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

You are not the person you were two days ago. A week from now you will be different as well. Every experience and event affects us, and changes us.  Ralph Waldo Emerson put it like this, “The world’s incessant plan, halteth never in one shape, but forever doth escape, like wave or flame, into new…

During the men’s French Open final yesterday, Alexander Zverev complained that the trophy which was displayed in the front row of the stadium was “too shiny,” as the sun must have reflected off the polished silver and caught his eye. The idea of the “shine of a trophy” as distracting is interesting. Whatever our goal…

I watched The Taste of Things, a lovely French film about a decades long romance between a noted gourmet in the late 19th century and his cook. At Cannes, Anh Hung won the Best Director award for the film.  I keep thinking about a scene where the main character, actor Benoit Magimel, asks Pauline, the 10-year…

I was moderating a panel at a poetry festival a few nights ago and had prepared this question, “What question does your work as a poet respond to and attempt to answer?” And it occurred to me this morning, a similar question we might ask ourselves is, “What question is our life answering?” —— To download…

I keep thinking about a quote I read yesterday by Francis Ford Coppola. He said, “It’s so silly in life not to pursue the highest possible thing you can imagine, even if you run the risk of losing it all. You can’t be an artist and be safe.” Coppola was the director of The Godfather,…

We all are given a finite amount of time. If we live to 80, for example, it’s 960 months. With that information as our guide, a helpful question to ask ourselves is, “Am I living the kind of life that makes me excited for the day ahead?” In other words, do we wake up excited…