13 Minute Read
A longer-than-average post about shorter-than-average words and the subliminal messages they breathe into our mind’s ear.
1 min read
Say the Change
Declarations of Being & Becoming
1 min read
When’s Your Tide?
If, as my mother taught me, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, from what fictional materials must the journey not taken be made? (more…)
1 min read
When’s Your Time?
Beginning seven hundred years ago, young people were apprenticed to a master until they could come into their own as skilled workers and contributors. Today, we use terms like 'intern' and 'trainee' to describe an apprentice system that prepares its graduates for positions of choice and accountability. (more…)
1 min read
When’s Your Turn?
When leading a meeting or presentation, it's never a bad idea to consider that your busy audience might have been tempted to skip it. To recapture their attention, prepare your remarks as if listeners were in the middle of the biggest crisis of their week and only you possess the information they need to get through it. (more…)
1 min read
When’s Your Truck?
When pondering the future, it might sometimes seem easier just to let the present take us there, no questions asked. Fortunately, if awkward, even painful, the world has a way of begging certain questions. And when it does, maybe we should think twice before choosing not to answer them. (more…)
1 min read
When’s Your Train?
Remember that proverbial squirrel spinning its heart out inside the black box of anything that is mysteriously mobile? If Erwin Schrödinger was right, before looking under the lid, there's an equal chance the mysterious power source is something else entirely. (more…)
1 min read
His 50-Year Goals
4 Minute Read
In Timor-Leste, I meet a man who foretold the future.
1 min read
Orson Ball’s a Friend of Mine
2 Minute Read
In which I declare a sixty-year-old event, diagnose it thirty years later, and foretell its future thirty years later still.
1 min read
Irrational Will
18 Minute Read
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.
1 min read
Five for a Dollar
8 Minute Read
Your love is such a thrill. But your love won’t pay my bills. —Janie Bradford & Berry Gordy, Money
1 min read
Silver Water
7 Minute Read
Being and Change is a U-tube. But what is a U-tube when it’s at home?
1 min read
Consider the Chatbot
4 Minute Read
This post was mostly written by a computer scientist/physicist friend of mine, Ken Ritley, and his favorite AI. It took me all of two minutes to sprinkle about my contribution to Ken’s dialog with a machine. Judge for yourself which of its three authors speaks to you.
1 min read
Beauty for Ashes
11 Minute Read
In which I pose the question to anyone who stopped (or started) something because of the Pandemic: Have you now restarted (or stopped) it?
1 min read
Performing ‘on Broadway’
11 Minute Read
Or How I Inadvertently—and Then Intentionally—Impersonated a Secret Service Agent at a Special Preview of The Phantom of the Opera.
1 min read
The Newing of an Old Word
< 1 Minute Read
In which I posit the restoration of a changeful idea.
1 min read
Wounded Are the Meek
7 Minute Read
In which I restore a forgotten nuance of a blessed life.
1 min read
The Kindness of Strangers
11 Minute Read
In which I commit to becoming the stranger I wish to meet in the world.
1 min read
Falling Objects
18 Minute Read
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
67 min read
Transformatives: An Introduction
44 Minute Read
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 […]
18 min read
Mark’s Bookshelf
12 Minute Read
(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 ageng. The agent, after his meek […]
14 min read
Faucets
9 Minute Read
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? […]
1 min read
Schrödinger’s Cat Burglar
12 Minute Read
The truth of something is not the thing itself, only the knowledge of it.–Stephen Covey
26 min read
Time’s Gravity
17 Minute Read
[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 […]