Have you ever seen a picture on the front of a newspaper and tried to guess what the story was? Probably not. But then, we don’t all aspire to creative greatness. My apologies if you can never retrieve the next five minutes of your life, but let’s be honest: it was either this or BuzzFeed, and we both know you don’t need to spend any more time reminiscing about 90s icons or learning 14 reasons why whipped cream is so atrocious. So here we go – you can click on the picture to see a link to the real news story. Let me know how close I got!
We Cannot Live on Tomorrow’s Bread
Pastel drawing of Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
Langston Hughes penned these words in the turmoil of World War II. Freedom from slavery was a legal reality for African Americans. Equality was not.
5 Reasons to Run a Tough Mudder
I am getting married next July.
The “Cage Crawl” obstacle
One month earlier, on June 8, my bride-to-be and I will crawl through mud, climb over walls, and apparently undergo some new, muddier form of waterboarding. Continue reading
Divine Sparks
Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest known for his mystical tendencies and wily wisdom, and he sends me a personal email every morning. That’s how I choose to think of it, at least. This morning, he writes:
Our suffering in developed countries is primarily psychological, relational, and addictive: the suffering of people who are comfortable on the outside but oppressed and empty within… So we turn to ingesting food, drink, or drugs, and we become addictive consumers to fill the empty hole within us.
Can you relate? A young Muslim-turned-Buddhist once told me that medicine and technology has left us no better off than before – it simply shifted our suffering from outside to inside. Continue reading
Saturday Challenge: A Fast (sort of)
Most Saturdays, I forget the weekend is only a break from work – not from life. I figure if there’s nowhere to be, then nothing I do really counts. That includes the obvious: Eating pizza for breakfast, no showering, drinking before a socially acceptable hour. The usual.
That’s all fine. I recommend it, in fact. The problem is when I start thinking I’m on vacation from being a generally decent human being. You know, I start giving people the stink eye and not looking away when they notice, or making little kids cry. Things I maybe try to avoid on weekdays. Continue reading
Morning Meditation
From my front porch, I can look to the left and see two buildings. The first, just down the street, belongs to a young woman who lives on her own. I have only met her once, when passing out cookies to the neighborhood. After offering her cookies, she cocked one eyebrow, looked at me like I was Anthony Weiner trying to get her Twitter handle, and said, “Why?” I replied that we just wanted to be good neighbors. As her expression softened, she said, “It’s just that this is the first time anyone has done something like this for me since I started living on my own.” Continue reading
7 Things More Important than the Government Shutdown
Politics has become something of a Whose Line Is It Anyway episode. Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. Or rather, the crises are made up and everyone behaves like the issues don’t actually matter. The debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequestration, the government shutdown – is it all one desperate attempt to stay relevant?
I have an idea: What if we all collectively agreed to stop paying attention to their invented political melodramas? What if news stations realized we were not watching anymore? What if we stopped tweeting our frustrations and feeding their insatiable hunger for attention? Continue reading
Life Reconciling 