Progress

By Edgar Allen Poe

There is, perhaps, no point in the history of the useful arts more remarkable than the fact, that during the last two thousand years, the world has been able to make no essential improvements in road-making. It may well be questioned if the Gothamites of 3845 will distinguish any traces of our Third Avenue: and in the matter of street-pavement, properly so called, although of late, universal attention has been directed to the subject, and experiment after experiment has been tried, exhausting the ingenuity of all modern engineers, it appears that we have at last settled on a result which differs in no material degree, and in principle not at all, from that which the Romans attained, as if instinctively, in the Via Appia, Via Tusculana, and others. The streets in Pompeii were constructed on the very principle which is considered best by the moderns: or if there be any especial variation, it certainly is not to the credit of modern ingenuity.

What’s one way that the world has improved in the last ten years, and one way it hasn’t?

Edgar Allen Poe was an American prose writer and poet.

Unplugging

By Ben Greenman

I would like to say that I unplugged because of an interest in higher orders of spirituality and connectedness, but the truth is that my wife gave me an ultimatum.

“I’m sick of this,” she said. “You have the phone on your night table when you go to sleep.”

“To listen to the news,” I said. “Like a radio.”

“And then I wake up and it’s in your hand.”

“To check the time,” I said. “Like an alarm clock.”

“But a clock radio’s not always occupying your head and your hands. And you don’t take an extra thirty seconds with a clock radio to text a friend or watch a video or look up obscure song lyrics.”

“Though that would be a good clock radio,” I said.

“Stop it,” she said. “I’m serious.” When someone says they’re serious in a joking tone, you can joke back. When someone says they’re serious in a serious tone, it’s a good idea to try to do what they’re telling you to do, particularly if the person doing the telling is a usually patient wife.

I didn’t completely unplug in the sense that I did away with all devices. I used my Sonos speakers, along with one smart lightbulb I got as a novelty gift but that ended up being immensely helpful for brightening or dimming my office. But I did what she said. I put my phone out of arm’s reach while I slept or ate or sat and read. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t holding it. It was that I didn’t, for a moment, know exactly where it was. During those times. I couldn’t check for emails or texts. I couldn’t look at Twitter feeds.

I’d like to report that it changed everything.  The truth, though, is that it changed only small things. I felt more relaxed. I recovered some measure of internal monologue. I got to do different things with my hands—I started doodling again, which hasn’t happened since the early part of the century. But those are seeds, and seeds grow.

What can you do when you unplug?

Ben Greenman is a New York Times-bestselling author who has published both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novel is The Slippage.

Crisis

By Ben Greenman

Everybody has seen movies with gurus who advise inner calm. “Take a break,” they say. ‘Take a breath.”

Everybody has seen other movies with people who face life by clenching their jaw and soldiering forth. 

Everybody has to make that choice.

Everybody has trouble with the world. That’s one of the things the world’s for: to give us trouble. Sometimes it is trouble within the self. Other times it is trouble that takes the form of watching someone else in trouble, especially a loved one.

Everybody wonders, in those moments, about the best strategy. What will it take to dissolve the trouble? Can it be dissipated through peaceful waiting? Must it be attacked with weapons? Do you have to understand trouble to combat it?

Everybody has to make that choice—and not just make it once, but make it several times, for the self and others, never fully certain which road will lead to resolution and which to ruin. 

Everybody, upon making that choice, just waits and sees. There is so much beyond our control. There is no prescription, no matter what any of us have heard.

Everybody has seen movies.

How would you like to think and act in times of crisis?

Ben Greenman is a New York Times-bestselling author who has written both fiction (most recently, the novel The Slippage) and nonfiction (including Mo Meta Blues, with Questlove).

Idleness

By Bertrand Russell

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: “Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution.

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. This traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it.

What is a time that you’ve been able to be idle without also feeling anxious?

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher and writer.

Love and Loss

By Sarah DiLeo

One year ago, my dog Ella died. She was a sweet, mischievous, expressive little pug, whose hoarse bark a friend once likened to a broken garbage disposal.  

