I didn’t laugh out loud when Tony asked me to write a guest post for “Declaring Freedom.” I knew he was graciously offering a platform to a neighbor who’d had just enough success as a writer to declare writing their […]
For millennia, retreats have been used by sages, scientists, and saints to refresh and refocus, and have often been the occasion for profound personal transformation. The founder of Buddhism, Gotama Buddha, recommended his followers spend the 3 months of the […]
I stood at the top of Marx, a wryly-named double-black-diamond expert ski trail at the peak of Big Sky’s Lone Mountain, over 11,000 feet above sea level. I had worked myself up to this over a week of skiing with […]
It’s New Year’s again, and time to drag out the usual lists: New Year’s resolutions, what worked and didn’t work in 2017, goals for 2018, and so on. I’m not down on lists: I’ve made a fair number of them […]
We recently packed our bags and moved out of our house of 23 years in high-priced suburban New York and moved to the non-nosebleed-priced countryside outside of Woodstock, NY (real estate hackers will recognize this as a neat bit of […]
I was recently in Moab, Utah on a family hiking and mountain-biking trip. The desert terrain is surreal: bizarre, unearthly spires, arches, mounds, bridges, and hoodoos carved from the sandstone through millennia of erosion by wind and water. To walk […]
Over the last few months, as my mother’s health worsened (she had been suffering from dementia and complications for roughly the last 5 years), I’ve been thinking a lot about what her legacy has been, what her life meant to […]
Everyone, unfortunately, has at least one other asshole in their lives (in addition to the one they’ve been attached to since birth). Sometimes it’s a boss or a co-worker, sometimes it’s a friend or acquaintance, and sometimes it’s a relative […]
The crucial role of courage in personal freedom I don’t think of myself as a “courageous” person, at least not in a stereotypical way. We tend to think of “courage” as an attribute of firefighters, of the men and women […]
Travel is often seen as the ultimate expression of personal freedom: if you are free, then you have the freedom to go anywhere, at any time, and do anything you’d like. But I have found that it also works in […]
