Inside each of us is something infinite, something eternal, something that someone else can only see a tiny fraction of, even if we spend a lifetime trying to show them. And even if you tried to explain, all this inside you, all that flashes through you, to me, it’s just words. Clumsy words that confine you, clumsy words that grope like a blind man... See more

the flood of information on the internet made me feel anxious and incapable and directionless and overwhelmed. So I stopped.

There was a Jesuit preacher, Anthony de Mello, who said if you’re suffering but not willing to do anything about it, you need to suffer more. Suffer until you get sick of your suffering. Which sounds harsh, but it’s true. The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of... See more

And I saw another guy on the bus, beside the hypothetically Lebanese girl, watching a videos of a chef pulling pizzas out of a wood-fired oven, pizzas with genoa salami and sweet pepper and fennel, pizzas with prosciutto and arugula, pizzas with sausage and wild mushrooms, pizzas glistening, bewitched to a dark gold, while he pulled a second hard... See more

As you pull yourself away, as the chains you never saw come crashing to the floor, you learn things. You learn books can tell you things about yourself you don’t know. You learn concentrating on anything is very hard work. You learn what you pay attention to is the job of a lifetime, a job that never ends, a job that quite literally shapes your... See more

On his regular rants about ‘the Facebook,’ an old business professor I had in Navarra used to say, in his velvet Spanish accent, “If there’s no price, you are the price.”

On his regular rants about ‘the Facebook,’ an old business professor I had in Navarra used to say, in his velvet Spanish accent, “If there’s no price, you are the price.”

This urge to be less online. To be less performative, less see-through, less concerned with what others think of how we live, and more deeply involved and intimate with our own real local lives.

The faster things go, the more immersed we are in the flow, addicted to the speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet. That deprivation makes itself felt in the body as a kind of dread.