@Lumi

Hey there, Tim, Sorry for the slow response and thanks for thinking of me in this context. It has become pretty obvious of late that I’m trying to do too much, and so I started an experiment of not adding anything whatsoever to my “to-do” list, so that it wouldn’t get any longer. The result is that the items that were ALREADY on my “to-do” list

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One of the smartest thinkers on the subject is an author named Sonya Renee Taylor. She argues that self-love is our natural condition. Babies, she says, don’t enter the world criticizing their thighs. They learn to do that via our toxic culture.

Next time you notice yourself in a toilet vortex of self-recrimination, bring to mind this slogan from... See more

don’t surround yourself with smarter people. Surround yourself with differently free people.

You have to decide that you're worth protecting—because if you refuse to trust your own discernment and set your own boundaries, you will set yourself up for unnecessary suffering.

If you can't tell anybody else "no," you'll run out of energy to tell yourself "yes."

Here's what I suspect would actually happen if I could send a letter back: I'd agonize over what to say, write something carefully calibrated and wise, and my younger self would read it with mild interest, think "yeah, yeah, I get it," and then continue making exactly the mistakes I made. Maybe they’d have a few new anxieties about whether he was... See more

A friend recently reminded me of the Letter to a Young Activist that Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in 1966, and suggested that some of the same issues are again in play now. That letter was originally a personal response to Jim Forest, who was then a young activist and a founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, who felt deep discouragement... See more