Once in a while, you’ll hear the phrase “self-authorship.” It conjures up the image of a novelist, cloistered away in their study, hunched over a keyboard, tapping out a stream of thoughts and images from their singular imagination until it fills the previously empty page. It’s a compelling vision, but a misleading one.

When I misbehaved as a kid, my parents put me in timeout behind the door to the basement stairs. I never actually went down the stairs, where the oil heater made weird noises, and mice scurried around amid the boxes and garden tools, and there were probably dead bodies hidden behind the wood pile.

We put our time and energy into daily worries, momentary squabbles and short term plans, as if they’re the most important things in the world. And all the while, the sand keeps trickling to the bottom of the hourglass in a steady, unrelenting stream.

Our 12-year-old Pippa is well into full-on adolescence now, and we’re always a little off balance with her, adjusting on the fly. As she forms her new identity and ventures out into the world with it, there’s much to wonder at and admire, but there are also moments of sadness. For me, one of the hardest has been watching her put on her emotional armor everyday.

All around us, little notes of slight dissonance add shimmer and movement and possibility to an otherwise static world.

It’s an unfortunate misconception of our age that all of us should be striving to achieve a state of uninterrupted happiness. If we aren’t happy, something must be wrong.

When we create a story, we take the raw clay of our daily lives and mold it into something that contains meaning. When we share that story, we offer not only the beauty of the vessel, but the meaning within.

On the short list of primary emotions, anger often gets a bad rap.

When we talk about cultivating gratitude, it sounds like labor--as if we need to get out a rake and hoe and start pushing dirt around in the garden. Maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. What would happen, now that autumn has left its first chill in the air, if we thought about gratitude as a form of harvest instead?

If the point of communication is to make a connection with someone, there are two components of a message that need to work in tandem: authenticity and kindness. Both are necessary if you want to communicate in a way that brings people together, rather than driving them apart.

Years ago, I came up with a concept that’s been helpful whenever some proverbial shit hits my metaphorical fan. I call it the “Existence Tax.”

Just as we simultaneously crave and fear newness, we love and hate familiarity. With no novelty in our lives, we become complacent and bored, yet we hate to give up the comfort and ease that familiarity brings.

When people parody “therapy speak,” they often mock the idea that people should learn to love themselves first. Taken out of context, this can sound like a whole lot of self-absorbed, self-indulgent bullshit. But like so many tired platitudes, there’s a core of truth there.

Because we experience the world through our conscious minds, we tend to think that our conscious thoughts are the totality of who we are. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yesterday, one of my partner’s dearest friends died suddenly, without warning. He was one of those people who had enough life force for several normal humans, and the tsunami from the tectonic shift of his death ripped through the lives of everyone he left behind.

What do you believe? Often, we think of our beliefs as fundamental parts of who we are, but not all beliefs are created equal.

Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping it kills the other person. —Nelson Mandela

We are all imperfect messengers and imperfect listeners.

I frequently find myself in spirited disagreement with my other empirically-oriented friends. We usually agree, more or less, about what we know. Where we butt heads is when we talk about what we don’t know.

Stopping to consider that we might be wrong is really hard, because we just feel so . . . so . . . right!