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

Marie Howe is a wonderful and well-regarded poet and in an interview in The Work of Art by Adam Moss, she describes her writing process as, “what is happening is the unconscious is just waiting to see if you mean it.” Howe helpfully reminds us until we emotionally, spiritually, and physically commit to that specific…

I read an interview with Al Pacino yesterday where he pointed to a quote from the Flying Wallendas that meant a lot to him, “life is on the wire, and the rest is just waiting.” The point he and the interviewer were discussing was, where does life happen for you? Where do you feel most…

I was talking with someone yesterday about how we evolve and grow in our lives and she made the fascinating observation that, “you have to be ready for your next story.” What she was reflecting on is how everyone moves through a sequence of stories in their lives with relationships, careers, aspirations, dreams, but there…

I’m in Chicago to watch my son run a marathon. We were at the Expo yesterday where we ran into one of his friends who was also running. They were discussing their goals for the race, and my son’s friend expressed anxiety that he would be in a slower corral that would put him behind…

Daniel Jones has edited the Modern Love column in the New York Times for 20 years. Yesterday, he reflected on seven ways he’s learned to love “better” from reading and engaging with over 200,000 submissions. His first idea was, “Love is more like a basketball than a vase. Relationships involve conflicts that can lead either…

Last night my son sent me a clip of a young Jack Dorsey giving a talk about starting Twitter and encouraging people to “get the idea out of their head.”  Dorsey shared how he recognized he’d have these ideas, but then would think they could only be realized, “if I had this person, or if…