of the people I know seem to have a deep sense of purpose. Whether working for racial justice, teaching children to read, making inspiring art, or collecting donations of masks and face shields for hospitals during the pandemic, they’ve found ways to blend their passion, talents, and care for the world in a way that infuses their lives with meaning. Luckily for them, having a purpose in life is associated with all kinds of benefits. Research suggests that purpose is tied to having better health, longevity, and even economic success. It feels good to have a sense of purpose, knowing that you are using your skills to help others in a way that matters to you. But... posted on Aug 12 2020 (11,168 reads)

source Thomas Schwatke By bringing fresh air to persistent challenges, we can get past feeling overwhelmed to make a better world together. That's what we do at THE OUTSIDE: we help collaborators get unstuck with pivotal events, capacity-building, and strategy that sparks significant change. Today, we explore the key ingredient to change that makes a difference: equity. A conscious practice of equitable systems change often begins with a bang—an abrupt coming-to, a sad realization, a peak of failure or outcry or injustice. Something urgent enough to make us realize the effectiveness and relevance of our systems is diminishing exponentially. From higher up than ... posted on Sep 15 2020 (6,169 reads)

to start to actually have a more conscious, embodied sort of relationship with that alchemical process that’s going on all the time. I mean, just the ways that we are attempting to make sense of our experience is an alchemical sort of endeavor. I think one of the gifts that alchemy offers us is this idea that of course, many of us have heard, that there’s a certain gold, right? There’s a certain jewel, gold, or silver, or a lapis, you have the stone, the ruby, whatever images you want to use. There is some kind of gold that’s found, not in a wound that’s actually already healed, right? The gold isn’t found in a healed wound. The gold is found&mdash... posted on Dec 12 2020 (6,023 reads)

more psychological answer: These are very, very hard subjects, and it's easier to talk about funerary rituals and who's throwing cowrie shells or doing incantations or prayers or wrapping the body in a shroud. Let’s talk about funerary rituals and all the stereotypes that were swirling about while the outbreak was happening. You point out that many people were examining the spread of Ebola through a lens of exoticization. How do you hope that the book adds nuance to blameful images associated with Ebola? I have never not encountered this distorting interpretive grid. Go right through the list of places that PIH has worked, places I've seen and written abo... posted on Dec 16 2020 (3,816 reads)

humans, we inevitably experience harm: we feel hurt, we get hurt, and we hurt others. We free ourselves from this experience not by imagining we can escape harm but knowing we can heal it— moving from wound to scar—and then learning to love the scars. This can, of course, be the work of a lifetime. Luckily, I have long loved scars. When I was four, I accidentally cut my left eye. As a result, a small scar formed directly under my eye and inside the eye, where the pupil stayed dilated with a keyhole in it. After I had the eye removed at twenty-one, a photographer I knew told me she wanted to record people’s scars, so I asked her to photograph me with my empty socket. I... posted on Jul 4 2021 (5,373 reads)

am happier now, after the angst of my earlier years. Those years were rough. I started life in a factory as a coiled mix of copper and zinc being pressed into a small, cup-like shape. Then I was pulled mechanically into a cylinder and stretched to form a tight tube. Even the memory is painful: in order to be stretched without breaking, I had to be heated, annealed, pickled, rinsed, and measured, over and over. After that, machining tools pinched off the top of me , stamped my bottom, and jammed me into a permanent tubular shape. I won’t even share the details of what followed: the whirring lathe, the cutting, the punching of the “flash hole”, the final sealing that ... posted on Dec 13 2021 (2,266 reads)

is “that hypervigilant feeling that escalates swiftly to a sense of catastrophe and doom,” writes Ellen Vora, M.D., in her new book, The Anatomy of Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming the Body’s Fear Response. Anxiety is “as grounded in the body as it is in the mind.” Too often, she argues, we turn to only mental solutions for what is in part a physical problem. That resonates with me. When I feel anxious, some solutions I try—like talking to a friend or watching TV—are hit or miss. Over the years, the only foolproof remedies I’ve found have to do with the body: A good high-intensity workout is bound to make me feel better, ... posted on Apr 7 2022 (9,042 reads)

essay is adapted from Embracing Unrest: Harness Vulnerability to Tame Anxiety and Spark Growth (October 2022, 274 pages) published by Page Two Books. When was the last time you felt anxious, with your body braced and on edge? It could have been when your partner was late coming home and you couldn’t reach them on their cell, your computer crashed just before a deadline, your child had a full-on tantrum in the grocery store, or you were waiting on medical test results. In that moment, how did you respond? Maybe you grabbed a bag of cheese puffs, or had a sudden impulse to tidy the kitchen, or found yourself online shopping for that incredibly useful cauliflower core... posted on Apr 5 2023 (6,334 reads)

the lyrics of the iconic happiness anthem to find surprising science-tested insights on well-being. In 1988, Bobby McFerrin wrote one of the most beloved anthems to happiness of all time. On September 24 that year, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” became the first a cappella song to reach #1 on the Billboard Top 100 Chart. But more than a mere feel-good tune, the iconic song is brimming with neuroscience and psychology insights on happiness that McFerrin — whose fascinating musings on music and the brain you might recall from World Science Festival’s Notes & Neurons — embedded in its lyrics, whether consciously or not. T... posted on Dec 22 2011 (41,785 reads)

