Joan Westernberg recently wrote a post on LinkedIn that caught fire. In it, she describes deleting every trace of her productivity systems: all of her meticulously constructed “second brain”, her notes, saved articles, and to-do lists. Surprisingly, she felt relief. […]
August 2016. Northern New Mexico. I was deep into a five-day silent meditation retreat, surrounded by quaking aspens, mountain air, and breathtaking wilderness. But my brain wouldn’t shut up. I couldn’t tame my creative mind. On the outside, I was […]
What ChatGPT doesn’t know about me could fill a book—or at least the extensive neural network of an LLM. As people increasingly experiment with asking LLMs personal questions, some have taken the trend a step further, suggesting that we ask […]
I have a confession to make. Though I’ve written over a thousand blog posts for this website, to be honest, I’m often writing for myself. Writing for oneself is as old as writing itself. Writers have always written privately. Famous […]
Recently, I’ve been practicing what Susan Pollak calls “letting go of whatever isn’t serving you right now”. Perhaps your first thought is “That sounds nice”, quickly followed by a second thought along the lines of “Huh, easy to say, hard […]
Through attending decades of Vermont Town Meetings, I learned that effective facilitation requires respect. For over two hundred years, my little hometown of Marlboro, Vermont, met at least once a year for “town meeting”: a form of local government where […]
I am not a psychologist or neuropsychologist. However, I have spent thousands of hours as an amateur, supervised by therapists, leading small group workshop explorations of individuals’ struggles to make sense of their lives. And I’ve learned that confusion about […]
After a four-year gap due to the COVID pandemic, we eagerly returned to Anguilla for a two-week vacation. We love this tiny Caribbean island and have taken a welcome break from Vermont winter for fifteen years. I have written many […]
49 years ago I met Celia at the wedding of mutual friends in the heart of the English New Forest. I moved in with her ten days later and we’ve been together ever since. We married in 1977… …and moved […]
Growing up, I was immersed in an environment that worshipped feats of mind, to the almost total exclusion of the body. Apart from compulsory school sports on Thursday after school, I spent 5½ days each week studying, studying, studying. Perhaps […]