My friend is a huge Elvis Costello fan. One weekend, he listened to Elvis's entire discography, from the raw, punky ’70s records to the later polished, orchestral stuff. My friend came away with one conclusion: all Elvis's songs are basically the same complaint about women. “It starts with him griping about his girlfriends," my friend said, "and ends with him ranting about his daughters.” People struggle with the idea of reincarnation, but you don’t have to look across lifeti

Take some time to notice how hard everyone around you is trying. In Iran, it is customary to acknowledge when others are working by saying, Khaste na bashi — "May you not be weary." In America, we tend to respond to other people's labor by comparing their efforts to our own: "That person is lazy" or "Look at that sad sack slaving her life away." We don't realize that by comparing instead of appreciating, we cheapen the value of our own efforts by training ourselves to percei

There’s a famous Borges story about mapmakers who are so obsessed with detail that they produce a map of an empire at a 1:1 scale, covering the entire territory. Later generations find this gigantic map useless and abandon it. That map feels like a metaphor for our age. As data becomes abundant and accessible, it often doesn’t clarify the world. In many ways, it obscures it. Companies optimize for productivity, growth, and options, yet lose sight of their impact on the planet

The poet Wendell Berry wrote, “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.” I love how he ties the Golden Rule to ecology. Our current environmental crisis isn’t just industrial or technological — it’s also spiritual. So many of us remain in deep denial about our interdependence. Interdependence isn’t always pretty. It’s unsettling to realize how much our survival depends on fragile ties with people we may distrust or even see as irrational. Conside

About fifteen years ago, when my cousin Andre was still alive, we were sitting in an East Village restaurant when Ryan Gosling walked in, disguised in sunglasses and a baseball hat, and sat down at a table next to three high school girls, who didn’t recognize the famous actor. “Andre,” I whispered, “how long do you think before they figure out it’s him?” But Andre started talking loudly, in his provocative Parisian way: “Who is zis Ryan Gooselink? No one. I have been in ze pr

There once was a woman named Kisa Gotami whose only child died of a fever. Unable to accept this loss, she carried her dead child to the Buddha and begged him for a cure. “I will help you,” he said, “but first bring me a mustard seed from every household that has never known death.” She went door to door, but every family in the village had lost someone. So she returned to the Buddha, empty-handed, and said, “I could not find a household untouched by loss.” The Buddha replied

Ajaan Fuang said that we have two ears and one mouth to listen twice as much as we talk. That’s not just a statement about being polite; it’s also a statement about power. Society teaches us that influence comes from shouting in all caps, but our ability to change other people’s lives — as well as our own — really starts with becoming quiet enough to listen for possibilities we don’t normally notice. In the coaching tradition I practice in, it’s said that there are three leve

King Solomon was passing through the countryside one day. The animals came to pay their respects, all but one blind ant, who continued his work of carrying clods of dirt across a field. Solomon asked the creature why he hadn’t stopped to honor the royal procession. “I wanted to, Your Majesty,” the ant replied, “But I’m in love with a she-ant, whom I promised I would build a home for.” “And where’s your beloved now?” Solomon asked. “I don’t know,” replied the ant. “I am blind.

Years ago, a friend of mine dated a guy who could never hold a job. She loved him, but whenever he had money, he spent it on his passion: buying old-fashioned letterpress machines. Eventually she threw him out. Not long after, he got a call from Cooper Union. They were looking for someone to curate a special exhibit of … old-fashioned letterpresses. The moral of the story: whatever weird thing you’re into, keep doing it. We often look at our passions and think, That’s useless

My teacher once said that a good argument for the existence of rebirth is the fact that we still have war. War is so obviously stupid, unproductive, and contrary to human happiness that you would think one war would be enough for people to stop and say, “Okay, let’s never do that again.” But that's not what happens. Instead, greed, hatred, and delusion get reborn, in new bodies and new eras, and people start to forget. Greed starts speaking: maybe war will be good for the eco

