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

I’ve been listening to the musical Hamilton on my commute to work and yesterday heard the song that renders how Hamilton and his wife Eliza cope with a horrific tragedy in their lives. What the lyric suggests repairs their broken hearts is a “grace too powerful to name.” When tragedy strikes our lives, our loved…

“Only dead fish go with the flow,” observes Derek Sivers, one of my favorite writers on how to live our lives. Sivers’ point is if we “go with the flow” this means we no longer affect the direction we are traveling. The current is taking us in its direction. Now, at times in our lives…

“Male canaries learn a new song every year,” observes Moheb Costandi in his book Neuroplasticity, ”in order to serenade potential mates, and learning and production of their songs are controlled by two brain nuclei.” This weekend a family member joyfully played a song she had leaned on the banjo, an instrument she had decided to learn…

Patrick Mouratoglou is a tennis coach who helped Serena Williams win Grand Slam titles. He now runs tennis camps and publishes videos on Instagram where he shares a moment in a lesson he gave, usually with a teenager. One lesson I saw stuck with me. He was teaching a boy with a big forehand how…

In a New York Times article this week, we learned how Silvio Berlusconi, the infamous Italian politician, in the last few years of his life, purchased 25,000 paintings often from “hotlines of late-night art shopping television channels.”  Why? Friend and art historian Vittorio Sgarbi thought Berlusconi didn’t think he “would die, this accumulation was like buying up…

I had the privilege to interview Jennifer Senior, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning article for the Atlantic which was turned into a book, On Grief, praised by Oprah, Cheryl Strayed, and John Green. Senior eloquently and movingly tells the story of a family who lost a son on 9/11 and the various paths they chose to grieve.…