So the U.S. women’s World Cup team thrashes Thailand 13-zip, the most lopsided result in World Cup history. A squabble ensues over whether all those goals, and the jubilant celebrations following each one, exceeded the norms of sportsmanship. My interest is elsewhere. I wonder about Thailand’s coach. What if I had her job? What would
Vermont’s popular former governor, former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, author, poet, Madeleine May Kunin, 85, gave a talk and read some of her verse. My beloved and I attended. I had never before seen Ms. Kunin in person. As it is for many people at a certain aging time, her voice no longer enjoys
On Sunday Tiger won the Masters. On Monday Notre-Dame burned. On Tuesday my younger son, whom I met when he was 41, turned 53. On Wednesday I ran across philosopher Carlyle, who said: “Change yourself, and then you’ll know there is at least one less rascal in the world!” On Thursday the Mueller report was
When I was a kid in St. Mike’s grammar school Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union. This was the 1950’s. Mr. Stalin, we were told, was an evil man. His evil was the reason we practiced hiding under our desks to protect ourselves in the altogether possible event that he would rain
My take on death is delightfully captured in one of my favorite cartoons. The grim reaper is escorting a buddhist monk from a meditation hall. On his way out the door, the monk turns to a fellow monk who remains behind on his meditation cushion and says, “I’ll be right back.” I have no big
This photo, taken in 2015, is symbolic of my life, not uniquely I’m sure. Intense challenges, deep support. I’m reading the book “Betrayal,” by the Boston Globe investigative team that revealed the harrowing story of pedophile priests within the Catholic Church, the Church’s decades-long coverup of that abuse, and the lives brutalized by it. Napping
While we may never become a world renown anything, always available to us is something far more valuable: the peace of deep, abiding self-confidence. Not the ego’s rah-rah (born of fear). Rather, the confidence that resides in the core of our being, unfazed by anyone’s opinion, especially our own. This reflection was stimulated by
Retirement is an amusing delusion that can be both dangerous and rewarding. After all, what can we really retire from? Certainly not anything that’s essential, anything we cannot live without. Like bringing all the love we can to here and now. Like managing fear. Like allowing our experience to teach us. Like aligning commitments