Leave Your Mark — essays and old wisdom on living well.
Reflections "The life you seek is hidden inside the discipline you avoid." It's all over the internet with a famous Stoic's name under it. We went looking and couldn't find it in his work. The line still works.
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Reflections You've told the story about your boss eleven times. Nothing about it has changed. The story has gotten really good.
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Reflections By 8 a.m. you've journaled, exercised, and taken a fistful of supplements. Are you awake yet?
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Reflections Crusading over someone else's wrong can feel like solidarity. Sometimes it's something else — a way to claim victim status without ever looking at your own life.
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Reflections He played in a Major League game every single day for more than sixteen years, broke a record everyone assumed was permanent, and when he finally sat one out, it was because he decided to — not because his body made him.
Photo by Rick Dikeman (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Reflections A day is one rotation. A year is one orbit. A month is roughly the moon doing its round. The week answers to nothing at all — and the dread you feel on a Sunday evening was never installed by the calendar.
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Reflections NASA trained him to fly a spacecraft. Nobody trained him for what it would feel like to look back at Earth. He came home a different kind of person than he left.
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Reflections In the Hanoi Hilton, the prisoners who didn't survive weren't the pessimists. They were the ones who picked a release date and couldn't survive it passing.
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Reflections Fifteen years into The Far Side, at the peak of its fame, Gary Larson wrote his readers a letter and walked away — before the thing he loved started running on fumes.
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Reflections Two young fish are asked by an older fish how the water is. They swim on, then ask each other, 'What the hell is water?' The point isn't that fish are dumb. The point is that the most obvious, all-encompassing thing is the hardest thing to see.
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Reflections Her ten-year-old brother had three months to write a school report on birds and waited until the night before, paralyzed at the kitchen table. Their father sat down next to him and gave him the only instruction that's ever actually worked.
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Reflections A Zen teacher told his American students that the beginner has it better than the expert. Not as encouragement — as an actual claim about how minds get stuck.
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