A little navel gazing can help, especially if you do it with someone who’s seen their share of innies and outies in their time.

When a loved one passes on from this life, we go through a passage of a different kind. They leave behind a void, and we have to figure out how to fill it.

My strongest memories of those cold, bright autumn days are the smell of burning leaves and the last, lingering warmth of Indian summer, before the long New England winter took hold.

The other day, a friend of mine said: “People can surprise you, but they never break character.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. He may well be right, but it depends on what you mean by character.

The reason this structure keeps coming up is that it helps us satisfy one of our own deepest longings: the longing for meaning.

Our culture is really big on accumulating. In almost every arena, acquiring more seems to be the stated point of the game. More money, more status, more degrees, more possessions, more likes, more clicks.

Ideas are like living beings. They are born, and they develop, and they either bear fruit or die. At each stage of their existence, they need different conditions to grow and thrive, and those conditions are provided in the changing environment of our minds.

There’s a Norwegian man named Aleksander Gamme who’s kind of a professional adventurer. Back in 2012, he decided to ski to the South Pole by himself, and he filmed some of his journey on a GoPro camera.

The other day, I was supporting some workflow changes at a clinic when someone from the HR department dropped by with a therapy dog and his trainer.

I had a plan today. I’m in Bend, Oregon for the week, and I had the day off, so I decided to go hiking near a lake south of town. I got about 10 miles down Hwy 97, and the sky started pissing rain. We make our plans, and the gods laugh.

When you start dancing tango, the only thing they really want you to do is walk. How hard could it be? To this day, it’s not unusual for me to be tango walking with my partner and feel myself on the verge of actually falling down.

In this country, we’re really attached to having lots of choices. We want to go into the grocery store and have 73 different kinds of pasta sauce on the shelves, and we’ll complain if anyone tells us we can’t.

We can have the same thoughts we put in our journal without actually writing them down. What is it about translating those thoughts into ink on paper that has such far-reaching, beneficial effects?

It’s a principle of physics that any object will tend to maintain its current speed and direction unless acted on by an outside force. That applies to more than just our physical beings. Our love of predictability and familiarity gives us a kind of behavioral inertia that acts on us just as surely as gravity or friction.

When people are first learning to paint, many start out with acrylics. They’re cheap, and easy to clean up, and they come in a huge variety of colors. Eventually, though, many artists switch over to oils. The reason, for non-painters, is counterintuitive: oils take longer to dry.

But pain always has its say. If we don't give it a voice, it speaks through our actions.

“It’s tough to make predictions--especially about the future.”

--Yogi Berra

“The Game of Life, The Game of Life, you will learn about life when you play The Game of Life.” --1960’s Milton Bradley commercial

When we feel an uncomfortable emotion, there are two ways we tend to deal with it.

Sometimes, we do our best to deny it. We shove it down the basement stairs and triple-lock the door, then try to ignore all the banging and moaning and screaming.

“What noise? I didn’t hear any noise. It must be the wind.”

That’s kind of the problem with experts—they agree. They coalesce around common wisdom, and fail to see the uncommon, unpredicted world emerging right before their eyes.