7 for Sunday

I really do know what it is that I should be doing. I can tell you that it often feels like it will be soul-crushing work. Which really doesn’t make sense when I take the time to think about it. As I turn over each ‘should’ in my mind, they’re all things I want to…

We have a vision of The Thing we’re about to do. You know The Thing I mean. It can be in progress now, due tomorrow or just off in the future a bit. It’s the writing, the painting, that podcast episode, the project at work, the family you’re thinking about starting, or the exam at…

I get frustrated when it becomes apparent that my hard-won knowledge had a limited lifespan. I’m left trying to pound square pegs into round holes. Take goal-setting for example; in the beginning of my journey I had no knowledge about how to set goals, later I learned how to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic,…

From the first issue of 7 for Sunday, I’ve always wondered if I’d make it to 100, and I’m glad I stuck with it. Some weeks it was a right struggle to get it done. In a very real sense, knowing there were readers out there gave me a goal to get through some dark…

The creative journey, writ small, is sometimes (Ira Glass among others) described in six or so steps. They go as follows: I used to think I wasn’t really a “creative” person; Sure, I would always have agreed that I was creative, in the “good at problem solving” sense… but creative? …you mean like an artist?!…

It really matters that you start. It doesn’t matter where you start; Start where you are (in your years, your journey, your beliefs) and lean into the first thing which sparks a question within you. Benevolence and self-direction […] are usually near the top of the values we all share. Each of us also has…

The other day I took out a small, blank slip of paper. Then, thinking “what are the areas of focus in my life?” I tried to come up with the fewest number of areas. I wrote the first one that came to mind, and then I left some space. Then I wrote a second area,…

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…