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

There is a fascinating exhibit of Mark Rothko’s work at the National Gallery which spotlights how he created over 1,000 paintings on paper instead of canvas. It also depicts Rothko’s artistic transformation from reinterpreting Picasso and Miro to discovering his own signature approach to geometric shapes. The exhibit also offers this Rothko quote, “a painting…

I recently bought a nifty hourglass with 15 minutes of sand in it. We all have a stopwatch on our phones, but I was interested in physically observing what 15 minutes looks like. What inspired the idea was something we heard Jane Hirshfield say last week, “a definition of time is… where change happens.” Which…

Yesterday I came across and bought an orange stapler shaped like a smiling whale. You’ll find a photo of it at on-emotions.com.  I can’t remember buying a stapler before, but its design brought a smile to my face. I appreciated the creativity and even joy that must have been involved in making it. I learned…

“I found early on that every single day was different. That helped a lot. There are whole days that sucked really bad, but I quickly understood that one bad day had no correlation to the next whatsoever,” shared Robbie Balenger on a podcast. Robbie was reflecting on a 3,175-mile transcontinental run he started in Huntington Beach, CA…

This past fall artist Refik Anadol used AI to transform the entire collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. On a large screen in the museum lobby you could watch his AI program continuously create and re-create ever evolving digital images using the MOMA collection as its source and inspiration. At on-emotions.com you’ll find a photo…

If you summarized the primary concept you live by in the fewest words possible, what would you say? For inspiration some of us might look to philosophy or religion. Søren Kierkegaard, for example, believed “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Jesus said, “treat others as you would want to…