What do you do if you’re an ultra-rich, celebrity pop star and you realize your life is off track? What if you’ve begun to sense that, for all your money and fame, there’s a huge void in the center of your life? Where do you turn? Well, like anyone facing an existential crisis, the best option may be to look inward, to the place where your soul and God meet. The best thing to do may be to lean on... Read more
What do you do when the world isn’t right around you? When you see a friend or stranger being mistreated or a person in authority behaving badly? Do you assist and defend those being persecuted? Do you call out the person in power and try to hold them accountable? Be the change you want to see in the world. ~Gandhi While there are many national and global problems that are seemingly out of our control, there are things we can... Read more
Do you live life in touch with your innermost feelings—or do you live strictly through your head, letting your mind call the shots? If you’ve been feeling a bit adrift lately, either empty, down or directionless, you may have lost touch with a vital part of your self—the soul. The first thing to do is recognize the soul, what it is and the role it plays in your life. I like to think of the body as a figurative home.... Read more
Sometimes you can find spiritual guidance in the strangest places. Like the ABA Journal, an online publication for the law profession. That’s where I stumbled upon an article titled Mindfulness and Spirituality for Lawyers. I know what you may be thinking. Lawyers? They perennially rate as one of the least admired professions in our society, a notch above car salespeople and members of Congress. But the fellow who wrote the aforementioned article, James Gray Robinson, is not your typical lawyer.... Read more
Every once in a while, I meet a person who radiates joy. These are people who seem to glow with an inner light. They are kind, tranquil, delighted by small pleasures, and grateful for the large ones…they live for others, and not for themselves. They know why they were put on this earth and derive a deep satisfaction from doing what they have been called to do. Did you read the paragraph above and think, hey, I’d like to be... Read more
“Let us be silent, and we may hear the whispers of the Gods.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson What if someone told you that they regularly talked to God, had a give and take, where they asked God a question and got an answer in return. Would you think they were nuts? Or would you think they had tapped into a secret wisdom that you didn’t know about? In a Daily Beast story titled “We Talk with God: What Evangelical Christians Hear,” anthropologist... Read more
Do you ever find yourself disconnected from life, more concerned with your to-do list or personal issues than the people and environment around you? Or perhaps you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through your smartphone just a little too often, tuning out the real world in the process. There’s an exercise for that, or make that 6 exercises. Think of them as ways to wake up your consciousness and stay better connected to the world around you. I stumbled upon them while... Read more
I was in NYC recently, having a beer at the bar of an Upper West Side restaurant, when the woman sitting next to me and my wife engaged us in conversation. Her name was Helen Anderson and she had quite a story to tell. Helen grew up in the South and moved to New York City in her 20’s, becoming the first African-American flight attendant for Eastern Airlines. She later moved on to a career selling real estate, and was... Read more
You don’t see much graffiti in New York City anymore, at least not in midtown-Manhattan. When it does appear, it’s usually about self-glorification, a name spray-painted on a building or a bus shelter. Within a day or two it disappears, the affected area scrubbed clean. That’s why it was surprising to come across a long-form piece of graffiti, scrawled on an abandoned phone booth kiosk, in the vicinity of 37th Street and Fifth Avenue. It appears to have been written in... Read more
Late in his life the famed Russian author Leo Tolstoy began compiling a book titled A Calendar of Wisdom. Subtitled Wise Thoughts for Every Day, it contained a series of quotes and insights that might be looked at as rules to live by. They included pearls like, “When joy disappears, look for your mistake,” and “Instead of saving humanity, every person should save himself.” But as pointed out by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings, many of these insights had to... Read more
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