Welcome to the X.

“Hope for the best, expect the worst” is the title of a song written by Mel Brooks for his movie The Twelve Chairs. This phrase popped into my head after I spoke with someone who is about to begin retirement. While he has completed his…

You know that feeling when your hands are cold, and you rub them together really fast? Well, it’s the friction that creates the heat. Friction is the force that resists motion when two surfaces touch or try to move past each other. In a human…

Throughout our lives, we’ve usually known what our roles were supposed to be, at least in a general sense. As a son, a student, a husband or partner, an employee, or a leader… we pretty much understood the goal and what was expected of us.…

My wife and I just returned from a weekend at Kripalu in the Berkshires. I’ve been going there since the mid-1990s. It’s definitely one of my happy places. While there, I did some yoga, journaling, and meditation. I especially enjoyed the outdoor walking meditation. Being…

It’s normal to think of failure as something bad, and indeed, in certain contexts, it is.  But failure, as we’ve learned from Thomas Edison, is often the step before success. Failure can be fertile ground for growth and learning. It can be the motivation for…

I hear men tell me they can’t think of anything that interests them. I hear them say they haven’t found activities that move them into action. I hear them say that unless they have a passion for something else, they’ll remain doing what they’ve always…

I can’t tell you what it was or where it came from, but the call to try pottery making was in my head. Perhaps it was the confluence of seeing artistically shaped pottery in a display case at a local museum. Or my current internal…

Like our bones that make up our skeleton, we need structure. Without it, we are… what, jellyfish? Yeah, pretty much. No disrespect to jellyfish or anything, but if given the choice, I’ll pass. We depend on structure. We raise our children with structure. We’ve led…