How Are You Still Not Doing This?
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in Vita Antonii that the reason he did his journaling--his confessing, as the genre was called by the Christians--was that it was a safeguard against sinning. By o...
5 Sep 20183min
This Message Is Waiting For You
On April 24th 1924, the pioneer writer Laura Ingalls Wilder got a note that he mother, aged 84, had died. It was a sad day, particularly since it had been so many years since she had been able to see ...
4 Sep 20182min
In This Way You Are Unstoppable
Acceptance? Resignation? That’s not me, we say, when we hear the Stoics preach those concepts. I never give up. I’m a fighter. Ok. If you say so. But there’s a difference between being a fighter and a...
3 Sep 20182min
Your Heart Shouldn’t Be Getting Harder As You Go
The old joke--which dates back to the 1870s--is that if you’re not a liberal when you’re young you have no heart, but if you’re still a liberal when you’re older, you have no brain. Now we can put any...
31 Aug 20183min
This Is The Only Thing That Matters in Life
In 1940, while he was struggling as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Walker Percy wrote to his uncle and adopted father, William Alexander Percy, to give him the ba...
30 Aug 20182min
Why You Do This Work
There is an element of this philosophy that is a lot of work. You do all this reading. You do your morning and evening journaling. Maybe you attend meetup groups or even have pursued an advanced degre...
29 Aug 20182min
There Is Always Something To Be Grateful For
One of the most stunning things about Anne Frank’s diary is how indefatigably happy it is. One might expect that her journal, which she kept from 1942 to 1944, as her family hid from the Nazis in an A...
28 Aug 20183min
Why You’re The Luckiest Person In The World
“It’s unfortunate that this happened,” Marcus says in one of his imaginary dialogs. Then he corrects himself: “No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it--not shattered...
27 Aug 20182min