Ronald Reagan has to do with gorilla costumes, Shakespeare and fake pennies.   The intricate mechanisms of the human mind are endlessly fascinating. We’ve previously explored various facets of how the mind works — from how we decide towhat makes us happy to why music affects us so deeply — and today we’re turning to when it doesn’t: Here are five fantastic reads on why we err, what it means to be wrong, and how to make cognitive lemonade out of wrongness’s lemons. BEING WRONG The pleasure of being right is one of the most universal human addictions and most of us spend an extraordinary amount of effort on avoidi... posted on Nov 11 2011 (9,257 reads)

the end of your life” a friend once asked,  “What do you hope to have happened?” I thought it a great question and decided to give him a thoughtful answer, so I pocketed it for later and bought myself a month for the assignment. For a while my mind flooded with questions of plot. Will I fall in love? Will I have kids? Will I know passion in my work? Will I touch lives? Will I change the world? For the better? What will my regrets be? Where will I have traveled? Where will I have lived? Will I have really traveled? Will I have really lived? When I was a kid watching movies, I used to shout during tense scenes, “Ah! What’s gonna happen!?”&nbs... posted on Nov 8 2011 (39,124 reads)

fewer hours could save our economy, save our sanity, and help save our planet.     Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.   Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That's the formula. The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of l... posted on Jan 12 2012 (45,592 reads)

van. One father. One son. Thirty-one cities. 30,724 pounds lost among 1,516 participants. 1,255,740 views on YouTube. When Ben Davis makes a promise to his Meemaw, he means business. It was Christmas Eve of 2008 when Ben’s grandmother expressed her concern for him simply by asking whether he was happy.    “I was 360 pounds,” Ben told me. “I was in a deep depression, I had lost a relationship as a direct result of the depression—I was, in no way, happy—and her inquisition that night … it pushed me to really examine my life and spurred me to get it together. To get a grip and get my life back on track.” Inspired, he... posted on Jan 4 2012 (11,976 reads)

it’s dawned on me: We humans are creatures of the mind. We perceive the world according to our core, often unacknowledged, assumptions. They determine, literally, what we can see and what we cannot. Nothing so wrong with that, perhaps—except that, in this crucial do-or-die moment, we’re stuck with a mental map that is life-destroying. And the premise of this map is lack—not enough of anything, from energy to food to parking spots; not enough goods and not enough goodness. In such a world, we come to believe, it’s compete or die. The popular British writer Philip Pullman says, “we evolved to suit a way of life which is acquisitive, territor... posted on Apr 10 2012 (28,712 reads)

secret of success is concentrating interest in life… interest in the small things of nature… In other words to be fully awake to everything.” With Father’s Day around the corner, let’s take a moment to pay heed to some of the wisest, most heart-warming advice from history’s famous dads. Gathered here are five timeless favorites, further perpetuating my well-documented love of the art of letter-writing. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In a 1933 letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgeraldproduced this poignant and wise list of things to worry, not worry, and think about, found in the altogether excellent F. ... posted on Jun 17 2012 (20,139 reads)

was gone for almost a year, all told. I was on a bike, in a tent, most of that year. Before leaving, I had tucked into the deepest corner of my back pannier my house keys, small jangling embodiments of a fact that served as both security blanket and threat throughout my 3,500 mile bike ride: eventually, I would go back home. When you’re in constant movement, stationary life becomes an image from memory. You can be so strung out on the curve of the road it doesn’t hit you quite right to be in a room. A room with a door is even weirder. When you walk into the room called your room, the air has a hazy shadowiness to it. It f... posted on Jul 26 2012 (13,267 reads)

a world record holding sprinter from South Africa. She's a spunky 5-year-old from Essex, England. In an inspiring series of images that have recently gone viral, the two strangers, united only by a stubborn refusal to let double amputations stop them, race each other in a friendly bionic foot race. Oscar "Blade Runner" Pistorious, 25, was just 11 months old when doctors discovered he had no fibulas, requiring below-the-knee amputations of both his legs. Ellie May Challis lost both her hands and legs at 16 months, after contracting a severe case of meningitis. Although Ellie was originally fitted with standard prosthetics, the toddler found them difficult to ... posted on Aug 10 2012 (71,367 reads)

have to keep them alive. In 1973, I had gone to visit my favorite forests and swim in my favorite stream before leaving for Canada to do my Ph.D. But the forests were gone, and the stream was reduced to a trickle. When officials arrived at the forest, the women held up lighted lanterns although it was broad daylight: “We have come to teach you forestry.” I decided to become a volunteer for the Chipko movement, and I spent every vacation doing pad yatras (walking pilgrimages), documenting the deforestation and the work of the forest activists, and spreading the message of Chipko. One of the dramatic Chipko actions took place in the Himalayan village of Adwani i... posted on Feb 13 2013 (17,541 reads)

to come, listed in roughly the order in which they were published. There’s a Personal Cost to Callousness. In March, researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, published a study in Psychological Science that should make anyone think twice before ignoring a homeless person or declining an appeal from a charity. Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne found that after people were instructed to restrain feelings of compassion in the face of heart-wrenching images, those people later reported feeling less committed to moral principles. It was as if, by regulating compassion, the study participants sensed an inner conflict between valuing morality an... posted on Mar 13 2013 (19,678 reads)

the student body of an elite private school in Silicon Valley was given the chance to vote on who would give their graduation address this year, they chose a man named Nipun Mehta. An unexpected choice for these teenagers, who belong to what Time magazine called the "Me Me Me Generation". Nipun's journey is the antithesis of self-serving. More than a decade ago, he walked away from a lucrative career in high-tech, to explore the connection between inner change and external impact. ServiceSpace, the nonprofit he founded, has now drawn over 450,000 members across the globe. In this electrifying address that garnered a standing ovation, he calls out the paradoxical crisis of... posted on May 27 2013 (550,682 reads)