You may know the myth of Theseus, who slew the Minotaur at the center of a labyrinth. Before he entered, Ariadne gave him a ball of thread to tie at the entrance. As Theseus moved through the maze, he unwound the thread behind him. He then killed the Minotaur and followed the thread back out, retracing his steps in the dark. We often imagine life as a series of Minotaurs to slay: losing weight, earning that promotion, getting into the right school. What we don’t expect is tha

Someone recently suggested I read a parenting book called Listen by Patti Wipfler. Its core idea is that children’s emotional storms and tantrums are healing processes, not misbehavior to shut down. When adults punish or soothe a child’s emotions too quickly, they interrupt a nervous system cycle that’s trying to discharge stress. Instead, parents need to offer calm containment and presence while the child completes the cycle. I’m not formally a parent, but the book reminded

In 1912, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was in a deep depression. His friend Lou Andreas-Salomé suggested he travel to Vienna for psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. Rilke declined, saying, “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.” I don't think Rilke meant that therapy is bad. I think he meant that trying to become well-adjusted too quickly spares us from the very confrontations that give depth to life. I've certainly done that. I’ve stayed

When I was a kid, my mother took me to see Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The film tells the story of an older German woman who falls in love with a younger Moroccan man. They find comfort in each other, but as neighbors gossip, insecurity creeps in and the relationship slowly unravels. The film's title has stayed with me for decades: fear doesn’t just feel bad. It eats the soul. It kills life. You can see this everywhere. Relationships end not because love is absent, but because p

On weekends, my neighbor plays video games and screams at his TV all day. At first, I judged him (“Men will do anything but go to therapy”). But then I realized: I carry the same rage, I just express it differently. Now, when I hear his trapped anger ricocheting through the walls, I feel compassion for both of us. Anger gets trapped in many ways. Some people repress it. That’s often my style. Recently someone said, “I was an angry teenager,” and, to my surprise, I said, “Me t

About a decade ago, I wrote about a trend in pop-psychology toward claiming we don’t owe each other anything: "You don’t owe your friends an explanation." "You don’t owe your parents a relationship." "You don’t owe anybody shit." Taken to its conclusion, I said, this growing advice would erode our values, connections, and society. Well, here we are. Now, of course, many power dynamics depend on convincing people they owe debts they never really incurred. No, women don’t owe m

You may know the story of Orpheus, who led his beloved Eurydice out of the underworld, only to lose her when he looked back to check if she was still there. When I first read that story as a child, I thought: Why did you do that, Orpheus? Why look back? Now that I’m older, I know why. We all look back. None of us moves through life without losing faith at times. But if we’re wise, we learn why we lost faith and how to get it back. We don’t lose faith in life because pain and

Years ago, a man came to me with some extremely specific questions about meditation. Something felt off, so I asked him what was so important to him about these questions. “I love meditating,“ he said. “But something always gets in my way.” “Like what?” I asked. “Like this pile of laundry I haven’t done in three months,” he admitted. “Bro,” I said. “Do your laundry. That’s your first meditation instruction.” Our culture is obsessed with the idea of “doing inner work.” But thi

In 2023, I took a long trip to Asia. Before leaving, I walked around my house asking of everything I saw, Could I use this on my trip? I stuffed all these “useful” things into my backpack. Then I realized, with dismay, that my pack was way too heavy to lift. I’d focused so much on usefulness that I'd forgotten to ask what I could actually carry. It's the same with the mind. We tend to judge our thoughts by whether they feel true or important, but rarely do we examine the burd

A friend of mine runs a boxing gym in Bushwick. “Come train,” he’s always telling me. “You don’t have to actually fight.” I tell him I grew up around a lot of violence, and it can still be triggering. “Oh boy,” he says. “In that case, you DEFINITELY need to train. You need to get in touch with the part of you that understands self-preservation.” In the West, there's a kind of defanged spirituality that tells us to simply “be with” whatever arises in the mind. But while the Bu