Great piece, and thank you. Perhaps (and please) correct/remove the s at the end of "studies of the Sierras"

We "Sierra" are already plural......

I also used to find it troubling. Thankfully, I am now beginning to find it hilarious.
Reminds me of the 2 faces of the theatre: tragedy and comedy.
The authors here speak of a mindfulness approach. The Buddhist texts that I have read frequently speak of people as being in a kind of somnambulistic trance from which they need to awaken - and that when people awaken, they tend to do a lot less talking. Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know, as Lao Tzu said. Yet if I say that these people act as if they are in a trance (and talk too much), am I not committing the hubris of claiming to be enlightened? And if I make the simpler diagnosis that these people have some kind of compulsion to be controlling and manipulative, am I not acting in the same way when I seek to influence them to change? But then, if I do not seek to change them, am I being indifferent to the suffering that I understand them to be bringing to the children in their care? Does it even matter - isn't suffering inevitable, so that those who seem to escape it only come to suffer from being shallow?
"Death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back." (Gladiator)
In the end all I really know is what company I like to keep. And that mathematics, compared to life, is wonderfully uncomplicated.