Not everyone becomes calmer with age. Some people remain as concerned about what others think at sixty as they were at twenty-five, still preparing, still performing. However, some people are softening. You can feel it the moment you’re around them:…
There is a special type of parent who doesn’t raise their voice, and once you notice it, you notice it everywhere. At the grocery store. Pickup at school. In the kitchen at the end of a long day. It’s not…
Grandparents often worry about what they have to offer. They think the gift should be advice, or money, or some hard-won wisdom imparted at just the right moment. But what the grandson values most is the least of all these.…
A strong sense of well-being does not reveal itself. It’s not loud or obvious, and people who have it are often the last to notice it. It comes out in ordinary moments, how you handle being disagreed with, how you…
Some people just make life better. You leave them lighter than when you arrived, and you can’t always understand why. They may be funny, charming, or a great talker, but it usually doesn’t make sense. What really makes the work…
When someone we love dies, the world does not end, but it loses its form. The familiar becomes strange. Time stretches and collapses. There is a delay in movements, as if the body has forgotten to belong to itself. In…
We live in a noisy world that is constantly competing for our attention. But as teacher Sharon Salzberg reminds us, our focus is strongest when we can rest and restore it. When we talk about attention, we often use active…
Today’s lyrics are darker in tone, simpler in form, and more focused on the isolated self. What does this say about the sing-along culture? Popular music is one way a culture expresses its values and rehearses its moral vocabulary. By…
With some people, without much fanfare, there is a shift when they stop treating life as a losing race. The rush just oozes out of them. You can see it in the way they move, the way they talk, the…
Ask an adult what he remembers most from his childhood, and he rarely points to something precious: expensive holidays, a birthday party with a rented bouncy castle. What pops up instead is something small and repetitive, common enough that no…
