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

I grew up in a time when people use paper maps. Today, of course, everyone uses GPS. I can’t remember when I started to notice it wasn’t just directions you were given when you used your an app on your smart phone, but it also offered pictures of your destination. You could see, for example,…

This morning I was reading Alan Lightman‘s book Probabilities Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings, where he made this fascinating observation, “In nature it is the difference in adjacent conditions that makes things happen. An airplane is kept aloft by the difference in air pressure below and above its wings. Make the pressures the same… and the…

Jordan Kisner recently wrote a fascinating article in the New York Times about the last two remaining Shakers.  The Shakers began in 1774 with Ann Lee who led a group of English refugees across the Atlantic. Lee believed God was both male and female, sacrifice was at the core of one’s spiritual life, in particular sacrificing for…

“Your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering,” observes Naval Ravikant.  We often think a worthy goal in life is to seek to make it easier, simpler. But Ravikant points out what we are likely remembering at the end of our life are the moments where we discovered the true essence of…

I continue to return to the insights of entrepreneur and writer Naval Ravikant who makes the subtle and simple observation that outcomes in our lives are usually a result of our actions. “People are oddly consistent,” he writes, “we repeat patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.” —— If you know someone…

I came across in the New Yorker recently an article by Brooke Jarvis about how we attempt to measure the unmeasurable. She was reflecting on what we call sea level. Jarvis writes: “Mountains, oddly, are the reason most of us have learned to think of the level of the sea as a stable point, a baseline, an…