Phoenix of Love

Here’s a story for you. Harold Hartley is a sales representative for a Detroit steel company. Every Monday, he catches the disastrously early 5:45am Northwest Airlines flight to Indianapolis to work with a major client there. Every Thursday, after three and a half long days of hard selling, he topples into his coach class seat [...]

The jaw muscle, or masseter, is one of the most powerful muscles in your body, and can apply enormous amounts of force when clenched. This is useful for chewing stale bagels, but inconvenient when chronic stress causes us to chew our own teeth.
I grind my teeth at night, and my dentist has made me wear [...]

Every weekday at around 5:45pm, I ride the train home from work. Like everything that happens with such mind-numbing regularity, I have it reduced to a mostly unconscious routine: leave the office at a particular time, take the elevator downstairs, go out the north exit, walk through the alley, head up the stairs to the [...]

Following on my post about nonchalance, a meditation on how we accidentally fence ourselves in:

This is not a gate. My soul
is passable; I keep control
of any blemish in my fate.
This is how I always dress
to show the absence of a mess:
a wall of iron lightly tressed,
but not a fence. I hate pretense.
This is not a [...]

There are certain things you can’t do any faster. Sing faster and it will sound wrong. Breathe faster and you are hyperventilating. Laugh faster and you won’t enjoy the joke. Sleep faster and—that doesn’t even make any sense.
Actually, doing anything faster is like sleeping faster. It doesn’t even make any sense.
When we talk about doing [...]

Sartre’s famous aphorism that “hell is other people” is backwards.
Hell is disconnected self-consciousness. Hell is the lack of other people.
A characteristically brilliant and frank recent post by Mona brought this to mind:
My biggest test for the last couple of years, though, has been feeling (relatively) alone in my quest for human interdependence. It pulls me [...]

Anxiety is a uniquely human disease. It’s an unwelcome byproduct of our ability to imagine: to create a world in our minds that does not match the immediate input of our senses. Because we can feed these fabricated images and experiences back to ourselves, and because the less sophisticated parts of our brains lack the [...]

With the Bahá’í Fast beginning tomorrow, I am reflecting on how often periods of quiet and calm are the breeding ground for surges of forward energy. It seems like perfect design that we have this sort of generative space built into every year, poised right at that juncture where the pendulum hits the outer edge [...]

One of the less fortunate qualities separating us from animals is the way that stress gets stuck in our bodies. Stress is handy for dealing with immediate threats to life or dignity, and if we never experienced it we would have a good deal more in common with cucumbers than with birds or dogs or [...]