Personal
Illiteracy
Literacy is such a fundamental aspect of modernity that we cannot imagine not reading. If there is a series of strokes that can be interpreted as letters, the brain just treats them as such. They may represent a word I know or a weird admixture of foreign sounds—it doesn’t matter: I can’t not parse the [...]
Israeli workout
Though we’re staying at a fancy hotel here in Tel Aviv, the gym is extra. And really, what’s the point when there are free outdoor gyms on the boardwalk? I’d call them “adult playgrounds,” because that’s what they look like, but you’d get entirely the wrong idea.
Every morning I run on the boardwalk by the [...]
What’s in a marriage?
We just returned from our first wedding since we ourselves got married a year ago. The groom and bride are pretty awesome people: geeks, fans of the outdoors, interesting and engaged in the world. We were glad to be part of the community witnessing their vows. A highlight for me was the acoustic metaphor of how each one is an [...]
The Power of Now
One of my pursuits these days is the cultivation of mindfulness. Life is rich and helter-skelter. Only by living in each fleeting now, it seems, is there hope of appreciating a journey that is already accelerating to its eventual conclusion. Existential crisis? Perhaps, but fairly benign as those go.
It was with some anticipation, then, that I picked up [...]
Rapt
I recently finished reading Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher. It talks about why paying attention is good and shapes your life experience, and offers a few reminders as to how to do so. It was OK reading, though I expected it to be either more of an analysis of the state of rapt attention itself, or [...]
