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China Then and China Now: Part 1
In 2005, a friend and I spent just shy of a month wandering across southern China. From Hong Kong to Lijiang, we bounced on overnight buses and multi-day trains through lush farmland and sprawling cities. We sought a version of China not found in western media. And we earned this by collecting stomach aches, sleeping…
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Lost in Layovers: The Art of Drifting Between Flights
I’m somewhere between space and time, lost in a haze of airport purgatory. Crossing oceans, hopping date lines, and bouncing from continent to continent has me tangled like a bucket of old ropes. Modern travel is an absolute miracle and would blow the minds of our ancestors. Its efficiency, though, leaves a bowl of clock…
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Why Validation Can’t Replace Real Effort
When we engage in activities aimed at self-improvement, we often do so with the sense that we are somehow accruing credit for our effort. We do accrue rewards from our labor: supple muscles from a daily yoga routine, stronger heartbeat regulation from targeted breathing exercises, greater mental acuity from brain games and puzzles. An autotelic…
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Echoes of Home: Revisiting a City of Memories
My fingers run along the walls, remembering the various bumps and scars. Memories of past decades linger here like dust particles in the sunlight. I walk through their clouds, feeling nostalgia’s tingle as it lands on my skin. I’ve left this place, but it never left me. Foreign lands and exotic faces kept calling. The…
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Thoughts on Deep Work: Part Two
This piece is a continuation of last week’s essay. For context, here’s a link to that entry: Thoughts on Deep Work. Note: All direct quotes in the below essay are attributed to Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work. If you’ve toyed with carving out time for your deep work and have managed to do…
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Thoughts on “Deep Work”
I’m reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work as I write this, and the ideas, while easily distilled down to a concentrate, require a closer look. The below is my partial summary of the text, and for those interested in exploring more, read his book; it’s time well spent. What is “deep work?” “Deep work is the…
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Just My Luck
The next 6 weeks should be a doozy. From my now-home in Denver, Colorado, I’ll fly east to my childhood home in the Poconos, Pennsylvania, for a first sip of autumn air. I’ll follow this with a visit to my spiritual home in Vermont, where I’ll plunge into the cool waters of Dog Pond by…
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Breaking the Illusions: The Power of Resistance in Overcoming Delusions
I’ve spent large chunks of my life in states of delusion. Not the hard, debilitating delusion that schizophrenia induces. And not hallucinatory delusions brought on by a drug-fueled frenzy. Like most people, I suffer from soft, arrogant delusions that compel me to believe I’m something different from what I actually am in the world. Delusional…
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Fiction: Creating a Character
*The following is a short piece of fiction, aimed at developing a character from an odd point of view.* His face told a story of pain, as if death somehow found him before life did. Being alive was not the same as living. He moved, shifted, breathed and ate. These were chores, not pleasures, and…
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Meditation on Travel
This piece is a short meditation on travel. I want real travel to give me a fat lip. Like a stiff jab from a blind angle, I want to feel it land and eat the punch. I don’t mean vacations. I’m not claiming all the time. But a hard-nosed wander through foreign terrain? A dust-kicking…
Stirring Point 