As I grow older, I worry I will keep getting crankier and harder to be around — assuming, of course, I was any fun to begin with. Will I sink further into my own head? Or is there still time to grow wiser, warmer, more useful to the people around me? I have had times…
There is a two panel cartoon I keep coming back to this week. In the first panel, two people, a dog, and a chicken are falling through a black void. The caption reads: “Three seconds after falling into a bottomless abyss.”The people are freaking out. The dog is not doing well. The chicken is not…
For my seventieth birthday, a dear member of our sangha handed me a book called This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund. It’s a dense read — more philosophy than bedtime comfort. And it’s had me thinking deeply about what we’re really doing when we take our seats on the cushion. Hägglund…
Perhaps I get a little carried away with Buddhist contemplation? I mean, just the other day I felt compelled to pull over while driving to ponder whether in light of the radical teachings of impermanence, do I continue along as usual, making coffee, going to work and streaming my shows when I get home? Perhaps…
A New Yorker magazine cartoon depicts a couple strolling down the street, one saying to the other: These are the ‘good old days’ that someday we won’t be able to remember. I think a lot about when the kids were little, and how great it felt to be a new dad, and now that both…
In her most recent book, Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch, the 81-year-old Zen teacher, editor and writer Susan Moon relates an ordeal she went through while riding on public transit from Berkeley to the San Francisco airport. When she got to the airport, she realized that her carry-on bag, which had…
The other day I received an interesting catalog in the mail. My wife thought it was a medical scrubs catalog, as I am a nurse, but when I looked closer the company’s about us page was all about “adaptive clothing” for a clearly older demographic. Opening to a random page I find a grinning couple…
The other day at the hospital, I ran into a nurse I haven’t seen in a while. She looked at me and asked “You’re still working?” I guess I’m not used to getting this question because an answer didn’t roll off my tongue as it would if she had asked what I had for breakfast…
The other night my wife and kids threw me a 60th birthday party where, after the usual social stuff, folks started dancing to 60’s music. Great songs from the Beatle’s White Album segued into the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Starship, and Van Morrison, for a deliciously long time, with Jose Feliciano’s Light My Fire…