Archive for Year: 2022

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customers so well the product or services fits them and sells itself.”  Peter Drucker “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”  Mahatma Gandhi In these turbulent and stormy times, sailing can be perilous.  Who knows when a rogue wave in the form of some technological disruption may capsize your boat?   At what point might a tsunami of Read More

“I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness – it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practicing gratitude.” Brene Brown “The highest ecstasy is attention at its fullest.”  Simone Weil “The way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us.” Gabrielle Bernstein “Without reflection, we go blindly on our way.”  Margaret Wheatley Ezra Klein recently wrote a brilliant column in the NYT Read More

My family and friends would tell you that I have a hard time sitting still.  I’m always looking for the next adventure.  “Hey Gary, do you want to go for a bike ride?”  “Are you ready, Bobbitt?”  “Mobilize Ezra, let’s go!”   And my after dinner favorite, “Ok, time to leave – people are waiting.“ My poor family has never seen an encore at a concert because I’m halfway to the parking lot before the last Read More

How could we function without the first 7 letters of the alphabet?  We couldn’t write great novels.  Speech would be nearly impossible.  Most of us could no longer write our own name. And yet, that’s exactly like what’s happening to the world as it ignores the critical crises that are killing us.  We are so distracted by culture wars and political noise that we have lost focus on the existential threats we are confronting.  These Read More

“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”  Oscar Wilde “It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”  Yogi Berra “I believe that two people are connected at the heart, and it doesn’t matter what you do, or who you are or where you live; there are no boundaries or barriers if two people are destined to be together.”  Julia Roberts “A healthy social life is found Read More

“The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least try not to defy them.” Paul Hawken “When the soil disappears, the soul disappears.”  Ymber Delecto “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  R. Buckminster Fuller “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a minor reflection of what we are doing Read More

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.”  —John F. Kennedy This upcoming, mid-term election is a battle of narratives – in many ways, a Read More

“We humans are both miracles and catastrophes. We must acknowledge both death and joy, horror and awe. It is an astonishment to be alive, and life calls on us to be astonished; but lifelong astonishment will take iron-willed discipline.  Wake – over and over. Weep for this world and gasp for it. Wake, and pay attention to our mortality, to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us. Pay attention to the softness of Read More

In her newsletter on September 18, 2022, Heather Cox Richardson traced what happened between 1776 when the Articles of Confederation were written to 1787 when the Constitution was written.  The Articles of Confederation stressed independent thinking – states were sovereign and free to make their own decisions independent of the impact on the other 12 states.  As a result, some states clung to slavery, refused to contribute to the common good, and entered unilateral trade Read More

“There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe – imperishable, divine.”  George MacDonald “For every sentence (in the Upanishads) deep original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit.  In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.  They Read More

“Death is not the greatest loss in life.  The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”  Norman Cousins “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?”  Jesus “Grief is in two parts.  The first is loss.  The second is the remaking of life.”  Anne Roiphe I recently returned to a classic book – Herzog by Saul Bellow.  It’s a strange Read More

“The significance of the cherry blossom tree in Japanese culture goes back hundreds of years.  In our country, the cherry blossom represents the fragility and beauty of life.  It’s a reminder that life is almost overwhelmingly beautiful, but that it is also tragically short.”  —Homaro Cantu “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”  —Aristotle “A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or Read More

“It is only human supremacy, which is as unacceptable as racism and sexism, that makes us afraid of being more inclusive.” Ingid Newkirk Let’s start with a little perspective. There are about 400 billion Milky Way stars and as many as 10 trillion planets orbiting them. On our little planet, there are 8 billion people. Given those facts, how did we come to the conclusion that our planet reigns supreme and that any one of Read More

“This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make.”  —Christopher Alexander “There is an immense, painful longing for a Read More

Dear Annie and Ezra, You are almost 11 years old now, and you are citizens of several communities:  your synagogue, your school, your teams, your town, your state, your country, and the world.  You have responsibilities to all of those communities. A citizen is someone who has rights and responsibilities in a defined group.  Those rights are at risk when we don’t act responsibly.  In your Jewish community, your responsibilities are to learn the Torah, Read More

No justice; no peace!!! That has been the slogan of many protest movements going back as far as the 1986 killing of Michael Griffith, a Trinidadian immigrant assaulted by a mob of white youth in Howard Beach, NYC. Since then, it has been a rallying cry for each miscarriage of justice perpetrated on the disenfranchised. It implies, of course, that peaceful action is impossible without justice. I wholeheartedly agree. In this post, I’m proposing that Read More

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the landAnd don’t criticize what you can’t understandYour sons and your daughters are beyond your commandYour old road is rapidly agingSo get out of the new road if you can’t lend a handThe times, they are a-changin’.” Yup, the times are a-changin’. Bob Dylan wrote this song in 1964, and change has continuously accelerated since then. For example, the world population, when he wrote the song, was about 3 billion. Read More

“We always belonged to this mystery, and maybe we can begin to find our way back, even if it means following an almost hidden path.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee I just completed a 60 day course entitled “Harmonizing All with All” conducted by Artie Vipperla, a Harvard trained polymath and Ph.D. psychologist who happens to be a Vietnam buddy of mine. The course consisted of two cycles – the first to present and give people an experience Read More

Our small town of Elk Rapids (ER), Michigan is embarking on a bold experiment. We are seeking to find common ground across divides while welcoming healthy conflicts and respectful disagreements—not exactly what we are seeing around the world.  WHY? We want to demonstrate that it is possible to bridge divides in the pursuit of creating healthy, innovative, and thriving communities, and that is possible for multiple community agencies to engage constructively and collaboratively to accelerate Read More

“We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.”  Mohsin Hamid Humans are complex systems – so complex that it is tempting to reduce experience into simplistic dualities.  A great case in point are the conversations about gender fluidity and sexual orientation. It is so easy to confine the human experience into the binary of male and female.  These handy Read More