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The Bamboo Forest

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“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sysiphus

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Change This Post

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Barely a month into the New Year, I can already feel my resolutions shifting beneath my feet. Institutional change is elusive, and personal transformation can be downright brutal.

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Truth Eternal

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My best friend for fifty years is the real communicator in our marriage.

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The Housetops

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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 increasingly feels like receding resistance to the commitment, here are my initial offerings from @TheHousetops.

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The Life You Change May Be Your Own

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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 1986.

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A Moment of Giants

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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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Throw Me the Ball! (Side B)

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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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The Lemonade Stand

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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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As the Crow Rightly Flies

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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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What Flag Are You Flying?

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If the proper aim of life were handwritten on a secret card before we drew our first breath, what would it say? 

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Irrational Will

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The proper aim of life, even at its least creative, is handwritten on a secret card placed face down on the table before we draw our first breath. Our mothers, by some undiscoverable trick of love and light, seem always to know each word on the underside of not just their own card but of ours as well. 

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Silver Water

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Being and Change is a U-tube. But what is a U-tube when it’s at home?

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Transformatives: An Introduction

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Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.  David Bohm Author’s Preface I began this post as a placeholder for the introduction to five articles on the topic of what I have come to call in my work, Transformatives. What happened instead is worth summarizing before proceeding to the […]

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Mark’s Bookshelf

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(For Mark Magleby) I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland This post owes its title to a short story in Adventures in Contentment in which David Grayson, the pseudonymous author and principal hero of Ray Stannard Baker’s early 20th-century tales about pastoral life in western Massachusetts, meets and flips the fortunes of a door-to-door book agent to surprising effect. The agent, […]

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Faucets

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Why do I write? I write to remember. I write to understand. I write to change. Scott Knell This morning, as I waited for my head to clear to the sight and sound of running water in my bathroom sink, I found myself staring at a familiar object posing as the favorite faucet of my youth. I had just run a finger across the top of a mirage reflected in its polished nickel–a water spot? […]

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Time’s Gravity

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[This post was originally published in three parts: First Person Metacognitive; Then, Now, & Yet; and Nowland. All three parts have been re-consolidated into this post.] Part I. First Person Metacognitive I have a full-scale map of the United States. One mile equals one mile. Last summer I folded it. Steven Wright Before he retired to minister to people’s hearts in a more figurative way, world-renown cardiovascular surgeon and medical pioneer Dr. Russell M. Nelson […]