Renewal

By Aaron Davidman

The subway the freeway the airwaves stop. The traffic the deadlines the newspaper stop. The shopping the carpool the homework stop. The iPhone the iPad the Internet stop. The politics restaurant food stamps homeless man garbage can God plan stop. The drones and the clones and the suicide belts. The attacks and the cracks in the facts and the holy arcade by the black street parade and another kid down she’s been kicked by the trade. Ones and zeros piled high as the sky and the nighttime cries while the dreamer’s awake he can’t shake the mistakes of the dizzying day.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

Catch a breath. Take a sip of cool air. Sit on the ground on a rock on a bed on a chair.

Light a candle. Take a walk. Under trees. Holding hands. Bare feet.

Breathe deep.

Close the eyes. Go inside. As the belly expands then the weight of demands have a chance to release.

Breathe deep.

Give it time to unwind. The cells need fresh air to repair.

The mind quiets. The candle burns. The time slows down. The breath is here. Always. To remind. The closest friend in the world, the breath. As the world speeds on. I breathe into rest.    

How do you renew and how can you do more of it?

Aaron Davidman is a playwright and performer in San Francisco.

Storytelling

By Gertrude Stein

Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.

This brings us again to composition---the using everything.

The using everything brings us to composition, and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again. There is an elaborate complexity of using everything, and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again.

When you tell a story, how do you know where to begin and what to include?

What story do you find yourself telling most often and why? 

Gertrude Stein’s works include Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and Four Saints in Three Acts.

Unexpected Connections

By Kate Thomas

Commuting from New Jersey to New York, I’ve learned to stick to myself—to sit or stand in a tight space, with many other people around, and pretend they are not there. Sometimes I am content with this sense of individualism and independence, and other times I crave to engage.

I stumbled upon an invitation for interaction in the 42nd Street subway station. I noticed a man giving away free balloon animals, a colorful tiled mural, and then a table set up with posters reading “Free Henna”, “Free Quran”, and “Muslims Giving Back”. My eyes scanned a large banner with the word “Racism” crossed out.

Three Muslim women, wearing hijabs and full veils, were at the henna and Qaran table, dispelling negative stereotypes through simple, human interactions. I waited in the short line and then spent the next twenty-five minutes chatting with strangers, unexpectedly connecting with people from a different culture from my own.

I found myself wondering why avoiding connection is so easy to do in such a diverse, full city. In an effort to change this pattern, I placed my hand on the older woman’s knee as she drew a beautiful, brown design gently across my skin. It spanned from my left wrist to my fingernails—a flower, paisley, and little dots and lines.

This MLK Day, how can you connect with individuals and communities different from your own?

Kate Thomas was a 2014-2015 Repair the World: Baltimore Education Justice Fellow, and is currently earning her MSW at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work.

Beginnings

By Justin Rocket Silverman

The plan was to be down on one knee. She and I were at the exact spot in the park where we'd met three years before. My brother was hiding in the bushes with a telephoto lens. I’d spent months searching for the right ring. A diamond, but not a bloody one. She wanted this engagement and wasn’t shy about saying so. I was less sure. Not because I didn’t love her or want to spend our lives together. But because of the overwhelming uncertainty. The divorce rate isn't actually 50 percent, it's more like 30, but that’s still a whole lot of visits to Splitsville. And there is no reason to think we wouldn’t one day book tickets there ourselves. Yet the part of me that doesn’t care about logic knew it was time, uncertainty be damned. Because really, in this life, there is nothing to do but try. I dropped down, lifted the ring, and asked my baby to become my bride. She said yes. The rest is a blur. Luckily my brother did his job. But in the photos I’m not down on one knee. I’m down on both knees. Grounded, in the face of uncertainty.

When you’re starting something new, how do you balance excitement and uncertainty?

Justin Rocket Silverman is a veteran newspaper and magazine writer in New York City.

The New Year

By Charles Dickens

Next to Christmas-day, the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year. There are a lachrymose set of people who usher in the New Year with watching and fasting, as if they were bound to attend as chief mourners at the obsequies of the old one. 

Now, we cannot but think it a great deal more complimentary, both to the old year that has rolled away, and to the New Year that is just beginning to dawn upon us, to see the old fellow out, and the new one in, with gaiety and glee.

There must have been some few occurrences in the past year to which we can look back, with a smile of cheerful recollection, if not with a feeling of heartfelt thankfulness. And we are bound by every rule of justice and equity to give the New Year credit for being a good one, until he proves himself unworthy the confidence we repose in him.

This is our view of the matter; and entertaining it, notwithstanding our respect for the old year, one of the few remaining moments of whose existence passes away with every word we write, here we are, seated by our fireside on this last night of the old year, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six [1836], penning this article with as jovial a face as if nothing extraordinary had happened, or was about to happen, to disturb our good humour.

