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The Best Books Reveal How People Think
The Summer Before the War tells a story that takes place in “The town of Rye . . .” (first line of the novel), a real place in the county of Sussex, England. Carefully researched, the idyllic coastal region contrasts not only the losses of WWI (World War I), but chronicles the end of an era––or rather the beginning of the end of an era––where class distinction slowly disintegrates under the weight of its own hubris. “Here’s to taking the future at a run.” Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War, Acknowledgements The above quote is the last statement in the author’s note to recognize the contributions of others who…
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The Hard Work of Writing in Order to Be Understood
Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 B. C.) said, “The aim of writing is not simply to be understood, but to make it impossible to be misunderstood.” Unlike face-to-face dialogue, the writer must imagine readers of all sorts in various times and places interacting with words written on a page. The words on a page cannot rearrange themselves in order to clarify a point. Neither can the writer know whether the reader reads to the end, or whether the reader reacts to one part of the writing and dismisses the whole. Or whether a reader reacts to something the writer never intended by reading into what he reads. The possibilities of being…
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Living an Edited Life: Minimalism Meets the Enneagram
For a couple of years, I’ve followed a person whose message is minimalism. He blogs about all the stuff you and I accumulate that no longer serves us. Clutter. His messages make me think about getting rid of stuff. Some of you may have these thoughts too. Waves of guilt followed by inaction. A few years ago, I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizing expert, who has a TV series on Netflix. After reading her book, I took everything out of my closet, even took pictures with my camera and posted on my website the whole cathartic 2-day process. “Make everything earn its place,” my daughter…
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Quotes Can Ease Your Aches, Quiet Your Thoughts, and Revive Your Heart
As a child, I learned the power of memorization. Memorized words increase analytical skills by forging pathways for thinking. Through the years, I have collected hundreds of quotes. Quotes from movies, songs, hymns, and for years, I memorized scriptures. For whatever reason, unlike reading or looking up a quote, the words that have lodged in my memory offer comfort. Here, I’m not talking about memorizing facts in order to take a test, perform, or take part in a contest. Rather, I have benefitted from these random quotes in my mind’s data base when words previously memorized apply to situations unrelated to the source material. Applied in different and yet particular…
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Children Need to be Seen AND Heard
The proverb “Children should be seen and not heard” dates back to medieval times and particularly applied to girls. In the presence of adults, children were expected to keep silent. Children who experience chaos and trauma especially need to be heard as well as seen by caring adults. Mountains of misunderstanding and the valleys of assumption can exist between children and adults. For the sake of young, immature minds whose imaginations naturally feed fears of the unknown, adults need to climb those mountains and cross the valleys that characterize real life trauma and chaos. When adults ignore children, remain preoccupied with their own problems, or fail to consider the way…
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Are Your Stories Worth Telling?
If someone were to ask you about your life story, where would you start? Would you start from today and look back? Or would you start at your beginning, from when you were born? Would you begin explaining relationships? Your parents? The place where you grew up? Teachers? Friends? Would you want to talk about your childhood and adolescence? Or have the years since high school and college proved more interesting? Would adult years that perhaps include a spouse and children emerge as most significant? Or maybe you would want to tell about your career, or people you have met that have made a difference in your life? What about…
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Writing Can Help Make Sense of Your Story
You want your life to count for something. You want your experiences to benefit somebody besides you. You want to know before you die that it makes a difference that you lived. You need to write down some of your own story footnotes. You need to leave a trail. You need to write to hear yourself think. Your problem is my problem too. People used to write letters. Letters kept track of some of the important events in life. Letters said, “I’m thinking of you and I want you to know what’s going on in my life.” But now, few people write letters. And few people make prints from the…
