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Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.―Zhuangzi I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the delicate balance between striving and thriving.  In a culture where we measure success by how much money we make, by how many twitter followers we have, or by the status of our title or position, it’s easy to lose perspective about what’s most important.  Then one day, we wake up and realize that our striving is what’s gotten in the way of our thriving.  We keep looking for the next mountain to ascend, and believe when we finally get there, then everything will [...]

Wherever you are, be there. If you can be fully present now, you’ll know what it means to live.” 
― Steve Goodie I’ve been on a recharge vacation for the past five days. Every summer, we go to a ranch in the mountains for a week with our dogs. We stay in a sweet little cabin that looks out on a seven acre lake. We swim, hike, read fiction, cook delicious meals, sleep in and take naps every day. In a word, this place is paradise. It’s an oasis from the busyness that fills so much of the rest of the year. [...]

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.  You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.  — Albert Camus Last weekend we worked in our garden in our annual outdoor spring cleaning ritual.  Call me crazy, but I always love that first foray into spring―pulling weeds, preparing flower beds, pruning trees, cleaning the deck for summer barbecues―because it always represents that life begins anew after the long winter’s rest. One of the things I noticed as I pulled weeds from the garden was how the flowers always reappear [...]

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. – Jack London This morning I read about a live art installation called “The Orbit” that’s being staged in Brooklyn, NY.1 It consists of a 60-foot human hamster wheel and the two [...]

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and [...]

A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. -Liberty Hyde Bailey Though thriving requires personal effort, it doesn’t occur without the care and attention of others.  We all need leaders and allies willing to nurture and help us optimize our talents, while providing constructive feedback that helps us make course corrections.  We all need people who demonstrate their belief in our capabilities and value our contributions.  These are things that great leaders do well.  They are gardeners of people. Several years [...]

It’s so easy to sleepwalk without realizing that’s what we’ve been doing.  Sometimes we experience situations in our work and lives that rock our world and help us see that we’ve been caught in a trance, that our ideas about the world are not necessarily the way things are.  Often it takes a jolting event to wake us up. These wake-up calls often occur through an unexpected loss of something we hold dear―the death of a loved one, losing a job our family is dependent on for support, not receiving a promotion we expected, a betrayal by a spouse.  It [...]

The poet Mary Oliver offers a powerful question in her poem, “The Summer Day.” She asks, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Quite a fitting question to ask ourselves, particularly at the dawning of a new year. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot these past few weeks. I spent the better part of the month of December traveling on a medical mission in Nepal and then on to India for the remainder of my trip. I stayed in Varanasi at a guest house on the Ganges River with a [...]