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Is delusion a modern institution?
My upcoming book is devoted to the theme that suffering doesn’t come primarily from bad external situations (like political ones), but from the interaction of those bad situations with our mental states of craving and resistance. One might ask: is it possible to split the difference? Could it be that our suffering comes from our…
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Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy
Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced mathematics working out the logic of black holes. Another time, on the train with a…
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The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old…
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How to Tackle a Nagging Task: Power Hour!
An earlier version of this article appeared February 21, 2014 What is Power Hour? “Power Hour” is a way to tackle the tasks that tend to sit at the bottom of your to-do list for months (or even years) because they don’t have a real deadline. Here’s how it works: Set aside one hour every…
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