It’s spring, and pretty soon everyone’s garden will be erupting in bloom. That includes our neighbor’s camellia tree, with which I have a deeply ambivalent relationship.

Sometimes, in relationships, people say that they want to be known. They also say that they want to be seen. It’s worth considering whether those two wishes are not the same.

When I heard that the path of the solar eclipse was going to arc right through Cleveland, I called up an old friend who lives there part time and asked if I could crash with him that weekend. He said yes.

If you wander around downtown Berkeley, with your gaze turned downward rather than trained on the always colorful local inhabitants, you’ll soon run across one of several dozen metal medallions that have been fixed to the sidewalks in seemingly random spots.

It’s not in our nature to be stagnant.

There are going to be times when you don’t know what to do--when it seems like there’s nothing that you can do. There are going to be things that aren’t your fault, that you can’t control, and that you can’t fix.

By dividing the world into tidy compartments, we make it more predictable, more manageable--and a little more dull.

We live in fear that we’ll be discovered for the frauds we truly are, and that we’ll be shamed and humiliated as soon as our masks are lifted.

Once in a while, you’ll hear the phrase “self-authorship.” It conjures up the image of a novelist, cloistered away in their study, hunched over a keyboard, tapping out a stream of thoughts and images from their singular imagination until it fills the previously empty page. It’s a compelling vision, but a misleading one.

When I misbehaved as a kid, my parents put me in timeout behind the door to the basement stairs. I never actually went down the stairs, where the oil heater made weird noises, and mice scurried around amid the boxes and garden tools, and there were probably dead bodies hidden behind the wood pile.

We put our time and energy into daily worries, momentary squabbles and short term plans, as if they’re the most important things in the world. And all the while, the sand keeps trickling to the bottom of the hourglass in a steady, unrelenting stream.

Our 12-year-old Pippa is well into full-on adolescence now, and we’re always a little off balance with her, adjusting on the fly. As she forms her new identity and ventures out into the world with it, there’s much to wonder at and admire, but there are also moments of sadness. For me, one of the hardest has been watching her put on her emotional armor everyday.

All around us, little notes of slight dissonance add shimmer and movement and possibility to an otherwise static world.

It’s an unfortunate misconception of our age that all of us should be striving to achieve a state of uninterrupted happiness. If we aren’t happy, something must be wrong.

When we create a story, we take the raw clay of our daily lives and mold it into something that contains meaning. When we share that story, we offer not only the beauty of the vessel, but the meaning within.

On the short list of primary emotions, anger often gets a bad rap.

When we talk about cultivating gratitude, it sounds like labor--as if we need to get out a rake and hoe and start pushing dirt around in the garden. Maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. What would happen, now that autumn has left its first chill in the air, if we thought about gratitude as a form of harvest instead?

If the point of communication is to make a connection with someone, there are two components of a message that need to work in tandem: authenticity and kindness. Both are necessary if you want to communicate in a way that brings people together, rather than driving them apart.

Years ago, I came up with a concept that’s been helpful whenever some proverbial shit hits my metaphorical fan. I call it the “Existence Tax.”

Just as we simultaneously crave and fear newness, we love and hate familiarity. With no novelty in our lives, we become complacent and bored, yet we hate to give up the comfort and ease that familiarity brings.