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

Erika Fatland decided to embark on an eight month journey where she would travel around the border of Russia. In her amazing book, The Border, she describes going through Mongolia, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland and other countries.  Last night I read about her adventure traveling through North Korea, a country that shares a 19 kilometer border…

When was the last time you sat in silence? True silence. No phone nearby. No Spotify. How long did it last? 10 seconds? 10 minutes? This week I came across the wonderful observation that we should let “silence do the work.” Meaning, if we want to reset our emotions, and therefore our lives, we need…

“With watercolors, Georgia O’Keeffe was… an intuitive, surprising artist, but choosing the right paper narrowed the range of outcomes without avoiding risk altogether. In 1916, she opted for a tissue-thin Japanese kind that warps with the slightest moisture. In the resulting quartet of ‘Blue’ watercolors, the paper looks like a desert, but the brushstrokes seem…

We were having a conversation about a complicated matter with a friend yesterday and in the midst of an observation she was making, we heard her say, “…bandwidth pending….”  Isn’t that a lovely phrase and idea? How we heard it was that the “bandwidth” required to tackle that issue was “pending.” Sometimes we all feel…

We are fans of the author Brianna Wiest and on the topic of anger she makes a fascinating observation; she writes, “anger shows us where our boundaries are… [and] our limits and priorities more clearly.” We often sort anger into categories like “something to be avoided” or to be “released.” But what if we thought…

“Change was inevitable. Today is the day,” observed ESPN commentator Chris Fowler after 20 year-old Carlos Alvarez defeated 36 year-old Novak Djokovic in a thrilling five set Wimbledon final. The last time Djokovic was defeated on that court was in 2013. What made the difference? How was Alvarez able to pull off the victory? In…