Category: articles

    For most of my life, I lived a life rooted in fear. I have moved through the valley of death, as the psalmist calls it, and now am on the other side of the divide. Life is different here. Not just different, it is so different that it is in some ways unrelatable.…

    This morning, I witnessed the most wondrous thing. Now you have to know that I believe that everything that grabs my attention in the outer world is a perfect reflection of what is going on in my inner world. Let me elaborate on that a bit. We and everything around us basically are…

    In this world we are bombarded by messages that we should be, do and have both better and more. And as we feel inadequate, never good enough, after years of being standardized, these messages resonate with us. And we start chasing the perfect life. Out there. And sometimes we do get what we…

    There is this wonderful Cherokee tale. You might have heard it. It goes like this: An old Cherokee tells his grandson: “My son, there’s a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, and ego. The other is joy, peace, love, hope, kindness,…

    After I got better, after having been ill for some years, I assumed that all I had to do was to get my life organized again and get rolling again. What I did not understand, until now, is that apart from the parts of my life that I was genuinely loving, I had…

    Remember last week’s essay What do I want? Whenever we express an intention, we will be challenged to come through on that intention. This week, my challenge came in the form of the Ice Bucket Challenge. Unless you have been living under a rock those past months, you will know that this challenge…

  For the past twenty-five years, my predominant question has been ‘What do I want?’ Where other people did seem to have a pretty good idea of what they wanted in life, I simply seemed unable to fill in the blank. I remember five years ago, on a summer vacation in Tuscany, sitting next to…

    Last week, I was thinking about a present for someone, but could not come up with something fitting. Until hours later that day, when my eye fell on a book in my bookcase, and seemingly out of nowhere his name popped up instantly. Apparently, this was the present I had been looking for.…

    There is an analogy by the late Stephen Covey that I really like. In the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People he asks us if our ladder is leaning against the right wall. So that when we climb it, we won’t invest our energy in the things that don’t matter to us, only…