Photo by Laura Vinck on Unsplash We access more light when we don’t deny darkness Forget causality. Forget deserved. Forget sin and karma. I mean, if we really want to pick any of those back up — we can do that. But for now, let’s just imagine not asking ourselves why bad things happen to people. Especially the good […]
Tag: Stoicism
Photo by Ashton Bingham on Unsplash Turning disappointment into the story you’ll want to live When a toddler squeals, Do it again!, she’s joyfully learning through repetition. When she’s six years old and yells, Do-over!, she either wants to prove that she can do what she wasn’t able to demonstrate moments before, or to argue that the […]
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The Cancer of Privileged Expectations
Photo by Pixabay How to kill delusions of getting our way while keeping hope alive “Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.” — Margaret Mitchell Everyone has their blind spots. Blame nature, nurture, hard-to-break habits. One of my weaknesses is that I conflate hope and expectation. Just because I really want something and work hard to […]
Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash Should you keep trying? Between the facts of shared DNA, cultural expectations, and the ecstatic families portrayed on social media lies a fiction. It goes something like this: Being related means that we can relate to family members in ways we can’t with those outside the family. Although we know […]
Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Upsplash Just before Christmas, I asked a friend if she could push our lunch back 30 minutes so I could finish writing some recommendation letters. Over lunch, we talked about how we imagine “boundaries” of work, volunteering, family and personal life. Less a bitch-and-moan session than trying to figure it out. […]
Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash Resolutions have a dismal success rate: a quarter fail by mid-January and less than 10 percent are deemed successful by year’s end. The problem isn’t that we’re lazy or that winter is a lousy time to punish ourselves (although getting up at 6 a.m. to run in 20-degree weather isn’t […]
Jodi Barnes 