suffering

What do you demand of your life? What, more than anything else, do you insist that this life produce for you before you exit the stage? Fame, fortune, longevity, cool new experiences? (We’ll return to the question in a moment.) If I am honest…

This video is well worth the 9 minutes it takes to watch. It is beautiful because in just 9 minutes it challenges all of those silly, stupid little judgments we make about ourselves, about others, about life. It reminds us that regardless of what…

One of my favorite (and sometimes most dispiriting) lessons from Robert Adams was his admonition that you can tell how far you’ve come in your spiritual growth by how you behave when life throws you a curve ball. Do you retreat into your shell,…

Not so long ago I caught a snippet of a story about a U.S. drone attack on insurgents in Pakistan. Turns out we killed some villagers including a handful of kids. These things happen, right? The story explained that the U.S. government apologized and…

In the cathartic scene of “Good Will Hunting,” our hero is at last forced to accept that the abuse he endured as a child was not his fault. After a lifetime of marching to an invisible drummer, Will is at last so beaten down…

What a peculiar prison sentence is this thing we call life. Each of us appears to have been born into captivity, a death sentence hanging over us, only the actual date of our ‘execution’ unknown. We are shackled to these bodies – bodies that…