Chubmeister 5000

simplicity is difficult because there's no room to hide the lack of clear conviction that complexity affords

For the human race, the gift of thought and emotion created both the glory of independence and the punishment of isolation; on one hand the dichotomy made us proud, on the other lonely. It was the loneliness that proved our undoing. It became our punishment of punishments. It so perverted our instincts that we became strangers to ourselves—the true... See more

Instead of saying "you have to practice to get better", I've got an aerials instructor who says "whatever you do is what you'll get better at". I love the reframing.

Coming out in the religious south was one thing, and I’ve met a few folks with aligning stories to my own. But there has also been the coming out process within the gay community. I still live near where I grew up, and on any given occasion, the majority of my friends are straight. The geographic isolation of living in a rural community for me has ... See more

That a portrait painter gets better at seeing faces and a scientist better at seeing the thing they study is unsurprising, but do they get more perceptive overall? Probably a little bit. They at the very least learn to appreciate how hard it is to see what is really going on.

People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.” Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to raci

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Even after a beautiful Mass, ritual, or retreat, we go right back to either/or, dualistic thinking. We go right back to being angry Republicans or Democrats, Protestants or Catholics, Black people or white people. It just never stops. But as we practice, contemplation becomes a way to touch upon reality, a way of penetrating illusion.

“Speak only if it improves upon the silence.”

[I]f I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy an... See more