Phoenix of Love

When you hear the phrase “crayon art,” chances are that the image that pops into the gray matter is one of those squiggly compositions that your parents displayed on the refrigerator door when your age was solidly in the single digits. Galleries and museums probably don’t enter into the picture.
A fellow by the name of [...]

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 reasons that this business of not thinking is both tremendously simple and surprisingly difficult is that it isn’t about trying not to think so much as not trying to think. It’s no good smashing thoughts down forcefully as they arise, like that arcade game where you bop the alligator heads with a [...]

So many processes, so many adjustments, boil down to the resolution of dissonances. I remember once reading an article on Bruckner’s symphonies which described their progressions from start to finish, very broadly, as the gradual resolution of musical tensions declared in the introduction, so that each finale concludes in a sort of harmonic nirvana.
Since reading [...]

When I was younger, it bothered me tremendously that I couldn’t think straight in noisy places. I thought it was some defect of my mind that I had trouble feeling spiritual in the midst of commotion. Recently, I heard about some research that showed that, although we can become used to noise in the sense [...]

Today I had my first lesson in salsa dancing. I have a fairly terrible sense of balance, hardly any muscular flexibility, and not much physical coordination, so dancing doesn’t exactly come naturally to me. But I’ve been finding that I enjoy it more and more, and now I feel like getting good at it.
What I [...]

My overcoat has a small hole in the lining of its right pocket. For the most part I’ve gotten used to not putting small objects in there, ever since I discovered a few pens, my car keys, and assorted receipts burrowed into the bottom of my coat, but occasionally I forget. Yesterday evening, after buying [...]

There’s a whole emerging area of study that is like a quantum physics of the human mind. It is constantly churning out new research which shows that, when you look really, really closely at the human mind and its behaviour, there are extremely weird, irrational things going on. Loss aversion is one of my favourites [...]