What are you thinking about this New Year?

Do you begin each year assuming it will be a good one?

Charles Dickens was an English novelist and essayist. Early in his career, he wrote and published a series of short journalistic pieces about life in and around London. The pieces were collected and published as Sketches By Boz in 1937; this piece is taken from that collection.

Birth Story

By Joel Stein

Here’s how I thought childbirth happened: Women struggled and pushed and a baby popped out and everyone clapped and shook hands. What actually happened was that, over and over, my wife Cassandra struggled, before I finally saw the top of Laszlo’s little fuzzy head poke out.

Finally, the rest of him slithered out of her, red and angry and screaming. For three very long seconds I feared I wouldn’t love this furious demon child, that I wouldn’t be able to calm him, that he’d hate me. But then, the doctors put him in my arms, and he calmed down. And as soon as he stopped crying, I started.

I assumed being born was awful: You suddenly went from darkness, wet warmth, and a feeding tube that hooked into your stomach to bright, hungry coldness where you had to breathe yourself. But after those first three seconds of red-faced crying, which, in his defense, were probably due the fact that his head had just been squeezed out by Cassandra, Laszlo wasn’t upset. He was curious, looking up at me with total trust despite the fact that I hadn’t finished a single parenting book. The Buddhists were wrong: Life isn’t suffering. It’s awesome. And that was making me cry.

Where does life come from?

Joel Stein is a renowned American columnist and the author of Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity.

Body + Mind

By Nathaniel Deutsch

At the age of 75 my father became a golem. Or at least that’s what he told me when I visited him in the hospital, where he was suffering from kidney failure, only the latest in a series of medical complications related to diabetes. When I asked him what he meant, my father groaned, “I have become a golem. An out-of-control body.”

My father grew up in a very orthodox Hungarian Jewish family in pre-Holocaust Europe and — after coming to America as a war refugee — Borough Park, Brooklyn. In the yeshivas that my father attended, students were encouraged to cultivate their minds and souls but not their bodies. Indeed, they were taught that bodies were things to be ignored, subdued or enlisted to perform mitzvot (commandments) but not indulged or exercised.

Years of sedentary existence undoubtedly contributed to my father’s many health problems. Yet I also suspect that his profound alienation from his own body granted him a seemingly magical ability to overcome ailments that would have felled an Olympic athlete. During his numerous stays in the hospital, my father always had roommates who looked to be in better physical shape than he was. Some of them never recovered. My father, meanwhile, slowly but surely returned to some semblance of health. Invariably, he astounded physicians with his incredible resilience. They naively attributed his dramatic recoveries to an amazing if unaccountable reserve of physical strength. But I knew better. My father didn’t mend because of his body but, rather, despite it, or, even more accurately, to spite it.

How can I nourish my whole self? 

Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and the Director of the Institute for Humanities Research. He is also the author of six books, including, most recently, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement.

Anger

By Jenn Maer

When I was a little kid, I was obsessively well-behaved. I ate my vegetables. Got straight As. Wrote thank you notes for every single gift I received.

Then one day, I snapped.

It happened during recess in fifth grade. It was my turn to take the red rubber ball to the playground, which meant I was in charge of keeping it safe and choosing the game we’d play. I took this responsibility seriously—like I did everything back then—and silently vowed to be a just and fair keeper of the ball. We would play Four Square, I decreed: No backstops, no spinsies.

Then out of nowhere, Adrian B., a sixth grade bully with the hard, mean eyes of a career criminal, stole my red rubber ball. The ball I’d earned with good behavior. The ball I’d sworn to protect.

This would not stand.

A white-hot rage bloomed inside me like a tiny, pony-tailed Hulk. I raised my fist and threw the first (and only) punch of my life. Adrian turned his back to me in reflex and the blow hit his spine with a sickening crack. I broke my wrist with that single punch.

Adrian cried.

I did not.

And every damn kid in the school signed my cast.

When have you expressed righteous anger?  

Jenn Maer writes and develops projects at IDEO. She also is the frontwoman for IDEO’s all-employee rock band, Fishlocker.

Silence

By Judy Batalion

Not long ago, I developed insomnia. Having completed some projects in England, I was unsure whether I should return west. My friends and family overflowed with advice; I could barely have a two-second encounter without someone offering their take or interrogating me about where I would go. At first I attributed my sleeplessness to the anxiety of the unknown and the psychic workout of decision-making. But, with time, I came to realize that I actually enjoyed the calm of the night. I wanted some escape from the bombardment of everyone’s “two cents.” I cherished the zone of non-talk, the space between words where I could nonverbally feel out my desires and relocate my drive, some silence in which to just be.

Daily life, I realized, is noisy; quietude can be a reprieve. Hindus practice yoga. Buddhism is centered on meditation without speech. Sufism, tied to Islam, emphasizes wordless worship. The muteness of monks and hermits is the highest form of Christian observance. A Quaker service can rest silent for an hour.

