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

One of the strangest things about skyscrapers is they are designed to sway in high winds and storms. To keep a building from swaying too much and toppling, engineers design what’s called a “pendulum” that sways in the opposite direction of the building to keep it steady. In her wonderful book Built, Roma Agrawal notes how…

“Never go down a road you recognize.” We call this the “Sivers Principle,” after author Derek Sivers, who suggests we do “nothing twice.” Not eat the same food every week. Or pursue the same thought or topic of conversation. Or wear the same clothes. His idea is when we offer our mind, body and soul…

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet and a priest, died of typhoid at the age of forty-five. His last words were reportedly: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.” What is fascinating is although celebrated today for poems such as “Pied Beauty” and “God’s Grandeur,” in his lifetime, Hopkins is thought…

“Fear demands the same answers. A yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition.” Nadine Gordimer wrote those words. She was a Nobel Prize winning author who wrote against apartheid in South Africa and for those afflicted by the AIDS epidemic. I was exploring the memoir section of the library…

“Stop whatever you’re doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of dying because I won’t be able to do this activity anymore?” Marcus Aurelius wrote those words. He was Roman Emperor from 161 to 181 AD and kept a journal that became a wonderful book called Meditations. Aurelius believed there was great value…

In his essay “The Invitation,” Barry Lopez, a National Book award-winner, describes encountering a grizzly bear eating a caribou.  Reflecting on the experience, Lopez shared that while he saw the bear as a “noun,” Indigenous people, who he was traveling with, saw the bear as a “verb” and would instinctively “situate the smaller thing within the…