I began volunteering at the pug rescue, from which I had adopted Ella. The backstories of the dogs read like a Debbie Downer routine from SNL—elderly, blind, diabetic, abused. (My wife, who reluctantly tagged along once and only once, dubbed it the Island of Misfit Pugs.) But I felt sustained by the very existence of this place—the relentless optimism and abiding hope that I saw in the people who keep it going.

A few months in, I fell for a sassy 12-year-old pug named Midge and decided to adopt her. When I shared the news, I was met with a variety of incredulous reactions, from my wife’s genuine concern for my well-being, to a stranger at a holiday party who gasped, “But she’s just going to die!” 

Mostly, people asked why? Why would you knowingly enter into an emotional attachment that’s likely to end in sadness so soon? It’s a divisive question, one that forces us to consider the relative value of love and hope. To me, it’s worth it. As renowned pug enthusiast W.B. Yeats said, “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes; what more is there to say?”

What have you learned from brief loves?

Sarah DiLeo is the producer for integrated content at award-winning commercial and digital company Tool of North America. She is also an award-winning film producer.

Return

By Shawn Landres

“Why would you go back?” asked my Austro-Hungarian-born grandmother in 1994, when I announced I would be spending the summer in the former Czechoslovakia. She had never looked behind her after fleeing Bratislava in 1940, first to Italy, then traveling across continents to Sydney, then Los Angeles, where I was born.

“We knew you would come back,” said my wife’s grandfather as Zuzana and I prepared for our 2001 chuppah in Košice, Slovakia, her hometown. He had always looked forward; a Jewish surgeon under state socialism, he had moved his family from Prešov to Bardejov to Košice, no one city more than 80 kilometers from another.

“Why would you want to come back?” asked the ministry official as I reclaimed my Slovak citizenship, in the name of my forebears whom the wartime Slovak state had disenfranchised, dispossessed, and deported. By right, I replied, and the only restitution that mattered to me: the acknowledgment that my multinational, multilingual family had always belonged here, and that this new Slovak Republic was the heir not to fascist chaos but to cosmopolitan “civitas.”

The guns of August, first sounded 100 years ago this summer, resonate across the generations. Empires disaggregated, nation-states pronounced and divorced. To the different roots of our children’s family tree, the changing seasons brought wealth and poverty, death and life, love and loss. There were those who migrated and those who remained. We, their descendants, have recovered, rediscovered…returned.

Of course there is no undoing the past century. But for our family—for me—I am not so sure that there is no going back. The United States, unquestionably, is my home. But today we also are at home in Slovakia. The art of return? It is dance—a round—always in motion, ever unbroken. [From Jewels of Elul, jewelsofelul.com]

What are the things in your life that you would like to return to?

Dr. Shawn Landres is co-founder of Jewish Jumpstart/Jumpstart Labs and a L.A. County Commissioner.

Renewal

By Aaron Davidman

The subway the freeway the airwaves stop. The traffic the deadlines the newspaper stop. The shopping the carpool the homework stop. The iPhone the iPad the Internet stop. The politics restaurant food stamps homeless man garbage can God plan stop. The drones and the clones and the suicide belts. The attacks and the cracks in the facts and the holy arcade by the black street parade and another kid down she’s been kicked by the trade. Ones and zeros piled high as the sky and the nighttime cries while the dreamer’s awake he can’t shake the mistakes of the dizzying day.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

Catch a breath. Take a sip of cool air. Sit on the ground on a rock on a bed on a chair.

Light a candle. Take a walk. Under trees. Holding hands. Bare feet.

Breathe deep.

Close the eyes. Go inside. As the belly expands then the weight of demands have a chance to release.

Breathe deep.

Give it time to unwind. The cells need fresh air to repair.

The mind quiets. The candle burns. The time slows down. The breath is here. Always. To remind. The closest friend in the world, the breath. As the world speeds on. I breathe into rest.    

How do you renew and how can you do more of it?

Aaron Davidman is a playwright and performer in San Francisco.

