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

I’m enjoying reading Katherine Rundell’s book about John Donne, Super-Infinite, where she quotes T. S. Eliot who said, “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience,” whereas “the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.” Life can often seem chaotic, irregular, and fragmentary, and yet if we…

The legendary Apple designer Jony Ive once made a distinction between “ideas” and “problems” and shared how he had “come to learn you have to make an extraordinary effort not to focus on the problems, which are implicated with any new ideas. Problems are known. They’re quantifiable and understood. But you have to focus on…

I was talking with a colleague at work a few days ago and mentioned I hoped something would work out. I could tell on her face this wasn’t her mindset. She responded, “It will certainly happen.” And it occurred to me, sometimes it’s helpful to think, there is no hope, only certainty. —— To download…

“Why is it that when the story ends, observes poet Rupi Kaur, “we begin to feel all of it.” When a vacation, movie, book, relationship, class, meal, or an evening out ends, we often look back and feel most strongly the emotions that event prompted. Which raises Kaur’s question, why? One reason is perhaps we…

“Something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school, in ways that may be long lasting. What was once a deeply ingrained habit — wake up, catch the bus, report to class — is now something far more tenuous,” observes Sarah Mervosh and Francesca Paris in a fascinating article they recently published…

Ed Yong is a wonderful science writer who decided to take up birding and unexpectedly found it transformative. In his New York Times article, “When I Became a Birder, Almost Everything Else Fell Into Place,” he writes this, “It’s easy to think of birding as an escape from reality. Instead, I see it as immersion…