This week, I have a guest blogger–my good friend Brian Fay. He’s a retired professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University, a thoughtful guy, and a good buddy. He talks about paying attention to our souls (our basic attitudes or orientations toward life, reality, and the universe) and “gerotranscendence” (which, to Brian, definitely doesn’t mean leaping … Read More
When I was growing up in the southern Midwest, our house had no air conditioning. Most people didn’t mind the heat too much—at least until that week in August when it would get oven hot. During that week, we often had two-shower days. Yesterday, when the temperature plummeted, the rain fell relentlessly, and the clouds … Read More
This crazy election week is a good time to be thinking about the Tao Te Ching. The Tao is a classic of early Chinese spirituality , an elusive, lyrical meditation on how to live in dark and dangerous times. Unlike Confucian thinking, which emphasizes social order (with its reliance on law, stability, and hierarchy), the … Read More
Years ago, my friend Susan took a class of college kids off to visit Middleton Plantation, outside Charleston. One of the few plantations not to be burned by Sherman’s troops, it was probably a terrible place for the slaves who worked the land, but now it’s lovely and quiet, a mansion of mellow brick set … Read More
Forest fires are still raging in the West. Covid is still gaining ground all over the world. And chaos at the top is still pushing the United States into disarray. Lots of us are casting anxious, hopeful glances toward the future, crossing our fingers for a recovery. Recent advances in medicine and the social sciences … Read More
Twenty years ago, my brother invented something he called Retired Guy Syndrome. Our stepfather had retired, and my brother watched him spend a day like this: One morning, Cliff decided it was time to replace a defective cabinet hinge. He went to the hardware store, looked around, bought something plausible, came home. The hinge turned … Read More
At 9:30 this morning, we moved from summer into fall. The shift has made me think about one of Vonnegut’s great inventions, the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse Five. This race of space-aliens teaches the novel’s traumatized protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, to understand time very differently than humans usually do. For the Tralfamadorians—who look like toilet plungers with … Read More
I’ve had a cold this week. It’s just a cold—but even as I write that sentence, I resent it. It is just a cold: the doctor ruled out Covid pretty quickly, with a test. But it’s easy to forget, when we’re healthy for months on end, how enervating, debilitating, and downright miserable a mere cold … Read More
You’ve already heard two of my Rules for Life. As a reminder, Rule #2 is that everybody gets to whine sometimes—with the corollary that no one gets to whine all the time. Rule # 3 is that everybody gets to make mistakes, with the corollary that you might as well learn to be gentle with … Read More
Amid the many things I hate about this pandemic, here’s one I love: watching a delicate new etiquette emerge. Here in western Massachusetts, we don’t just follow the CDC guidelines: we embrace them with a sense of humor and an air of courtesy. Sometimes we add a dash of panache. As a bottom line, we … Read More