Happiness in this World

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked my wife.
“I don’t know,” she answered.  “What do you want?”
“How about hamburgers?”
“No, I don’t want hamburgers.”
“What do you want then?”
“I don’t know…pasta.”

Changing another person’s mind is literally one of the hardest things to do in the world.  Think of how many conversations you’ve ever had in which one of the participants decided the other was right and abandoned their previous views altogether.  It almost never happens.
Why?  Because even though ideas flit in and out of our [...]

Several years ago, someone I know told me he was contemplating divorcing his wife.  I wasn’t surprised.  He’d been unhappy in the marriage for some time—and, in my opinion, with good reason:  his wife was jealous to the point of being neurotic, often behaving in ways that were shockingly inappropriate, offensive, and stress-inducing.
Or so he’d [...]

In 2002, my third-youngest brother and his wife announced they were going to have a baby.  The news absolutely floored me.  This would be the first baby of our generation and represented a significant life change for us all.
I left their apartment that night thinking about life stages and transitions and found myself wondering why [...]

Several months ago, my wife and I began toilet training our son, Cruise (the Montessori method is to train toddlers to use the toilet as early as possible).  We’d diligently put him on a small potty in his bathroom as often as we could drag ourselves into doing it and repeat over and over to [...]

My student’s voice trembled as she answered my question.  “How do you think you’ve done so far?” I’d asked her.  We’d been together on the general medicine inpatient ward for two weeks—the midpoint of the rotation—and as was my usual custom I was giving her feedback on her performance by first asking her to rate [...]

The Japanese have a term, kenzoku, which translated literally means “family.”  The connotation suggests a bond between people who’ve made a similar commitment and who possibly therefore share a similar destiny.  It implies the presence of the deepest connection of friendship, of lives lived as comrades from the distant past.

The other day I found myself thinking about what would happen if as an adult I encountered some of the children who terrorized me when I was in 7th grade (an experience I wrote about in an earlier post, Breaking Free Of The Past), wondering if I’d be able to forgive them for what they [...]

When my wife and I were first learning to ballroom dance (much fun!) I was amazed at how effortlessly our teacher was able to lead her when demonstrating a technique to me.  She always seemed to know where he wanted her to go and how he wanted her to move, despite being as inexperienced as [...]

Years ago, a hulk of a man came to see me with a lump in his neck.  He was as big as the lump was small, standing at least six and half feet tall with shoulders that seemed almost as broad.  His lump, in contrast, was only 2 cm wide.
Wide enough, however, to warrant concern.  [...]