Tag: life
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Where Do You See Grace?
Which author would you love to have dinner with? If I could have dinner with an author, I would choose Tim Winton. But not in a restaurant. I imagine fish and chips somewhere on the Western Australian coast, sitting outside with the ocean stretching away in front of us. And there would be one condition:…
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People Were the Point
If your future self could send you one sentence,what do you hope it would say? If my future self could send me one sentence, I hope it might say: “The people mattered more than the projects.” My mother often told me that I took on too much and needed to do less. She was probably…
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Better Slightly Uncoordinated Action
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I have received may be this: Better slightly uncoordinated action than fully coordinated inaction. I am a pragmatist at heart. I often begin with a hunch rather than a plan. I have a glimpse of something that might be worth exploring, even when…
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Learning to Sit with Suffering
What’s a skill you consider basic, that most peopledon’t actually know how to do? Sitting with someone who is suffering seems like a basic human skill. It is also one of the hardest. As a young man in my twenties, I regularly visited people in an oncology ward. They were experiencing all kinds of emotions.…
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John Ames
Who is the fictional character you relate to the most? Of all the fictional characters I have encountered, John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead may be the one I relate to most. Ames is an ageing minister writing to his young son. He is gentle without being sentimental, devout without being coercive, and deeply attentive…
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The Ideals We Keep
What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever? I was at university when Jackson Browne released The Pretender. There was a music room where people supposedly went to study, although Jackson Browne’s For Everyman and Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark seemed to be permanently playing. I often went there when I had a…
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Lunch with the Cat in the Hat
If you could have dinner with any fictional character who would it be? If I could have lunch with any fictional character, I would choose the Cat in the Hat. He would arrive without being invited. “You were thinking of me,” he would say, stepping through the door with his striped hat brushing the frame.…
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AntennaPod
What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it? I recently checked the Digital Wellbeing section in my phone settings. AntennaPod consistently comes out on top, anywhere up to an hour per day. I do not feel bad about it at all. AntennaPod is the app…
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Too Busy Enlarging Our Lives to Live Them
If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be? If I could erase one trend from history, it might be the belief that bigger is always better. Bigger houses. Bigger cars. Bigger companies. Bigger cities. Bigger economies. Bigger audiences. Bigger ambitions. We have learned to treat growth as proof of health and…
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The Same Storm, Different Trees
Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are? We are neither fixed selves untouched by life nor blank material shaped entirely by circumstance. We become who we are through the interaction of temperament, experience, relationships, choices and grace. Two people can endure the same event and be shaped in…
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The Day I Stop Being Curious
Are you a lifelong learner? Some people collect jewellery. Art lovers collect paintings. Others collect coins. I seem to collect degrees. One qualification has often led to another, and then sometimes another after that. I now have seven degrees. That makes it sound more deliberate than it was. I never set out to accumulate qualifications.…
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Writing That Fills Me
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most? When I first started writing as a hobby many years ago, I set aside one morning each week. It was a discipline, and for a while it worked. Eventually, though, it was crowded out. I stopped writing for myself during the years when I was…
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Being Needed and Being Whole
What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years”— and what got you through it? People often say that a person’s forties can be the hardest years of their life. That was true for me. I would call that chapter The Hard Years. Not because everything collapsed, but because I came face to…
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Where Would I Live?
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? I’m tempted to name a place I’ve never been. Costa Rica. It keeps popping up in my feed, which probably says as much about the algorithm as it does about me. But I am intrigued. The prompt asks, “If you could live anywhere…
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More or Less
What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger? When I was younger, more seemed better. I loved to read, and building a library was something I valued. Book by book, shelf by shelf, I watched the collection grow. There was satisfaction in it. A growing library felt like a sign of…
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Keep It Simple
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you? The best advice I would give to someone younger than me is this: keep things simple. That may sound too plain to be useful, but a lot of wisdom is plain. We often make life harder than it needs to be. We overthink, rehearse,…
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Character Outlasts Achievement
What is your top tip to be successful in life? My top tip for being successful in life is simple: character outlasts achievement. We live in a world that measures success by what can be counted, announced, awarded, or displayed. Titles, income, influence, publications, prizes, and recognition all have their place. Achievement matters. Good work…
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Watching M.A.S.H. for the First Time Again
What’s a book, movie, or TV show that youwish you could experience again for the first time? I was late to the party when it came to M.A.S.H. It was not a show we ever watched at home. Then I went to college, and suddenly it became part of the daily rhythm. Straight after dinner,…
