Years ago my friend Jill told me about The Artist’s Way
by Julia Cameron, a book of advice for people who make their living in the creative arts. Perhaps the best-known suggestion in the book is a practice Cameron calls “Morning Pages,” a kind of stream-of-consciousness journaling to be done each morning. . . .
Category: Personal
Hello, Isaias
Tropical Storm Isaias swept through our area yesterday, and it made for a good news/bad news kind of day at our house. The storm knocked out power to our neighborhood (not to mention thousands of other PSE&G customers)…
Side Effects
This past Saturday I had a strange experience. I was unaccountably weary all day. I felt as if I’d spent the previous day strenuously exerting myself and then gotten only half a night’s sleep. . . It didn’t occur to me until after I’d turned the light out that night that I’d had the second dose of the Shingrix shingles vaccine the day before…
This Music Is My Drug
When I need to do a lot of physical work around the house, I put on exuberant, up-tempo music — loud. I’ve got a “Favorite Uptempo” playlist on my phone with songs like Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. (Ebullient songs like Sara Bareilles’s Brave and The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations make their way onto the list even if they’re not especially fast.) I start playing that list and I’m off to the races…
Remembering Names
I mentioned in an earlier post that my memory is not what it used to be, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a particularly good memory for names. I have to really work at getting a name embedded in my head. Even 30 seconds after being introduced to someone, I often have to say, “Would you please remind me of your name?”…
Reading Books
As I’ve mentioned, I read a lot. Most of the books I read are non-fiction — history, biographies, economics, politics, and various other topics. As it happens, there’s a book club in my neighborhood that’s been meeting for years, but it’s restricted to women, and they read only literary fiction. A year and a half ago one of my neighbors, who reads a lot of history, asked if I’d be interested in forming a non-fiction book club for the men in the neighborhood.
My Men’s Group
In the spring of 1994, a friend of mine, David Raymond, asked me if I’d like to come to a meeting of what he called a “men’s group” that he was going to host at his house. The participants he had in mind were all graduates of the Landmark Forum, a three-day personal development course that I’d taken several years earlier, and his intention was that we would meet monthly to talk about “life stuff”…
Let’s Talk
Years ago, when I lived in Princeton, NJ, I was sitting in Small World Coffee on Nassau Street writing in my journal when a neighbor stopped at my table to chat. I didn’t really want to talk…
Smartphones and an Inability to Focus
I’ve become convinced that smartphones, notwithstanding how handy they are, are training us not to be able to focus deeply on any one thing. I’m also convinced that an ability to focus is important for our effectiveness, our ability to learn, the quality of our relationships, and our overall peace of mind.
When I got my first iPhone…
My Email Management Saga – Part 2
Yesterday I described how I managed my to-do list in the early days of email. Some of the workarounds I came up with were no longer necessary after my company migrated to Microsoft Outlook because the developers of Outlook included nifty features that allow users to convert emails into tasks and manage them as part of their overall to-do list…