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

A few days ago AT&T had outages around the country and this development showed up where bars usually appear on our phones indicating strength of service: but now it read, SOS. From 6am to 7am I thought the issue would resolve soon and didn’t consider its impact on my day. But when I headed for…

I was watching the documentary It All Begins with a Song last night and one of the featured songwriters, Caitlyn Smith, sang how Nashville can make or break a writer’s dreams and yet, as she put it, “I gave you my soul.” It’s interesting to ask, to what or to whom do we give our…

A few days ago in the New York Times Alissa Wilkinson wrote about a documentary on Aleksei Navalny who recently died in a Russian prison camp. Wilkinson notes how at the end of the film he says these extraordinary words: “You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that…

I’ve started reading Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land where he shares an anecdote how his mother once said to him, “Barry… there are people in the world who think only about themselves. They don’t care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves…

“You have to accomplish what you propose,” taught Danai Gurira’s professor at N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts. In an interview, Gurira brought up this maxim as a reason why she was returning for a new season of the Walking Dead. Her point was her character had proposed a journey and she felt – as…

We were talking with our son how best to transition from when a work day ends to the rest of the evening and he mentioned how he intentionally plans what he calls “the thing after.”  He explained how he spends his entire day on a computer and looks forward to transitioning from the digital world…