A Therapeutic Journey

People almost never hate those who make polite and reasonably framed demands; in fact, they tend to respect and like them a little more. They feel in the presence of a maturity and kindly authoritativeness that appear worthy of their time, as well as seeming rare and a bit thrilling. Frustrating someone’s wishes doesn’t have to be evidence of selfi

The news constantly provides us with a ringside seat at the most compelling and horrendous issues of our times, which feed both our outrage and our sense that there must be something we can do to try to prevent disaster. But in the process, we forget the radical limits on our powers to intervene effectively in pretty much any of the dilemmas that b

We don’t need to make art in order to learn the most valuable lesson of artists, which is about noticing properly, living with our eyes open and thereby, along the way, savoring time. Without any intention to create something that could be put in a gallery, we could—as part of a goal of living more deliberately–take a walk in an unfamiliar part of

But of course we have barely scratched the surface. We have grown bored of a world we haven’t begun to study properly. And that, among other things, is why time is racing by.

We must go to Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat, Astana or Montevideo; we need to find a way to swim with dolphins or order a thirteen-course meal at a world-famous restaurant in downtown Lima. That will finally slow down the cruel gallop of time.

But this is to labor under an unfair, expensive, and ultimately impractical notion of novelty: that it must in

The difference in pace is not mysterious but has to do with novelty. The more our days are filled with new, unpredictable, and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. And, conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in a blur. Childhood ends up feeling so long because it is the cauldron of novelty; b

One of the most basic facts about time is that, even though we insist on measuring it as if it were an objective unit, it doesn’t, in all conditions, seem to be moving at the same pace. Five minutes can feel like an hour; ten hours can feel like five minutes. A decade may pass like two years; two years may acquire the weight of half a century. And

Poignantly, on a tour of a primary school an ageing Picasso once said, “At their age, I knew how to paint like Titian. It’s taken me a lifetime to remember a greater achievement: how to paint like a child.” What he meant was that it had taken him decades to shake off a compliant urge to paint “well” and “respectably” and to listen instead more clos

Those who can’t lay down boundaries have invariably not, in their early lives, had their own boundaries respected. Someone didn’t allow them to say when they were unhappy with a genuinely difficult situation; someone didn’t give much of a damn about their hurt feelings or distinctive hopes; someone insinuated that being good meant falling in line,