7 for Sunday

There’s a wonderful little story that goes with that photo: I snapped it (on a Canon digital camera) just as I was dashing out of the building. At one point in time, my wife was a mathematics professor, at a small college which arranged a class trip to Japan and extended an invitation to faculty…

This might not age well, but is permanently burned into my brain: When things get difficult and there is also a time constraint, I sometimes mutter: “Pick the lock, don’t look at the dogs.” It’s a reference to an ancient Magnum, P.I. episode where Magnum is trying to get into his patron’s Ferrari, as Higgins’s…

I’ve lately been working through reading many, short interviews with people of varying degrees of fame and success. Most of them don’t particularly interest me. “But wait,” you’re thinking, “why would you bother to read a bunch of things which don’t particularly interest you?” What I’m looking for, in both fiction and documentary, are moments…

Nostalgia totally sounds like some sort of prescription nasal spray that pops up in one of those interstitial, web-page ads. It’s potent enough that it certainly shouldn’t be as readily available as it is. The instant I begin to cast my mind back 30 years to when I was participating in building the Internet and…

I feel that I waste so many moments. I suspect you do too, because that’s the human experience as far as I’ve seen. Hold in mind some moments you feel you’ve recently wasted. Don’t focus on the usual patsy, your phone. Think more broadly and find a few examples of time you wasted . .…

I’ve been struggling of late. The Police quote below is very apropos. I think I’ve optimized too much of the frivolity out of life. The cure, obviously is to systematize my reading! …no, just kidding. For the first 30+ years I was a voracious reader of fiction; mostly science-fiction, but also straight up classics, literature…

An extremely fast way to get to mindfulness—this is the fastest way I’ve found so far—is to think: This may well be the last time I do this. The last walk. The last boulder I scramble upon. The last conversation with this person. The last conversation ever. The last word I type. The last sentence…

I sometimes talk about “moving forward” as a default mindset I have. For example, all other things being equal, go to the airport and wait in the terminal, not a home. But in the end, it all boils down to my having deeply apprehended the lesson that the first 90% of everything is vastly easier…

Calm technology. Slow thought. Peace. We need a philosophy of Slow Thought to ease thinking into a more playful and porous dialogue about what it means to live. ~ Vincenzo Di Nicola from, https://aeon.co/essays/take-your-time-the-seven-pillars-of-a-slow-thought-manifesto We can each do some things, and not everything. Choose wisely. Journaling I find that whatever hindrances occur I write just about…

I’ve recently started reading a book about the importance of having exactly one thing upon which to focus. As with priority, becoming priorities, focusing on exactly one thing soon becomes two, and then three. Suddenly, it’s 23 things. And since the first 90% of any thing is vastly easier than the second 90%, in short order I’m busy, overwhelmed, sprinting…