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Posted by Alex Lickerman  Print  Email to a friend  Photo: Poitin Jimmie Being creative is hard. Thinking up ways to connect disparate elements into a whole that not only hasn’t been seen before but also delights us with surprise, meaning, or beauty requires a great deal of energy—”executive function,” as psychologists put it. Not to mention the time it takes to create something novel and then rework it and rework it and rework it until the original seed blossoms into a fully-formed painting or book or poem or song or blog post. It’s said that all writing is rewriting, but creation in any medium requires a laborious chipping away at unnecessary parts and a relentless enlarging and refining of others. And then there’s the space the children of our creativity occupy in our heads. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: mrsdkrebs America is a symbol of freedom all over the world, enjoying as it does freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. Our ancestors prized these political freedoms so much that many of them were willing to die defending them. And though many of us are often accused today of taking them for granted, we continue to see people rising up to fight for them when they’re threatened (when someone else’s freedoms are threatened, too). Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: limaoscarjuliet You don’t really know what an experience is like, of course, until you have it yourself. I remember thinking to myself when my wife and I first began discussing the idea of having children that this was especially true regarding parenthood. In the past I’d been able to predict with reasonable accuracy a number of novel experiences based on previous similar experiences, but no experience I’d yet had seemed even close to the experience of having a child (sorry, owning a pet doesn’t come close). Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: MikeBlogs I’ve always wanted to know the answers: What creates consciousness? How did the cosmos come to be? What happens when we die? Why are we here? From a certain perspective, my life has consisted of a series of investigations into ways of discovering the answers to these kinds of questions. In college, I became interested in philosophy. In medical school, I became fascinated by neurology and simultaneously began my experiment with Buddhism. I’ve learned a lot along the way and have settled at least the answer to the last question to my satisfaction (which, for interested readers, I detail in my forthcoming book The Undefeated Mind), but as to the others, a recent conversation with one of my brothers sparked an unhappy thought: perhaps our brains are built in such a way that they can’t even properly conceive the answers. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: oskay I often wish I could snap my fingers and make people do what I want. I wish I could speed up the pace at which I achieve my goals and slow down the pace at which pleasant things fade. I wish I could write blog posts and books that everyone loves, that I could have solitude and company whenever I want and not when they’re thrust upon me, and that when I’m in a bad mood I could simply decide not to be. What I wish for, in short, is absolute control over my life. Continue reading…
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