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

Last night I caught a part of an old Brad Pitt movie called World War Z. In one scene the character Pitt plays tries to convince a father to flee danger that is encircling them rather than choose to wait it out. To land his argument Pitt says, “movement is life.”  Life moves, in other…

I came across a wonderful word yesterday, qualia. It’s used in philosophy to describe those moments when we experience something fully and are completely conscious of that moment. For example, we taste licorice, run fingertips across sandpaper, smell sea air on the first day of a vacation. Qualia derives from the Latin word qualis which…

I recently read a New York Times article about Jackson Browne and his song “These Days” that he wrote at the age of 16 and is often included in lists that rank the best songs ever written. Browne is now 75 and in the article shared a helpful observation about this song and his overall songwriting…

Stacey D’Erasmo has written a book called The Long Run on how to continue to create art as the decades unfold in our lives.  In her conclusion she makes this helpful observation, “In the lives of the people I interviewed, and in my own life, will is certainly a factor… However, of equal if not greater importance…

I’ve been slowly reading a few pages a night from Richard Powers Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory where a common theme among the main characters is their love and fascination with trees. In one chapter Powers writes about Dr. Pat Westerford, a scientist, who figures out that trees are connected to one another through…

We joined friends for church yesterday and the person leading the service made the simple but profound point that an aspect of one’s spiritual journey is to come to define what our “more” is. What do we want “more” of in our lives: time, money, impact, quiet, love, friendship, etc. She then made the observation…