We don’t become our wisest selves without effort. Our growth requires us to become skilled in perspective taking, in managing our emotions, in crafting positive narratives, and in forming intimate rel...
Resilience is built by attention and intention.
Change may be gradual, but our realization of it comes in bursts.
Flexibility
As long as we can do most of what we want to do, we are young-old age. When our health fundamentally changes the way we live, we have entered old-old age.
The Ability to Love New People
The Ability to Calm Down
In the Western consciousness, emotion has had a bad rap as the opposite of reason and good judgment. But psychological and neurological research reveal that emotion is the primary organizing force for...
Why don't they go back where they belong?Refugees are here because they had no choices but to be here.
Whether or not we have a family, we need to live interdependently with others. Our growth depends on interaction: isolation is the quickest path to stagnation.
We don’t see the world as it is, but rather as we are.
This pivotal experience taught Mitch that to participate in a democracy, you must show up, meet people, and volunteer. It doesn’t work to wait to be discovered.
Schools are the frontline institution for acculturation, where children receive solid information about their new world.
It is difficult to convince humans to act when the payoffs are uncertain while the sacrifices are substantial and immediate.
Children are also effective at influencing others. Many times in the last few years, I have witnessed children’s letters and testimony touch and influence hard-boiled politicians in ways that adults c...
Children are a great aid in both stress reduction and joy production.
Realized that the prayers had all been answered. Not by anything I did, nor necessarily by anything that happened to the people I was praying for, but rather because time had made those particular pro...
How did I choose my friends, what did I feel passionate about, what books I enjoyed and why, and what did I think my talents were?
Everything interesting happens at borders.
We need to help refugees and immigrants early with job training, education, language, and business loans.