Back when I was in graduate school and going through a rough patch (that’s an understatement, by the way), I started developing some Rules for Living. Probably the most important one (maybe the only one) is this: Obey my gut. Gut insists that I take an adult ballet and a modern dance class every week [...]

Back when I was in high school, my best friend dreamed of becoming a contemplative nun. Her favorite author was Thomas Merton. I learned a great deal about some obscure religious orders (at one point she looked into entering a Camoldolese monastery in Italy) and  read a smattering of Merton myself. Just a smattering, though, [...]

My friend Joan Monahan was a Dominican nun for 20 years. When her order began to institute changes in response to Vatican II, Joan was selected to write a policy paper about the vow of poverty. Joan died in 2009, and I never thought to ask if she still had a copy of that policy [...]

Want to read something strange? Click on the link for a Hollywood Reporter article about Steve Jobs, calligraphy, and (I’m not making this up) a Himalayan monastery. The author, Tim Appelo, enrolled in the same calligraphy program at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, that inspired Jobs to make typeface design an important feature of the Mac. The [...]

I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. James Hillman Last Sunday’s “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade Magazine started me thinking. A Massachusetts reader asked whether slow economic growth is really a bad thing. “Why do we need growth?” he asked. Columnist Marilyn vos Savant replied, “Economic growth is [...]

The first and most important thing I learned from James Hillman is that I’m not crazy. I stumbled upon a copy of his book Insearch during a dark period in 1987. My favorite author back then was Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest who had written numerous books about spirituality. Hillman and Nouwen knew each other, as [...]

When I was in high school, my best friend, Kathleen, briefly explored entering a strict religious order. It was the first time I ever heard of the Carthusians–monks and nuns who spend most of their time in hermitages. (Fans of Thomas Merton will remember that he longed to transfer from his Trappist monastery to a [...]

Everything seems so right–so what’s wrong? You’re the person everyone looks up to. You’re a high achiever and a role model for those who know you. Your life is so rich and busy that friends wonder how you do it all. And yet…it’s not working. There doesn’t seem to be a clinical diagnosis for what [...]

Last night I watched Mao’s Last Dancer on DVD, courtesy of Netflix. It’s the true story of a Chinese ballet dancer (“Mao’s last dancer” in the film) who began questioning his Communist belief system when he came to the US as part of a cultural exchange program. It is the best movie I’ve seen in [...]

Every time I’ve done a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator inventory (MBTI), the bar indicating that I’m an introvert is so long that you’d almost think the paper ran out of space. I’m a rare MBTI type (INFP–less than 5% of the population: introverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving). Dealing with that boundary between my reality and what [...]