’s an old fashioned thing. Most of you probably went paperless sometime ago. Now you get spam, tweets, likes, bites, burps, and whatever other insidious means of assaulting our senses that marketers come up with. You can
I flipped on the light as I opened the door. He was a young man, mid twenties, and I wondered why he was ringing my doorbell on a Sunday night. Since I didn’t see a tie or stack of Watchtowers, I decided to satisfy my curiosity. Some people open their door to anyone or answer
Prayers, Cribs, and Pine Creek High School Read More »
The three cars ahead of me were stopped for no apparent reason, and I was in a hurry to get to work. Then I saw the deer. Four deer had crossed, and one was gingerly picking her way across the asphalt. Once she got to the side of the road, she ran. The drivers, congratulating
May All of Your Wishes. . . . Read More »
In the late months of 2014, human space exploration had a rough week—one dead, one critically injured, and two spacecraft wrecked. A lot of commentators wrote about the importance of the space program in terms of jobs, new technologies, and satisfying the human need for exploration and discovery. On the other side, the haters didn’t