a daily blog on well-being and how to feel better by Mark Barger Elliott…

“The crowds were lining up outside the Museum of Modern Art from the very first day of the performance,” writes artist Marina Abramovic in her memoir Walking Through Walls. “The rules were simple: Each person could sit across from me for as short or as long a time as he or she wished. We would…

We love movies when the hero is in a predicament and the audience can’t imagine how she or he will survive.  In his book, The Creative Act, Rick Rubin observes how life can mirror the movies, or perhaps a better way to perceive it is that movies can imitate life. Rubin then makes this wonderful observation.…

I was having our Honda serviced last weekend when a man in a black ball cap and black polo with a company name stitched on it, walked quickly through the waiting area and said into his phone, “you won’t believe it, but 12 people have died in the last 72 hours. Hit and run.” He…

On a quiet side street in Tokyo, notes the magazine Monocle (one of my favorites), you will find Morioka Shoten, a tiny bookshop that sells only one particular book at a time. That book then changes every week. The idea of a one book-bookstore came to founder Yoshiyuki Morioka when he was working at another…

We love a family that is kind, curious, generous and who have raised a remarkable young man who lives with cerebral palsy. In a time when our lives had been turned upside down and we were not sure when we’d emerge from shadows that had encircled us, this family invited us over for dinner.  Before…

We were walking in the Bryant Park subway station and noticed the words Gutta cavat lapidem carved into the wall. Do you know what it means? “The drop hollows out the stone.” The quote is attributed to a few people, but primarily Ovid, who made the point a steady drip of water hallows out the hardest…