Storytelling

By Gertrude Stein

Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.

This brings us again to composition---the using everything.

The using everything brings us to composition, and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again. There is an elaborate complexity of using everything, and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again.

When you tell a story, how do you know where to begin and what to include?

What story do you find yourself telling most often and why? 

Gertrude Stein’s works include Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and Four Saints in Three Acts.

Unexpected Connections

By Kate Thomas

Commuting from New Jersey to New York, I’ve learned to stick to myself—to sit or stand in a tight space, with many other people around, and pretend they are not there. Sometimes I am content with this sense of individualism and independence, and other times I crave to engage.

I stumbled upon an invitation for interaction in the 42nd Street subway station. I noticed a man giving away free balloon animals, a colorful tiled mural, and then a table set up with posters reading “Free Henna”, “Free Quran”, and “Muslims Giving Back”. My eyes scanned a large banner with the word “Racism” crossed out.

Three Muslim women, wearing hijabs and full veils, were at the henna and Qaran table, dispelling negative stereotypes through simple, human interactions. I waited in the short line and then spent the next twenty-five minutes chatting with strangers, unexpectedly connecting with people from a different culture from my own.

I found myself wondering why avoiding connection is so easy to do in such a diverse, full city. In an effort to change this pattern, I placed my hand on the older woman’s knee as she drew a beautiful, brown design gently across my skin. It spanned from my left wrist to my fingernails—a flower, paisley, and little dots and lines.

This MLK Day, how can you connect with individuals and communities different from your own?

Kate Thomas was a 2014-2015 Repair the World: Baltimore Education Justice Fellow, and is currently earning her MSW at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work.

Beginnings

By Justin Rocket Silverman

The plan was to be down on one knee. She and I were at the exact spot in the park where we'd met three years before. My brother was hiding in the bushes with a telephoto lens. I’d spent months searching for the right ring. A diamond, but not a bloody one. She wanted this engagement and wasn’t shy about saying so. I was less sure. Not because I didn’t love her or want to spend our lives together. But because of the overwhelming uncertainty. The divorce rate isn't actually 50 percent, it's more like 30, but that’s still a whole lot of visits to Splitsville. And there is no reason to think we wouldn’t one day book tickets there ourselves. Yet the part of me that doesn’t care about logic knew it was time, uncertainty be damned. Because really, in this life, there is nothing to do but try. I dropped down, lifted the ring, and asked my baby to become my bride. She said yes. The rest is a blur. Luckily my brother did his job. But in the photos I’m not down on one knee. I’m down on both knees. Grounded, in the face of uncertainty.

When you’re starting something new, how do you balance excitement and uncertainty?

Justin Rocket Silverman is a veteran newspaper and magazine writer in New York City.

The New Year

By Charles Dickens

Next to Christmas-day, the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year. There are a lachrymose set of people who usher in the New Year with watching and fasting, as if they were bound to attend as chief mourners at the obsequies of the old one. 

Now, we cannot but think it a great deal more complimentary, both to the old year that has rolled away, and to the New Year that is just beginning to dawn upon us, to see the old fellow out, and the new one in, with gaiety and glee.

There must have been some few occurrences in the past year to which we can look back, with a smile of cheerful recollection, if not with a feeling of heartfelt thankfulness. And we are bound by every rule of justice and equity to give the New Year credit for being a good one, until he proves himself unworthy the confidence we repose in him.

This is our view of the matter; and entertaining it, notwithstanding our respect for the old year, one of the few remaining moments of whose existence passes away with every word we write, here we are, seated by our fireside on this last night of the old year, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six [1836], penning this article with as jovial a face as if nothing extraordinary had happened, or was about to happen, to disturb our good humour.

What are you thinking about this New Year?

Do you begin each year assuming it will be a good one?

Charles Dickens was an English novelist and essayist. Early in his career, he wrote and published a series of short journalistic pieces about life in and around London. The pieces were collected and published as Sketches By Boz in 1937; this piece is taken from that collection.

