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 (38,781 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 (45,248 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 (11,935 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 (28,265 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 (20,018 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 (13,197 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 (70,916 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 (16,829 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 (19,470 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 (549,445 reads)

years I assumed that the Titanic tragedy was a result of human arrogance, the belief in the indestructibility of the newest, largest, fastest, fanciest ship of all time. But actually the Titanic went down because of distraction. Other ships had been warning about the iceberg-filled waters for days, but the Titanic’s captain changed course only slightly and did nothing to slow the ship’s speed. When the radio operator received a call from a ship that was surrounded by ice—this was less than an hour before the collision—he responded, “Shut up, shut up, I’m busy.” By the time lookouts spotted the iceberg ahead, it was too late to... posted on Jun 7 2013 (68,315 reads)

lived and as yet unlived, was spread out for examination, that my life was being read like a book, weighed like a stone in the palm of a hand. I saw that everything counted—or, everything real, every tear, all our suffering. That I didn’t “believe” in  any of this—that I was too cool, too skeptical, too educated to be dazzled by experiences that were clearly, had to be, subjective, that I would never resort to hackneyed religious metaphors, and images like weighing and reading—that also didn’t count. My opinions about what I believed or didn’t believe, what I was capable of or not capable of, were just smoke to be brushed a... posted on Jun 21 2013 (83,518 reads)

Burmeister is an Argentine handyman turned filmmaker. Though good at unstopping toilets and repairing windows, he decided to change his path at middle age and make films. Small films. Local films. Free films. Love-infused films. Films that make you feel the joy he clearly manifests in doing them. Daniel is a one-man film crew. When he needs a tracking shot, he hops on a bicycle and records with one hand while steering wobbly with the other. When he wants the effect of a panning shot, he places his subject on a sheet, which someone pulls from off camera, creating the appearance that the camera is panning the subject. Beyond Daniel's ingenuity, though, is a system. Burmeister ... posted on Jun 26 2013 (24,422 reads)

proper function of man is to live - not to exist." -- Jack London Too often we go through life on autopilot, going through the motions and having each day pass like the one before it. That's fine, and comfortable, until you have gone through another year without having done anything, without having really lived life. That's fine, until you have reached old age and look back on life with regrets. That's fine, until you see your kids go off to college and realize that you missed their childhoods. What follows is just a list of ideas, obvious ones mostly that you could have thought of yourself, but that I hope are useful reminders. We all need r... posted on Jul 28 2013 (298,187 reads)

does it mean to be mindful?  Essentially, mindfulness means to be present, and in the moment.  It is important that we remind ourselves of this simple fact.  All too often we can lose the true essence of mindfulness by over-complicating things or putting all our emphasis on the act of meditation alone.  Mindfulness is not something we leave at the chair, but something we can carry through our everyday lives.  If we can apply mindfulness on the chair, then why not while brushing our teeth, catching up with an old friend, or even waiting for our morning train?  All these moments present an opportunity for us to apply mindfulness,... posted on Aug 2 2013 (226,774 reads)

ON KINDNESS BY POETS, SAGES & ACTIVISTS In a dominant paradigm weighted towards self-interest and self-orientation, we must make a special effort to question our mode of being. Can we afford to be narrowly self-focused? Can we grow to anywhere near our true potential if we look out only for ourselves? What role do kindness and compassion play in bridging a world that is growing increasingly fragmented? What follows are five powerful reasons to be kind, articulated by some of the greatest minds and hearts from around the globe. 1. BECAUSE THERE CAN NEVER BE ENOUGH KINDNESS IN THE WORLD Even if we do not achieve perfect peace on earth, because perfect peace is not of this... posted on Sep 3 2013 (156,128 reads)

Seligman, the father of positive psychology, theorizes that while 60 percent of happiness is determined by our genetics and environment, the remaining 40 percent is up to us. In his 2004 Ted Talk, Seligman describes three different kinds of happy lives: The pleasant life, in which you fill your life with as many pleasures as you can, the life of engagement, where you find a life in your work, parenting, love and leisure and the meaningful life, which "consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are." After exploring what accounts for ultimate satisfaction, Seligma... posted on Dec 27 2013 (355,994 reads)

Americans are against sleep, equating it with laziness. But one of the world's leading experts on sleep says that's hurting our relationships and our ability to solve problems. We spend almost a third of our lives asleep, giving more time to sleep than any other activity. Some of us are blessed with easy sleep; others of us suffer from insomnia or sleep disturbance. Yet, until recently, scientists have known very little about the purpose of sleep or how it affects our brains and day-to-day functioning. Matt Walker is an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and Principal Investigator at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory. With the advent of functi... posted on Dec 24 2013 (70,556 reads)

past few years have been marked by two major trends in the science of a meaningful life. One is that researchers continued to add sophistication and depth to our understanding of positive feelings and behaviors. Happiness is good for you, but not all the time; empathy ties us together, and can overwhelm you; humans are born with an innate sense of fairness and morality, that changes in response to context. This has been especially true of the study of mindfulness and attention, which is producing more and more potentially life-changing discoveries. The other factor involves intellectual diversity. The turn from the study of human dysfunction to human s... posted on Jan 23 2014 (128,507 reads)

they are always an offering) to the children if they would like to tell the story of their picture or experience, they were welcome to one by one. It was amazing! All of the children, and there were eighty of them, queued up in line, and for the next several hours, we sat there, and one by one, each child described their picture and told their story. These pictures were filled with imagery of villages being burned, bombers flying from above, limbs being cut off, people being shot. These were images coming from children five to eighteen years of age. It was something we could never have imagined, and here they were expressing it, their memories of it. We realized in that moment, our job wa... posted on Apr 9 2014 (26,187 reads)