The other day I saw a post for a headline that caught my eye “On Scale of 0 to 500, Beijing’s Air Quality Tops ‘Crazy Bad’ at 755” because I was just in Beijing. I remember early one evening looking up in the sky and seeing a low flying airplane. Actually, I only saw its lights in the smog. I got confused looking at it because it looked close, so[…] Keep reading →

Following up yesterday’s post, when I talk to people about something they judge, like torture, the topic that motivated yesterday’s post, some of them point out that once you decide something is torture or right or wrong, you can do something about it. People like labeling things because labels mean so much. If you don’t call a behavior torture, they think, people don’t know what it means. Once you call[…] Keep reading →

I just watched Zero Dark Thirty and read a bunch of stuff about torture. People often ask about morality and ethics — is such an action right or wrong, good or bad. Asking the morality of actions and behavior doesn’t change them. I don’t see categorizing, judging, and  labeling things helping. Calling something good, bad, right, wrong, etc does no more than label them (tomorrow I’ll write more on why[…] Keep reading →

If you think something external is causing you stress or keeping you from the life you want, you’re looking in the wrong place. This early passage in Walden reminded me of how the challenges of living your life how you want to change with the external changes of the world. Thoreau could have described today. Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so[…] Keep reading →

I remember as a kid in the 70s being taught a policy to turn off lights when I was the last to leave a room. People put stickers on light switches with that message. I don’t see that message that much any more. People seem to generally project that saving energy is better than not saving energy, but I see the idea more used to market selling products than changing[…] Keep reading →

In a recent online discussion a guy talking about a tv show on morbidly obese people talked about people on the show disparagingly. He also said he used to be fat. Other people took him to task and criticized him as insulting and rude. I’m not sure I agree he was necessarily insulting and rude. For one thing, he later clarified he said what he did in part “to galvanise[…] Keep reading →

At the risk of posting too much on the recent storm and handling challenges, one more angle. Imagine a storm destroys two neighbors’ houses equally. Imagine they also have equal material resources to handle the situation. One neighbor looks at the wreckage and says My home is destroyed. I have to start from scratch. But I built my life up in the first place. I can do it again. I[…] Keep reading →

I ask people about their passions a lot. Many tell me they have no passions, which makes me sad for them. I don’t think passions are something you find lying around but something you create and build from small interests through self-awareness, effort, and dedication. It means they haven’t created something they could have. They either never invested enough to find out what it took to create a passion or,[…] Keep reading →

Following yesterday’s post on the Daily Show’s showing people saying they include and accept exclude and dismiss, here’s another on blaming and finger pointing, claiming others are doing it, not you. Watching the clip is funny, but I’m including it here because it gives us a chance to introspect. The point of this blog is to provide tools and insight to learn and grow, and I think this clip does[…] Keep reading →