And across my life of conversation, I have learned that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments precisely like ours, though ours is writ large, where human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay, power and frailty, birth and death, pain and hope, mystery and conviction, brokenness and beauty, calm and fi... See more
Coolness is an elusive concept without a universal definition, allowing everyone to have their own interpretation. Some people’s entire job is making sure you don’t remember that.
Creating high density of not only people, but ideas and energy = serendipity and aliveness. Lewis Mumford writes that the primary purpose of the city is “to permit—indeed, to encourage—the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life... See more
Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.
I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh i... See more
When an industry fails to address the societal and structural factors that make this type of work harder, and rely on workers’ passion to power the whole industry through a snowballing crisis....in those cases, not even a strong union can protect the worker from the burnout built into the system. You go beyond burnout to demoralization, which is th... See more