Rob Tourtelot

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

"good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are."

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as... See more

That sharp turn away from blaming others happens once you finally address your shame. Shame is something everyone has, thanks to our shame-ruled, shame-dispensing culture, but some people obviously have it worse than others. I’ve always been massively ashamed and self-hating, and for a long time, even in Ask Polly, I described shame as a thing you... See more

“It’s against this background of seeking satisfaction amidst ceaseless change, that you can see how radical an act of meditation actually is—meditation is the act of calling off the search, it is the art of doing nothing.” – Sam Harris