Birth Story

By Joel Stein

Here’s how I thought childbirth happened: Women struggled and pushed and a baby popped out and everyone clapped and shook hands. What actually happened was that, over and over, my wife Cassandra struggled, before I finally saw the top of Laszlo’s little fuzzy head poke out.

Finally, the rest of him slithered out of her, red and angry and screaming. For three very long seconds I feared I wouldn’t love this furious demon child, that I wouldn’t be able to calm him, that he’d hate me. But then, the doctors put him in my arms, and he calmed down. And as soon as he stopped crying, I started.

I assumed being born was awful: You suddenly went from darkness, wet warmth, and a feeding tube that hooked into your stomach to bright, hungry coldness where you had to breathe yourself. But after those first three seconds of red-faced crying, which, in his defense, were probably due the fact that his head had just been squeezed out by Cassandra, Laszlo wasn’t upset. He was curious, looking up at me with total trust despite the fact that I hadn’t finished a single parenting book. The Buddhists were wrong: Life isn’t suffering. It’s awesome. And that was making me cry.

Where does life come from?

Joel Stein is a renowned American columnist and the author of Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity.

Body + Mind

By Nathaniel Deutsch

At the age of 75 my father became a golem. Or at least that’s what he told me when I visited him in the hospital, where he was suffering from kidney failure, only the latest in a series of medical complications related to diabetes. When I asked him what he meant, my father groaned, “I have become a golem. An out-of-control body.”

My father grew up in a very orthodox Hungarian Jewish family in pre-Holocaust Europe and — after coming to America as a war refugee — Borough Park, Brooklyn. In the yeshivas that my father attended, students were encouraged to cultivate their minds and souls but not their bodies. Indeed, they were taught that bodies were things to be ignored, subdued or enlisted to perform mitzvot (commandments) but not indulged or exercised.

Years of sedentary existence undoubtedly contributed to my father’s many health problems. Yet I also suspect that his profound alienation from his own body granted him a seemingly magical ability to overcome ailments that would have felled an Olympic athlete. During his numerous stays in the hospital, my father always had roommates who looked to be in better physical shape than he was. Some of them never recovered. My father, meanwhile, slowly but surely returned to some semblance of health. Invariably, he astounded physicians with his incredible resilience. They naively attributed his dramatic recoveries to an amazing if unaccountable reserve of physical strength. But I knew better. My father didn’t mend because of his body but, rather, despite it, or, even more accurately, to spite it.

How can I nourish my whole self? 

Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and the Director of the Institute for Humanities Research. He is also the author of six books, including, most recently, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement.

Anger

By Jenn Maer

When I was a little kid, I was obsessively well-behaved. I ate my vegetables. Got straight As. Wrote thank you notes for every single gift I received.

Then one day, I snapped.

It happened during recess in fifth grade. It was my turn to take the red rubber ball to the playground, which meant I was in charge of keeping it safe and choosing the game we’d play. I took this responsibility seriously—like I did everything back then—and silently vowed to be a just and fair keeper of the ball. We would play Four Square, I decreed: No backstops, no spinsies.

Then out of nowhere, Adrian B., a sixth grade bully with the hard, mean eyes of a career criminal, stole my red rubber ball. The ball I’d earned with good behavior. The ball I’d sworn to protect.

This would not stand.

A white-hot rage bloomed inside me like a tiny, pony-tailed Hulk. I raised my fist and threw the first (and only) punch of my life. Adrian turned his back to me in reflex and the blow hit his spine with a sickening crack. I broke my wrist with that single punch.

Adrian cried.

I did not.

And every damn kid in the school signed my cast.

When have you expressed righteous anger?  

Jenn Maer writes and develops projects at IDEO. She also is the frontwoman for IDEO’s all-employee rock band, Fishlocker.

Silence

By Judy Batalion

Not long ago, I developed insomnia. Having completed some projects in England, I was unsure whether I should return west. My friends and family overflowed with advice; I could barely have a two-second encounter without someone offering their take or interrogating me about where I would go. At first I attributed my sleeplessness to the anxiety of the unknown and the psychic workout of decision-making. But, with time, I came to realize that I actually enjoyed the calm of the night. I wanted some escape from the bombardment of everyone’s “two cents.” I cherished the zone of non-talk, the space between words where I could nonverbally feel out my desires and relocate my drive, some silence in which to just be.