But where, I wondered, was Jewish silence in all this? Does it exist apart from trauma and pain? There are stories of rabbis running off to caves and kabbalist trance pursuits. There does exist a Jewish practice known as taanit hadibur, a fast of words; however, none of the rabbis I interviewed knew anything more about it, nor did they know anyone who had ever done it (Picture how many frantic messages a Jewish daughter would receive if she didn’t call her mother back!). But when, and how, aside from these rare examples, does silence — as a positive pursuit — appear in the rituals of Jewish life? [From “Sha Shtil!,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 6, Fall 2007]

How do you create moments of silence during the day?

Judy Batalion is a writer and performer.

Family

By Lou Cove

My first child joined the world 24 days after 9/11. How could I explain this crazy place?

Afraid for the future, I looked to the past and named my son Sam, after my grandfather.

I owned just one relic left behind by Gramps: the “life story” Grandma Wini made him recite into their Flat-Mic cassette recorder.

Gramps never talked about himself, and he didn’t put much stock in that project. Rather than spend $1.25 to buy a blank tape, he took a foreign language instruction cassette and affixed a piece of tape to the hole at the top, so he could record over the lesson. An autobiography in thirty minutes? And free? Now that’s a bargain.

I had that tape for ten years. I could never bring myself to listen it.

Until now.

“On my first day of kindergarten,” he began, “I was sent home with a piece of tape across my mouth and a note pinned to my sweater that said, ‘Send him back when he can speak English’ because all I could speak was… Jewish.”

And by Jewish, I knew he meant Yiddish. What I didn’t know was how much I almost never knew, because Gramps’ first school lesson was clear: keep your mouth shut.

That little piece of tape sealed his true story. Just forty-two words, yet enough to unlock an entirely new understanding of someone I thought I knew.

What's the best thing you've learned about yourself through your family?

Lou Cove is a writer and filmmaker.

Peace

By Wendell Berry
 

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Where do you find peace?

Wendell Berry is an American novelist and poet.

Love & Hate

By Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. You may be able to speak with the tongues of men and angels. You may have the eloquence of articulate speech; but if you have not love, it means nothing.

You may have the gift of prophecy. You may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules. You may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights. You may ascend to the heights of academic achievement so that you have all knowledge. You may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees.

If you have not love, all of these mean nothing.

How can you share more love?

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American civil rights leader and orator.

Love

By Mary Oliver

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

When it is over, I don't want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. 

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

What is one thing you can do this week to live a more engaged life?

Mary Oliver is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Faith

By Paul Bennett

My father died over 10 years ago in a hospice in Northern England. I was living in California at the time and as it became clear that he was close to the end, I called to say I was getting on a flight to London the next day to come see him. “Please don’t,” he said calmly. “I don’t need you to see me like this.” We said goodbye. He died two weeks later.

It wasn’t easy for me to stay faithful to his wishes and stay away, but in that moment I understood that my father was doing something I do every day — he was being a designer. He didn’t have many tools of the trade left: paralyzed with cancer, he was wired to the wall and unable to move — but he could still make a decision to spare me an image of him in a painfully diminished state. He didn’t want to be remembered that way, and this was the one small way in which he could still design his own death.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea lately. I know that we can’t choose the what, why, or when of our death, but can we do more to design the how? It provides me with some comfort.

What do you have faith in?

How can faith help us deal with events outside of our understanding or control?

Paul Bennett is a keen educator, thought leader, and writer, and serves as IDEO’s Chief Creative Officer.

Exploring the World

By Miranda Jones

When I decided to spend my junior year of college in Jerusalem, I had visions of finding the Jewish me that had eluded my Montana-based childhood. Of course, things never work out the way you think and I realized that – in spite of the late-onset bat mitzvah I was talked into by many well-meaning religious friends – I was not going to become a super Jew. Instead of attending temple, I found myself falling into a different ritual altogether, a rhythm inspired by the city during Shabbat.

On Friday afternoons, I would join the crowds at the shuk (open-air market) to pick out the best looking half-plucked chickens, then queue up to buy bouquets of flowers, finding my place in line behind a flank of black-hatted men. Back at my campus’ communal kitchen, a couple friends and I would make dinner together, light the candles, fumble through some prayers. And then we’d just sit together. Those evenings became my home away from home, a touchstone that grounded me. Although I was never able to exactly replicate it back in the States, Shabbat was my favorite souvenir from Jerusalem, and if enjoying cooking and sharing a meal with good friends is the barrier to entry, then I pass the Jew test with flying colors.

How can you take home with you wherever you go?

What is the most valuable new ritual you've brought home from a trip?

