Good Clean Reads

Change your thinking and change your life. This week’s enlightening discussion with Barbara Fredrickson, a Psychology Professor and lead investigator at the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory (a.k.a. PEP Laba) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We discuss her research and book, Positivity and provide the basic tools anyone can use to make their life and...

“You only get one chance. You have one journey through life; you cannot repeat even one moment or retrace one footstep. It seems that we are meant to inhabit and live everything that comes towards us.” –John O’Donahue

I have been struggling lately, confronted by the reality of an opportunity that I have been waiting for and dreaming about, yet still feel unprepared to carry out. I have known...

“He divines remedies against injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage; whatever does not kill him makes him stronger” -Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a sure sign when the day becomes a collection of physical injuries. Today a ping-pong table fell on my forearm, which remarkably held it up and a car door slammed into my ankle with about the force of the ping-pong table....

“For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life seems full of all kinds of events that mark the time indelibly; that I know will soon be remembered by before and after. Some of them, like senior prom and high school graduation...

“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.” -John M. Richardson, Jr.

Our local movie store is closing. Actually it is a whole chain of neighborhood stores that is closing with Hollywood’s demise. They had already shuttered 3000 stores and now with their bankruptcy, the most profitable...

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living” -Joseph Campbell

The highs and lows have been extreme lately. More and more my daily effort and my passion merge into something that an onlooker might call my bliss. Some days I am overcome with the sheer luck...

“Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

These opposites have more in common than we might expect. Learning how to win or lose with grace is another way to define how to live and grow with maturity. Richard Bach summed it up when he said: “That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed...

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” -Carl Gustav Jung

Today positivity means balance. The Buddhist teachings on equanimity are the texts I study, and today I realize that I need to double my efforts. The height of...

“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” -Woody Allen

On the drive up to the State Tennis tournament and with graduation just weeks away, we were listing the names of the kids we knew in common to find out where they will head off next year. As we were talking, I learned about a boy who I had known since my...