Daily life, I realized, is noisy; quietude can be a reprieve. Hindus practice yoga. Buddhism is centered on meditation without speech. Sufism, tied to Islam, emphasizes wordless worship. The muteness of monks and hermits is the highest form of Christian observance. A Quaker service can rest silent for an hour.

But where, I wondered, was Jewish silence in all this? Does it exist apart from trauma and pain? There are stories of rabbis running off to caves and kabbalist trance pursuits. There does exist a Jewish practice known as taanit hadibur, a fast of words; however, none of the rabbis I interviewed knew anything more about it, nor did they know anyone who had ever done it (Picture how many frantic messages a Jewish daughter would receive if she didn’t call her mother back!). But when, and how, aside from these rare examples, does silence — as a positive pursuit — appear in the rituals of Jewish life? [From “Sha Shtil!,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 6, Fall 2007]

How do you create moments of silence during the day?

Judy Batalion is a writer and performer.

Family

By Lou Cove

My first child joined the world 24 days after 9/11. How could I explain this crazy place?

Afraid for the future, I looked to the past and named my son Sam, after my grandfather.

I owned just one relic left behind by Gramps: the “life story” Grandma Wini made him recite into their Flat-Mic cassette recorder.

Gramps never talked about himself, and he didn’t put much stock in that project. Rather than spend $1.25 to buy a blank tape, he took a foreign language instruction cassette and affixed a piece of tape to the hole at the top, so he could record over the lesson. An autobiography in thirty minutes? And free? Now that’s a bargain.

I had that tape for ten years. I could never bring myself to listen it.

Until now.

“On my first day of kindergarten,” he began, “I was sent home with a piece of tape across my mouth and a note pinned to my sweater that said, ‘Send him back when he can speak English’ because all I could speak was… Jewish.”

And by Jewish, I knew he meant Yiddish. What I didn’t know was how much I almost never knew, because Gramps’ first school lesson was clear: keep your mouth shut.

That little piece of tape sealed his true story. Just forty-two words, yet enough to unlock an entirely new understanding of someone I thought I knew.

What's the best thing you've learned about yourself through your family?

Lou Cove is a writer and filmmaker.

Peace

By Wendell Berry
 

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Where do you find peace?

Wendell Berry is an American novelist and poet.

Love & Hate

By Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. You may be able to speak with the tongues of men and angels. You may have the eloquence of articulate speech; but if you have not love, it means nothing.

You may have the gift of prophecy. You may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules. You may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights. You may ascend to the heights of academic achievement so that you have all knowledge. You may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees.

If you have not love, all of these mean nothing.

How can you share more love?

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American civil rights leader and orator.

Love

By Mary Oliver

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

When it is over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. 

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

What is one thing you can do this week to live a more engaged life?

Mary Oliver is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Faith

By Paul Bennett

My father died over 10 years ago in a hospice in Northern England. I was living in California at the time and as it became clear that he was close to the end, I called to say I was getting on a flight to London the next day to come see him. “Please don’t,” he said calmly. “I don’t need you to see me like this.” We said goodbye. He died two weeks later.

It wasn’t easy for me to stay faithful to his wishes and stay away, but in that moment I understood that my father was doing something I do every day — he was being a designer. He didn’t have many tools of the trade left: paralyzed with cancer, he was wired to the wall and unable to move — but he could still make a decision to spare me an image of him in a painfully diminished state. He didn’t want to be remembered that way, and this was the one small way in which he could still design his own death.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea lately. I know that we can’t choose the what, why, or when of our death, but can we do more to design the how? It provides me with some comfort.

What do you have faith in?

How can faith help us deal with events outside of our understanding or control?

Paul Bennett is a keen educator, thought leader, and writer, and serves as IDEO’s Chief Creative Officer.