We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses--one foot is on the horse called fate, the other on the horse called free will. And the question you ha...
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when eve...
Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love...
The truth is, you need your fear, for obvious reasons of basic survival.
The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease b...
The culture of Rome just doesn't match the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I've decided that Rome and Yoga don't have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of...
Tan malo como el tabaco para los pulmones es el rencor para el alma;
Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel...
Speak to your darkest and most negative interior voices the way a hostage negotiator speaks to a violent psychopath: calmly, but firmly. Most of all, never back down. You cannot afford to back down. T...
Sometimes it's just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.
Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring.
Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.
Only recently, the word scientist had been coined, by the polymath William Whewell. Many scholars had objected to this blunt new term, as it sounded so sinisterly similar to that awful word atheist; w...
One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesi...
Nothing is so essential as dignity…Time will reveal who has it and who has it not.
My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from wh...
My fear wasn’t some kind of rare artisanal object; it was just a mass-produced item, available on the shelves of any generic box store.
Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.
Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.