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

I was sitting on a friend’s porch yesterday next to a fountain that was maybe 3 feet tall by 2 feet wide. Water circulated from the bottom to the top and made a lovely, familiar sound. For a few minutes I was entranced. Then I thought, what is it about the sound of water that calms…

“Do it for the plot,” encouraged Dean Anne Curzan yesterday at the University of Michigan commencement. “For the plot” is an expression that has been popular the last few years on social media. The basic idea is to be open to doing something that will move you to the next plot point of your life.…

Artist Janet Taylor Pickett was the commencement speaker at our daughter’s graduation yesterday from the Art and Design school at the University of Michigan. She shared heart-breaking and appalling stories of being dismissed as a person of color and a woman along her journey to becoming an internationally recognized artist. What she learned in overcoming…

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions,” observed 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, “the more you become a lover of what is.” It is often exciting to imagine other possibilities for our lives. But Spinoza reminds us to love what is occurring in our lives right now is how to understand who we…

As spring has arrived in New York I’ve begun to run outside again and enjoy finding the right playlist to keep me going. A few days ago I returned to the artist Avicii and came across his song “Waiting for Love” which has this wonderful lyric, “if there’s love in this life, there’s no obstacle.”…

W.S. Merwin won two Pulitzer Prizes and is perhaps best known for his poem “For the Anniversary of My Death.” Merwin writes, “Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me… Then I will no longer / Find myself in life as in a strange garment /…