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

Toni Morrison is one of my favorite novelists and in a recent article I learned that she published her most famous book, Beloved, at the age of 54. But in order to write that book she had to first close a chapter of her life working as a book editor. Reflecting on how she felt…

Craig Foster, who won an Academy Award for his film “My Octopus Teacher,” wrote a lovely op-ed yesterday in the New York Times about how an octopus stole his camera.  Foster writes, “I had been filming creatures living in the Great African Sea Forest off the coast of South Africa about a year ago when…

The NBA playoffs started yesterday. Our family are Boston Celtics fans and they are playing the Miami Heat. In the Boston Globe they interviewed Heat coach Eric Spoelstra, who has won 2 championships, about Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla, coaching in his second season, and he made this comment: “Joe… was a very good assistant coach…

I was watching a Netflix series last night on nature called Our Living World which is narrated by Cate Blanchett. In the first episode, the series spotlighted how currents begin in the Arctic and from there move water around our planet.  Then Blanchett said, “where there are currents, there is life.”  Her point was as…

Yesterday we attended my daughter’s senior project exhibition at the University of Michigan art and design school. One student’s exhibit was an animated movie about grief and loss. The artist described her film as following “a young girl as she experiences constant loss due to the unrelenting passage of time: her grandmother, her childhood home,…

After reading yesterday’s post about how “comfort is the enemy of progress,” a friend who is a designer wrote that he thought this is also true, “perfection is the enemy of progress.”  There is an old story about a ceramics professor who split the class in half. To one half the professor said if they…