For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a great affinity for nonhuman life. On one summer trip to a cottage in northern Ontario (some time in the late 80s, if memory serves me right), my brother and I found an injured frog and, in our good nature, brought it home and attempted to …
If this world has taught me anything, it’s that things don’t always unfold the way we expect. And hate doesn’t just go away, even when we think it’s been beat and buried. The year I was born was the same year that the AIDS epidemic began, a health crisis for which there was little immediate …
Everything exists in contrast to something. In the resilience of life there is vulnerability, and in its boldness, fragility. I’ve been no stranger to funerals in my life, and I’ve been teaching about the psychology of death and dying for over a decade now, but the truth is, death still terrifies me. And the loss …
In consideration of the many things that preoccupy the minds of Homo sapiens, and of those things for which we search endlessly in this world, there is perhaps none greater than the search for meaning. As I contend here, however, the search for meaning is a search for connection in disguise. (And it is a …
It is often said that science and religion are two different paths to truth. Religion and spirituality offer a sense of personal truth (what I will refer to as knowing) through faith and subjective experiences of meaning and transcendence. Science, on the other hand, offers an objective sense of the world—knowledge of how things exist …
The Reconciliation of Personal and Collective Truth Read More »
We’ve been in this pandemic for over a year now. It’s been a year of challenges, some worse than others, and some far more desolate, as no two situations are exactly alike. Whether in the loss of lives or the loss of way of life, it has also been a time to grieve. Indeed, we’re …
If there’s one new year’s resolution we all need to make (again), it is to be more humble. We need to listen more, and speak less. See the strength in modesty. And resign our egos—or at least try to. Because the world depends on it. Most of our problems today are driven by what lies …
It is from time to time and every now and again, when the wind moves and the trees begin to sway, and the sound of rustling leaves fills the air, that I get a little closer to that feeling—of being connected, or embedded, like I’m part of it all again, like I’m home. But most …
Fate whispers to the warrior, “You can not withstand the storm.”The warrior whispers back, “I am the storm.” —Jake Remington To call life the storm would be tempting but not quite right. It is the world that is the storm; the thing we struggle to navigate; the situations and environments that try us, and break …
“The present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own.” (Charles Caleb Colton) People say that there’s a lesson to be had from COVID-19; that as a species, we have something to learn from the recent pandemic. Perhaps it will remind us of what really matters in life, or perhaps it will alter …