you think you’re hearing the word “empathy” everywhere, you’re right. It’s now on the lips of scientists and business leaders, education experts and political activists. But there is a vital question that few people ask: How can I expand my own empathic potential? Empathy is not just a way to extend the boundaries of your moral universe. According to new research, it’s a habit we can cultivate to improve the quality of our own lives. But what is empathy? It’s the ability to step into the shoes of another person, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives, and to use that understanding to guide our actions.... posted on Aug 25 2013 (231,067 reads)

you’re living a distracted life, every minute must be accounted for. You feel like you must be checking something off the list, staring at a screen, or rushing off to the next destination. And no matter how many ways you divide your time and attention, no matter how many duties you try and multi-task, there’s never enough time in a day to ever catch up. That was my life for two frantic years. My thoughts and actions were controlled by electronic notifications, ring tones, and jam-packed agendas. And although every fiber of my inner drill sergeant wanted to be on time to every activity on my overcommitted schedule, I wasn’t. You see, six years ago I was blesse... posted on Sep 13 2013 (133,343 reads)

Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation “Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality.” Given my soft spot for famous diaries, it should come as no surprise that I keep one myself. Perhaps the greatest gift of the practice has been the daily habit of reading what I had written on that day a year earlier; not only is it a remarkable tool of introspection and self-awareness, but it also illustrates that our memory “is never a precise duplicate of the original [but] a continuing act of creation” and how flawed our perception of time is — al... posted on Dec 12 2023 (20,288 reads)

two hefty sacks of cat food in her arms, Manuela Wroblewski can’t stop smiling as she whisks toward the familiar shop on the corner. She’s making her weekly visit to see Hussein the barber. He spots her through the picture window of his quiet shop and bursts through the door and into the sunlight, stretching his arms wide with a Turkish greeting. Hussein clasps his hands in gratitude as he eyes the bags of food and the two hurry over to the tiny food dishes lined up in the alley. Soon the sound of kibble clinks against the bowls and several stiff tailed cats begin to appear. Here in Avsallar, Turkey, there is a cultural aversion to cats and dogs, and those who feed th... posted on Dec 17 2013 (187,126 reads)

Nation and experimented with graffiti. He continued to follow the street art scene from the reservation. In 2003, he traveled to Bahia and ended up spending time with local and international artists. Those three months became a turning point. ”The street art community that had embraced me and stirred something and my soul said ‘keep it going!’” Chip began to make large prints of the photographs in his archives. He boiled wheat paste and drove out at night to paste images on the walls of the roadside jewelry stands. His signature read Jetsonorama. In the morning, he was Dr. Thomas again at the clinic. “Art informs my medicine most immediately. It gets m... posted on Jan 16 2014 (29,134 reads)

self-esteem is an integration of an inner value with things in the world around you.” “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Joan Didion wrote in her timeless meditation on self-respect. But how can character be cultivated in such a way as to foster that prized form of personal dignity, along with its sibling qualities of confidence and self-esteem? That’s what celebrated artist, actor, playwright, and educator Anna Deavere Smith explores in a section of the altogether fantastic Letters to a Young Artist: Straight-up Advice on Making a Life i... posted on Jul 26 2014 (11,914 reads)

do you want to work here?" asked Cleveland Elementary School's principal, interviewing Mary Schriner for a position as a special education kindergarten teacher at the Oakland, California school. "Because your school looks like a prison yard, and I'd like to change that," said Schriner. Six years later, Cleveland sports six lovely gardens that serve as real-world classrooms, an ecoliteracy program for all students, community support and recognition, and student research projects that are making tangible changes in the district food program. For 2010-2011, Cleveland was chosen to serve as a pilot school within a suite of "iconic projects" ... posted on Dec 27 2014 (32,632 reads)

solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.” “One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. Few writers have come to write about it — and to it — more directly than the novelist, poet, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, who describes himself as “a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts.” In his wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collection What Are People For? (public library), Berry addresses with great elegance our neophilic tendencies and why innova... posted on Feb 1 2015 (27,925 reads)

I've discovered, is everything in life." - Isaac Singer Sometimes, all it takes is a small reminder to open our eyes to the beauty and wonder that surrounds us. Lucky for us, we get those reminders every day! For the last 365 days, we have been inspired by innumerable acts of kindness that have touched the lives of thousands of people all over the world. The following stories are some of our favorites from this year. Enjoy! 3,762 Miles Walked and 100 Tons of Trash On an unassuming weekday evening, Jane was at home… as usual. As her thoughts swung between what she was going to do with her life and their dinner plans for the evening, she was unexpecte... posted on Jan 3 2015 (68,344 reads)

