"What You Hear in a Whisper"
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I have recently written my first Instagram posts. Four, in fact. They represent the consummation of a 25-year intention to be deliberate about the life of the spirit. Now that I have broken through what seems a fading resistance to such a simple endeavor, here are my initial offerings from @TheHousetops.
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I write history the way some people read horoscopes. What is history, after all, but prophecy in reverse? The following story is true both root and branch. Like O. Henry’s leaf painter (and at P.’s request), I have camouflaged in its undergrowth of strange names and places a vine of living history more or less as P. recounted it to me on Christmas Sunday 1988.
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There are giants in the sky! There are big tall terrible giants in the sky! Stephen Sondheim The day I met Ray Bradbury, he gave it as his life’s dream that there might one day be a museum on every street corner. “Perspective is everything, you see. We come to this planet with a sacred obligation to preserve for the future the record of every success and failure of the past.”
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“These are kids. It’s a game! You should be ashamed.” Before taking a summer break from writing, I posted Side A of this two-parter, suggesting that when tight ends, teachers, and emergency medical responders demand ‘the ball,’ they do so largely from their heart. Intrinsically prepared and quietly confident, they sense that in their hands, the situation can only get better. But if their motives are ‘largely’ unselfish, what are we to make of those […]
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“There is no such thing as a long-term, sustainable, competitive advantage.” So preached my graduate school Microeconomics professor, often enough that the old saw about the supply bone connecting to the demand bone sums up the totality of my remembrance from business school forty years after graduation. That, and, of course, The Lesson of the Lemonade Stand.
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Is There Method in Your Migration? [For Josh] Through my library window this morning, I spied above me several murders. One after another, a dozen crows each, they jagged toward some unknown conspiracy convening somewhere to my north-north-west. They came our way for years, in October-November, until bird flu knocked them from the sky a decade or so back. They must have resurrected.
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(Continued from a LinkedIn post published July 2, 2024. To read this story in one go, click here.)
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Or the Strange and Ironical Case of Functional Living.
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“So, what’s it going to be?” invites the savvy supervisor, loathe to micromanage, slow to bail out her team, and dead determined not to have the last word.
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So, Too, Is This Subtitle.
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Cost no object; what would you take in exchange for your integrity?
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Can you solve the Riddle of the Six?
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“There are only two sorts of people on this planet. Those who consume culture and those who create it.”
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Some risks pose the probability of losing everything against the possibility of winning everything before that happens.
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Confused about good and evil? Consider this modern cancellation of Heaven and Hell and see where it takes you.
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If ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,’ what is your response when the needed thing just needs doing?
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Nothing presses on greatness harder than the expectation of more greatness still.
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“With all due respect to journalists,” my father told me at an impressionable age, “lawyers hang their mistakes, doctors bury theirs, but architects and engineers fix theirs.”
