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

My daughter is running a marathon in Lisbon. Before she arrived in Portugal, she received an email stating there was a problem with her registration. This was somewhat stressful. The email also told her to go to the “solutions desk” to resolve the issue when she arrived.  And so she went. As we watched runners…

We were in a lovely restaurant in Almada, Portugal – Porto Final –  and when the waitress came to the table she said with a wide smile, that the food was made with olive oil, garlic, salt and love. It was a simple phrase, yet it reminded me how in everything we create, whether it is…

It occurred to me that every car eventually makes its way onto a busy road, even the most tentative. Red lights eventually turn green. In other words, it might not feel that way in the moment, but we’re never stuck forever.

We had our car washed and somehow a setting was changed where a warning flashed whenever I was changing lanes, or came close to a lane, that read “lane departure warning.” The steering wheel would also vibrate. All this definitely got my attention and it took a while to figure out how to turn it…

In James Wood’s wonderful book Serious Noticing, he points his readers to an essay by John Berger on drawing where Berger offers this fascinating phrase, “the structure of experiences.” Berger writes, “To draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at.…

Gregg Popovich is the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, was voted into the basketball Hall of Fame, won five championships, and is the the all-time winningest coach in NBA history. He’s known for taking stands on social justice issues and coached many NBA greats, including David Robertson and Tim Duncan. One thing that Popovich is…