Blog Posts — Page 3

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”  Barack Obama “You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.”  Anton Chekhov   Here are the results of a 2023 Gallup Poll Survey on Institutional Trust.  The numbers represent the percentage of people in the United States who have a great deal Read More

Every summer, my wife and I visit my childhood friends, Bob and Norma.  Bob lives on 25 acres of farmland near Grand Rapids, Michigan, which includes a small pond with the most delicious blue gills ever hatched.  No hyperbole here.  Bob spends all year catching, cleaning, and freezing the fish so that when we visit, he is prepared for a feast.  Well, we are not the only beneficiaries of his generosity, but he does reserve Read More

“It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.”  —Eckhart Tolle “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.  We have guided missiles and misguided men.”  —Martin Luther King, Jr. “Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.”  —Buddha “You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order Read More

As we begin one of the most consequential years in history, I wanted to reflect on three themes that may play a big role in how the year turns out: Access, Excess, and Success.  I’m sure there are many other words that might capture what’s most important at this particular point in history, but these three, for me, seemed to cut to the chase of what we face. The questions I’ve been wrestling with that Read More

“It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will.  It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.”  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah   “It is the consistency of the information that matters for Read More

The problem:  Global carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil fuels industry exceeded 37 billion metric tons in 2022 – their highest level ever.  Since 1990, global C02 emissions have increased by more than 60 percent. Based on a business-as-usual trend, C02 emissions are forecast to increase to some 43 billion metric tons in 2050.  Even if many of the agreements to decrease C02 emissions that came out of the COP28 conference were implemented, a recent Read More

My father and grandfather were both farmers for much of their lives.  They prepared the soil, planted the seeds, pulled the weeds, nurtured the plants, and harvested the produce that resulted from all that care and hard work.  I’m sure it must have been very satisfying for them to see the fruits of their labor.  They never longed for a life defined by titles, trophies, or treasures.  Their goal, as I want to imagine it, Read More

“The five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the ones we lost.  They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling.  But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.”  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, best-selling author on death and dying.    “Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want Read More

“A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together, but for most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, argument, and persuasion which allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices – not only about the means to our ends, but also the ends themselves.”  Barrack Obama, The Audacity of Hope:  Thoughts Read More

“If we want to have good citizens, we need to create common spaces in which individuals can talk about the moral and ethical dilemmas that they have faced and how they resolve them.”  Howard Gardner   The more I read about the Israeli-Hamas War, the more confused I get.  The moral and ethical complexities are overwhelming.  I listen to Thomas Friedman, Brett Stephens, Nick Kristof, David Remnick, David French, David Brooks and Ezra Klein.  (Yes, Read More

“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women radiate, in their lives and their works. . . . . Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that Read More

“In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.”  Alanis Morissette “When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.”  Robert Sapolsky “We can learn the art of fierce compassion – redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, Read More

“Age does not protect you from love.  But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”—Anais Nin “Age is an issue of mind over matter.  If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.””—Mark Twain Last week, my wife went to North Carolina to visit a dear friend of 50 years who, after a torturous process and diligent search, was placed in a cognitive care unit due to her dementia.  We had known our friend as a Read More

In multiple surveys of presidential historians and biographers over the past 40 years, five presidents almost universally appear at the top of the “most effective leader” list:  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.  While there is much less consensus around who else should be similarly recognized,  if it were up to me, I would add three more faces to Mount Rushmore:  FDR (consistently picked among the top 5) as well as JFK Read More

“Whatever you think rigor looks like, you should go up a few notches.”  Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy “Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.”  Dean Koontz, NYT best-selling author One of my favorite lines is “don’t believe what you think.”  We can have a lot of vigor for a particular idea or belief independent of the amount of rigor we invest to substantiate Read More

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —Victor Frankl “People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.” —Plato Growth can be for better or worse. Growing physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually is almost always a good thing Read More

“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and serenity.” —Thich Nhat Hanh “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius Life is so easy.  There are only two required tasks – we have to breathe and we have to die.  In their hit  song, Dust in the Wind, the group Kansas sings “All your money won’t another minute buy.”  Read More

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” —Martin Luther King A friend recently asked me why everyone called George Clooney by his real name and very few people knew that Fonzie’s real name was Henry Winkler.  My wife said, “that’s easy – George Clooney has been in Read More

“Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it’s not like you’re going to fix yourself and become a different person.  You remain the same person, but you become awakened.” —Jack Kornfield “To be, or not to be?  That is the question – whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, AND, by opposing them, end them?”  —Shakespeare, Read More

“We all have different narratives; all of our narratives are at different stages of development.”  —Viola Davis “If they were right, I’d agree, but it’s them they know not me.  Now there’s a way and I know that I have to go away.”  —Cat Stevens I’ve been thinking lately about how the narratives we create for our lives, or those that are imposed upon us, can limit or expand our possibilities.  The question is, “how Read More

“Ideologies separate us.  Dreams and anguish bring us together.”  — Eugene Ionesco “The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.”  — Tom Robbins “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”—   Eleanor Roosevelt “For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”  — Margaret Hefferman Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd.  Without innovation, it is a corpse.”  — Winston Churchill My Read More