ALL EPISODES

Once upon a time, I used to think that there was a way to make everyone like me, but that's not possible. I don't think even Mother Teresa was universally loved. No one is universally loved. Some people are able to manage being liked by a lot of people, but those people are also very frequently uninteresting.

Freedom seems like the ability for us to do whatever we want. But that's often the very thing that enslaves us at this moment. I kind of want to check my phone, but is that freedom or compulsion? What most of us like to call freedom is more of a curated form of voluntary enslavement. So, I noticed something a while back.

I had a friend. Literally have his world come crashing down on him this morning when a water pipe burst in his apartment building and started leaking from the ceiling. Understandably, his girlfriend was in a panic and to some degree, so was he. They had just gotten settled into this place with jobs and responsibilities weighing on them. They just didn't have the energy or the time to deal with this on top of everything else they already had going on. I read something in a

When a lion is looking for something to eat. It doesn't think about the antelope's feelings. It is focused and it is hungry, and it takes what it needs. It feels cruel, but the lion would die if it didn't choose to be the predator it was meant to be. People are odd creatures. We can be both predators and prey, and as such, I think that there's an argument to be made that maybe there are times in life.

There's a moment in the Chronicles of Narnia when Peter, one of the young protagonists, comes face to face with a wolf that wants to kill him. When others go to him, the king of Narnia, Aslan says Back, let the prince win his spurs. I never thought much about this until the other day. I happened to be watching the movie with my kids, and I thought, why on earth would you ever risk letting even the least valuable person in your army be killed by an enemy in one-on-one combat i

When I told my five-year-old, his mom and I were divorcing.  I was practically crying, and his response was, it's okay, daddy. I don't care if you split up. If only that was true. He's seven now and struggles more deeply than ever with the fact that the two people he loves most are not together. The ramifications of divorce go beyond what I think we like to imagine. Sometimes over 50% of marriages today are expected to fail. Maybe it's just easier to divorce or maybe the s

If you cannot stand to be apart from them, you're not in love.  You are infatuated or maybe just dependent. The difference between actually being in love or not is the difference between feeling pain when you aren't around them and having no place that you'd rather be. Romantic relationships have a way of being a kind of band aid for a lot of our insecurities. They make us feel less alone. They can bring some excitement to our lives. They bring pleasure to our lives. They

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on...

Have you ever felt like other people got a head start in life, like they were born taller, richer, smarter, more connected? Well, maybe they were, but even with all of those advantages, they're still not guaranteed to win, and neither are you unless you stop playing their game. So, you can play your own game. So, someone was telling me a story recently about this guy that was born with a disease that made his spine form abnormally, and the effect was he didn't grow very tall,