Eudaimonia & Wellbeing

This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish... See more

We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and... See more

Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most authentic self. Wendell Berry knew... See more

distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the... See more

Instead of a commitment to "winning" other people's games, I felt a commitment to design a life that I deeply enjoy inhabiting 3. I saw how my ambition can be unleashed not just in work but as a husband, father, friend, gardener, writer, citizen, and whatever other components now make up my fluid and evolving identity. It's not that I didn't... See more