People talk a lot about personal growth--so much so that it’s become a cliché. But why don’t people talk about relational growth?

When something unexpected or uncomfortable disrupts our lives, there are a couple of ways we can behave: we can either react or respond.

When our wish for the certainty of a simple answer overrides our need to understand the messy truth, Occam's Razor becomes a hatchet, and the cut is neither clean nor precise.

Sometimes I lay awake at night, worrying for hours about things that might happen, or about things that already did. I try to be all Buddhist about it and stop grasping at things I can’t change, but it’s hard to be enlightened when you can’t sleep and you’re grinding your teeth and your monkey-mind is scampering around in your skull at 100 MPH.

During the glow of the holidays, they seemed like such laudable, and maybe even reachable, goals. But now, in the harsh light of our extended holiday hangovers, they don’t look so bright and shiny anymore.

thank you

As bad as people are at giving advice, we’re just as bad at asking for it and accepting it.

There was once a man who sought advice and counsel from a great teacher.

“You seem to be suffering,” said the teacher. “Come, sit, and tell me what I can do to help.”

Our emotions are triggered by our experiences, but they are also molded by our assumptions, our biases and our conclusions.

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.