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Category Archives: Reflection

The Upsides of Uncertainty – Part II

Dec
12,
2021
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As we continue to grapple with a fast-evolving virus, extreme fall-out from climate change, and the resulting social divisions, uncertainty remains in the news and on people’s minds. And our scorn, fear, and dread of this deeply human mindset is clear. I hear laments from friends and see almost-daily headlines riddled with fear of the . . . read more

Categories: Impact of Technology, Reflection, Uncertainty // Tagged:

Invited HuffPost TED Weekend Blog: Beyond Gaming, There’s Life

Sep
6,
2013
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We’d just begun a family vacation this summer, when my teenager woke up barely able to swallow, with a throat raw and sore. I took her to the nearest ER, where the wait was blessedly brief. A triage nurse whisked into the examining room with a laptop on wheels and began questioning my daughter. . . . read more

Categories: Distracted, Family Life, Impact of Technology, Reflection, Work-life

On the Day of MLK’s “Dream” – A Thought on Aliveness

Aug
28,
2013
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The perfect scent of an August morning. The still reservoir, a sheet of glimmering glass.

Think of all the people pursuing their hopes, unrecognized, perhaps unpaid, for their inventions, creations, solutions – or just for surviving.

Sunlight strikes the small branch of a wayside bush, shaft meeting shaft. A flame-reflection bursts from a taxi in . . . read more

Categories: Distracted, Reflection

Why We Can’t Let Google Push Technology ‘Out of the Way’

Jun
18,
2013
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Note:  This post first appeared on Huffington Post‘s front page.

 

Heading home last week after a walk in Central Park, I saw a bearded man on his hands and knees, peering at a patch of plants poking up between the sidewalk’s cobblestones. Lost key or contact lens? I stopped to ask. No, he was . . . read more

Categories: Distracted, Impact of Technology, Reflection

The Secret of Reinvention in an Age of Longer Living

Jun
6,
2012
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In a new world of elongated lives and career fluidity, we need to have patience – with ourselves.

That was perhaps the most poignant and startling point articulated by a panel on “Second Careers, Doing Good” held last weekend at my Yale college reunion. I put together the event to explore the trepidation and the . . . read more

Categories: Reflection, Work-life

Are We Losing the Magic of Play in a Digital World?

Mar
9,
2012
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We began by picturing a young Eleanor Roosevelt teaching immigrant children to dance in the very room where we were gathered. Long ago, a dashing young Franklin D. Roosevelt would come to escort her home. I could see in my mind’s eye his jaunty straw hat, the long twirling skirts, an awkward young woman brave . . . read more

Categories: Family Life, Impact of Technology, Reflection // Tagged: , , , , ,

Does Quiet Un-Nerve Us? A Muse on Tinker Tailor Soldier…

Jan
8,
2012
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First one, then another… at the showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I attended last weekend, numerous people walked out of the movie. By the third or fourth exodus, I noticed that viewers were exiting in the film’s most still moments: when the camera lingers on retired spy George Smiley, pensively sitting alone in . . . read more

Categories: Distracted, Family Life, Impact of Technology, Reflection // Tagged: , , , ,

Family Life as a Landscape – A Zen Thought for 2012

Jan
1,
2012
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Heading toward the often stressful, overly complicated, ironically fatiguing holiday season, I had a small epiphany. I’d been trying once again to figure out how to be zen about the big family get-togethers that can fray even the most solid nerves.

Dynamics are never easy in any household, much less a series of households brought . . . read more

Categories: Family Life, Reflection

These Great Sorrows

Nov
11,
2011
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Is hyper-busyness a form of sloth? It seems beyond paradoxical to consider our efficient, connected, mobile days even remotely… lazy. But both medieval philosophers and early Buddhist practitioners warned of restlessness and busyness as slothful, because amidst such hyper-ness we tend to avoid what’s deep and important. Think about it. Madly ticking items off our . . . read more

Category: Reflection // Tagged: , , , ,

Storytelling in Medicine – Practical Wisdom for a Beleaguered Profession

Oct
13,
2011
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For Aristotle, practical wisdom was a key to the good life. He believed in flexibility in thought and in learning from experience, not in cold calculations or in rigid rules. Someone who tries to live their life by applying unbending rules to situations of uncertainty or conflict is like an architect who tries to . . . read more

Categories: Family Life, Reflection