service is love made visible. Love letters on flower shaped sticky notes, vegan chocolate chip cookies that can turn anyone into a cookie monster, a sunburst smile that will light up even the wariest of hearts, and a million and one acts of invisible kindness – there is no simple way to capture the boundless spirit of Audrey Lin. Her journey is unconventional. Inspired by “Planet Walker” and the stillness in her heart, Audrey once embarked on a three-day walking pilgrimage from Berkeley to Santa Clara’s Awakin gathering. Her fearless quest for truth called her to experiment as a monastic at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. And her abundance of lov... posted on Feb 17 2015 (21,446 reads)

is good at something. In a ServiceSpace context, that's a daily assumption -- by design. When your organizing principles forbid you to hire staff, or fundraise, or sell anything, you are happily forced to make art with the colors you've got in front of you. And as we've witnessed over the years, creative constraints like these can actually end up seeding inspiring innovations.  Last Wednesday, I met V. R. Ferose, a like-hearted artist who applied this thinking in an unlikely setting: The corporate world. In fact, a tipping point in Ferose's journey came when he published an article in Forbes. The title? Everybody is Good at Something. T... posted on May 27 2015 (28,635 reads)

studies reveal how to deliberately cultivate gratitude in ways that counter materialism and its negative effects. Now that we’re a week into 2015, most of us have come down from the buzz of the holidays and returned to life as normal. And after spending weeks, if not months, obsessing over the gifts and goodies that awaited us in December, some of us may feel a post-holiday hangover, where we realize that we’re probably no happier than we were before we got that new flat screen TV or cappuccino maker. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone tracking the science of happiness, which suggests that material things are unlikely to boost our happiness in a sustained o... posted on Apr 9 2015 (34,950 reads)

to revel in the “sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world.” Nearly a century before  modern neuroscience presented the uncomfortable finding that mind-wandering is making us unhappy, Bertrand Russell contemplated the conquest of happiness and pointed to the immense value of “fruitful monotony” — a certain quality of presence with the ordinary rhythms of life. The diaries and letters of humanity’s greatest minds are strewn with such instances of finding happiness in simple everyday moments, but no one captures the humble grace of presence better than Mary Oliver in one particularly bewitching passage from ... posted on Apr 30 2015 (19,971 reads)

is how other people want us to live our lives… Choosing Must is the greatest thing we can do with our lives.” “Does what goes on inside show on the outside?,” young Vincent van Gogh despaired in a moving letter to his brother while floundering to find his purpose. “Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.” A century later, Joseph Campbell stoked that hearth of the soul with his foundational treatise on finding your bliss. And yet every day, countless hearths and hearts grow ashen in cubicles around the world as we... posted on Jul 1 2015 (15,751 reads)

finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” In contemplating the shortness of life, Seneca considered what it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the h... posted on Aug 3 2015 (1,612 reads)

12 years at Microsoft, 5 of which were spent in India, applying electronic technologies for international development, Kentaro Toyama came to one conclusion: technology is not the answer. In our digital age of exponential tech innovation—where the average American adult spends 11 hours a day on electronic media, the majority of the nation’s cell phone owners sleep with it by their side, and companies like Google and Levis are coming up with ‘smart jeans’— the undercurrents of mainstream culture seem to be marching to the beat of a drum far different from Kentaro’s—one that toots technology as an indefatigable sign of progress.  ... posted on Aug 12 2015 (14,494 reads)

finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” In contemplating the shortness of life, Seneca considered what it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the hope of ar... posted on Aug 3 2015 (12,499 reads)

of the best ways to increase our own happiness is to do things that make other people happy. In countless studies, kindness and generosity have been linked to greater life satisfaction, strongerrelationships, and better mental and physical health—generous people even live longer. What’s more, the happiness people derive from giving to others creates a positive feedback loop: The positive feelings inspire further generosity—which, in turn, fuels greater happiness. And research suggests that kindness is truly contagious: Those who witness and benefit from others’ acts of kindness are more likely to be kind themselves; a single act of kindness spreads through ... posted on Dec 12 2015 (21,605 reads)

been an avid hiker my whole life. From the time I first strapped on a backpack and headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was hooked on the experience, loving the way being in nature cleared my mind and helped me to feel more grounded and peaceful. But, even though I’ve always believed that hiking in nature had many psychological benefits, I’ve never had much science to back me up…until now, that is. Scientists are beginning to find evidence that being in nature has a profound impact on our brains and our behavior, helping us to reduce anxiety, brooding, and stress, and increase our attention capacity, creativity, and our ability to connect with other peo... posted on Mar 20 2016 (27,764 reads)

most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist,”Anne Truitt observed in her ceaselessly insightful diaries, “is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” But if locating that nerve weren’t hard enough, contacting it can be terrifying and staying with the excruciating vulnerability of that contact for a lifetime can feel next to impossible. And yet great artists have managed to make the seemingly unimaginable the raw material of their art. What it takes to master that vulnerable-making discipline is what Annie Dillard — one of the finest writers and most radiant... posted on Apr 15 2016 (13,126 reads)