"We spend a lot of time looking for happiness when the world right around us is full of wonder. To be alive and walk on the earth is a miracle, and yet most of us are running as if there were some better place to get to. There is beauty calling to us every day, every hour, but we are rarely in a position to listen ." Silence p. 3 This past weekend, I attended an Association retreat in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. After driving through arduous traffic, the last

"Coming from a giving place means you aren't waiting to receive." We hold the door for someone and get slighted when they don't say thank you or acknowledge us. We give a friend a birthday present and feel disappointed when they don't reach out to us on ours. We are always the friend who reaches out first, and we get frustrated that nobody ever initiates with us. As the Stoics would say, looking for something in return is chasing the third thing. The first is you doing someth

"I've told people something that sounds a little cruel. Everyone should experience temporary blindness, to see how our vision can give us such hangups, how we judge and condemn, and what that does to us all. Like that [blind] boy with the birthday cake. There was a blind girl that he had fallen for. Then someone said she was unattractive. He stopped seeing her. It brought tears to my eyes. He'd been seeing fine." How Can I Help p. 144-145 It's easy to get trapped in a way of

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling." Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance I met one of my best friends while in New York City with the Mets. The thing is, I really disliked him at first. Dislike to the point that I repeatedly asked my bosses (Jake and Max) to move me to a different part of the office to get away from him (I later found out he was making the same request). That rocky start has sinc

"Between stimulus and repsonse there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom." Victor Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning" My road rage used to be BAD! I eventually figured out that it wasn’t the slow or seemingly inept, non-blinker-using driver who was upsetting me. I was upsetting myself. I was wasting my energy reacting and losing all control based on something I had no ability to control.  We are granted with