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

“The question isn’t whether or not you will suffer. You will suffer. At issue is the meaning of suffering, or the yield.” Louise Gluck said those words during a baccalaureate address at Williams College. She died yesterday at the age of 80. She was a Noble Prize winning poet and a favorite of mine whose…

“Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble facing the reality of death,” said Keith Haring before he died in 1990, “is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could have happened any time and it is going to happen to someone any time. If you live your life according to that,…

When we were returning from Portugal the pilot interrupted movies we were watching and said, “we will be experiencing some rough air up ahead, so I’m going to put on the fasten seatbelt sign.” I wondered what “rough air” meant to a pilot and Travel and Leisure explained it is “caused by three main categories…

The New York Times published a book with the great title of No-Recipe Recipes. It became a best-seller. The idea was to suggest that it’s possible to cook without a list of ingredients or steps. The goal is improvisation. Here is a sample – “Pick up a heat-lamp roast chicken at the market on the…

In Lisbon I saw a sign that read, “Do What You Love.” But the way it was graphically arranged was the first line read, “Do What…” I thought how we finish that phrase is interesting. Because we could insert many different words at the end of that phrase, “do what…” We could place the words…

Two days ago we woke up to the shocking news of an invasion of Israel by Hamas. Speaking about these events with friends of my daughter, one commented how she thought the situation in the Middle East felt like “entangled necklaces.”  I asked what she meant by this metaphor and she explained when you wear…