Last weekend, my husband, Jim and I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. At the end, we opened our fortune cookies. Mine was bland and offered lucky numbers. But Jim’s fortune was specific and intriguing: “Three months from this date, good things will happen.” We laughed and calculated the date in mid-May when good things [...]
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I was walking through the parking lot at work this week, getting to campus early to catch up on a few things. I zipped in and parked at the far end of the lot to get a little exercise on my way into the office. While I made mental lists of things to do for [...]
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Nicholas Carr asks what the internet is doing to our brains. His answer: rewiring it for easy distraction. He observes that the way we read online–with constant distractions–is actually changing the way our neural pathways work, with the resulting effect of limiting our ability for sustained attention to a long reading. It is good to [...]
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After sending the seventy disciples out to preach, Jesus listened to what they had to say upon their return. They recounted many wonders, to which Jesus replied “Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see [...]
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One of my favorite characters in fiction is Konstantin Dmitrich Levin in Leo Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina. Levin is an intelligent young aristocrat with a powerful conscience and a strong thirst for truth. He abandons the Orthodox Christianity of his childhood and seeks an answer to the meaning of life. He finds none. For [...]
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Something to think about | “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves. [...]
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Back in my coaching days I learned to develop a particular kind of vision: I saw details of my athletes’ performance that others would miss. This one slouched a bit; that one overreached; and so on. The vision was the product of careful, attentive, even loving work. What others saw was just a boat full [...]
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When I was in grade school, I was a daydreamer. I could get lost in the view out of the classroom window, in the display on the bulletin board at the side of the room, or in the stories at the back of my reader—although I was never reading the ones we happened to be [...]
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“Look, listen, and feel.” These are the basic instructions of any CPR course. Why? Because we know from experience that in order to help a person who appears to be in physical distress, it is important first to see what is really going on before intervening, lest one do more harm than good. Let’s look [...]
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