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Consistency is Key: Start Fresh This Year
The skeleton key for self-improvement is one’s commitment to consistency. Make your effort this year count.
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How Childhood Friendships Shape Adult Lives
Busy lives are no excuse to sidestep the need for meaningful friendships. Real social connections are daily vitamins that support our well-being.
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Winter Chills and Home Renovations: Tackling Decades of Wear
There’s no more hiding from the cracks in the walls or the uneven countertops. It’s time to do some work.
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The Balance Between Control and Acceptance
What happens when we lose control of a moment and can’t get it back? Is our effort best spent wrestling with the impossible, or do we shift toward the idea of acceptance?
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Time Awareness: Living Beyond the Rush
The days fall like dominoes, spilling one into the next. We stand beyond them like spectators, watching time toppling along an infinite string. These are our days. They belong to us, but we treat them as if they’re perpetual. We know they can be snatched away, yet we do little to change our behavior. It’s…
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Denver’s Autumn: A Stubborn Dance of Leaves and Cold
As Denver slides into the last days of autumn, a few stubborn leaves cling to the trees. An early snow tried knocking them loose. The bora wind blew heaps to the ground. The trees now stand like towering dendrites, stripped of their color and ready for winter. I rise early and stare from the window…
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Breaking the Cycle of Mindless Buying
Stuff. It’s everywhere, and our piles of it keep growing. Big Box stores peddle stuff to us like drug dealers. Online retailers use slick marketing to jam it down our throats. Buying things provides a ready hit of dopamine that keeps us sprinting along the hedonic treadmill. The more we buy, the more it seems…
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Rediscovering Travel: Beyond Passport Stamps
On my recent trip to China, I was humming along, happy to feel my feet pushing down on new earth. Professionally, my life’s work was the culmination of this moment: I was being paid to travel and to do so in style. 20 years ago, the idea seemed like a pipedream. The only ways into…
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A Taste of Taipei: Coffee, Cuisine, and Culture
I get it. I understand the hype. It’s not the neon signs flooding the downtown streets. Nor is it the narrow towers and low buildings all smashed together in a bouquet of steel. It’s the little things, the details bleeding through. The microcosmic streets with their bakers, baristas, and shoe repairmen; the smells wafting from…
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China Then and Now: Part II
This is “Part II” of an essay I published here last week. For context, here’s a link to that piece: China Then and Now: Part I I’m confused. Where is the trash that littered the streets during my last visit? Why is no one hocking phlegm against the pavement? And what happened to the plumes…
Stirring Point 