“My belief is that the two universal paths are great love and great suffering,” he told me. For much of his life, Rohr has used suffering as a spiritual tool to help him learn to be humble. “I pray for one humiliation a day,” he told me. “It doesn’t have to be major.”

Pain has been my greatest teacher in life. If it weren’t for pain, there would be none of this art that you see. Pain has allowed me to know my self. To know God. To understand others and have more compassion. Less judgment and more love. Pain has caused me to search the deepest parts of my being so that I could see what is beyond the pain. Sometim... See more

In an effort to get people to look

into each other’s eyes more,

and also to appease the mutes,

the government has decided

to allot each person exactly one hundred

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear

without saying hello. In the restaurant

I point at chicken noodle soup.

I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night... See more

It’s time in my life to make fewer arguments for things and do more sitting down with things to just experience them. ‘I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt,’ is how Namwali Serpell’s latest novel, Furrows, begins. It is also one way of summarizing how the current shift in my personal character is changing my writin... See more

I can’t tell whether this is so obvious it doesn’t merit mentioning, or so fundamental it’s hard to see, but I’ve noticed recently that there seem to be two core approaches people take to establishing trust in communication. Call them “truth-seeking” and “community-seeking.” Most people seem to have a dominant social mode in which they operate basi... See more

Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.”