Miranda Jones is a writer, editor, and one-half of the brother/sister furniture-designing duo Galanter & Jones.

Inside/Outside

By Aaron Davidman

The subway the freeway the airwaves stop. The traffic the deadlines the newspaper stop. The shopping the carpool the homework stop. The iPhone the iPad the Internet stop. The politics restaurant food stamps homeless man garbage can God plan stop. The drones and the clones and the suicide belts. The attacks and the cracks in the facts and the holy arcade by the black street parade and another kid down she’s been kicked by the trade. Ones and zeros piled high as the sky and the nighttime cries while the dreamer’s awake he can’t shake the mistakes of the dizzying day.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

Catch a breath. Take a sip of cool air. Sit on the ground on a rock on a bed on a chair.

Light a candle. Take a walk. Under trees. Holding hands. Bare feet.

Breathe deep.

Close the eyes. Go inside. As the belly expands then the weight of demands have a chance to release.

Breathe deep.

Give it time to unwind. The cells need fresh air to repair.

The mind quiets. The candle burns. The time slows down. The breath is here. Always. To remind. The closest friend in the world, the breath. As the world speeds on. I breathe into rest.    

How do you renew?

What have you learned about yourself by unplugging? 

Aaron Davidman is a playwright and performer in San Francisco.

Inside/Outside

By Nachman of Breslov

Grant me the ability to be alone;

May it be my custom to go outdoors each day

Among the trees and grass - among all growing things

And there may I be alone, and enter into prayer,

To talk with the One to whom I belong.

May I express there everything in my heart,

And may all the foliage of the field -

All grasses, trees, and plants -

Awake at my coming,

To send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer

So that my prayer and speech are made whole

through the life and spirit of all growing things,

Which are made as one by their transcendent Source.

May I then pour out the words of my heart

Before your Presence like water, 

And lift up my hands to You in worship,

On my behalf, and that of my children!

What has been the most profound spiritual experience of your life?

What is your relationship with nature?

Nachman of Breslov, the founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement, lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Ukraine.

Gender

By Gregor Ehrlich

A few years ago, my mother developed an interest in photo pairings — images that looked like other images. She developed an eye for odd similarities. Sometimes she would photograph a farm boy because his nose looked like former president Bill Clinton’s, or a checkout girl who looked like Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring.

Once she had me float on my back in bay water, to resemble a photo of her father, the rabbi, taken in the Dnieper River, in Poland, right before the Nazi invasion in 1939. When she found a photo of my great-aunt Ida in the old country, feeding chickens in the yard of a farm, she was very excited. Aunt Ida was of the era when cameras were still new and suspicious, and family lore has it that Ida always refused to have her picture taken. My mother decided to restage this rare photo, with herself in the starring role. She spent about three months getting the outfit together — sewing a dress and getting the right shoes. Rather than procuring live chickens (our days of owning livestock had ended with a move to the suburbs), she used a papier mâché ornamental chicken that my father had bought at a garage sale, probably someone’s souvenir from a holiday in Mexico. She got the right kind of basket, and then even put seeds in it.

I took the photo, and then reworked it in Photoshop to better resemble the older photo. When I handed her the print, she found it hilarious that I had labeled it “My Mother Is Crazy.” [From “A Life in Chickens,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 3, Summer 2006]

What do men learn from their mothers? What do daughters learn from their fathers?

Is personality transferable across gender lines?

Gregor Ehrlich is a writer, artist, animator, and producer.

Gender

By Lauren Wilkinson

As a woman, when I walk down the street, I try to pick up clues from the people coming toward me. Are they friendly? Are they threats? Should I move to the side or avert my eyes? What guides me, largely, is intuition.

What is intuition? It’s an expression of intellect. What is intellect? It’s many things. Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, has outlined two different cognitive systems inside our brains. System 1 is a largely unconscious mode of reasoning. It involves fast thinking. System 2 cognition is analytical and slow.

Intuition is a part of System 1 thinking. It’s is our ability to instantaneously and subconsciously pick up on social clues: the note in a friend’s voice that suggests they are angry with you, or the almost indiscernible expression that suggest they are lying. 

Intuition, long the stuff of myth, is recently the stuff of study. Last year, a study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology (a real journal) suggested that women are “more intuitive” because of lower prenatal testosterone exposure. The study was interesting, but not compelling. I would be more interested—and more convinced—by a study that investigated the link between a woman’s reliance on her intuition and her relative sense of personal safety. Perhaps is more likely that there are social factors at play, and not biological ones. Perhaps it is simply that people are trained to respond differently to potential dangers. As a woman living alone in a big city, I walk down the street alone in a big city. My awareness of my own lack of power is a source of power.

Do men and women have different kinds of power?

Are the powers of different genders in conflict or are they complements?

Lauren Wilkinson grew up in New York and lives in the Lower East Side. Her debut novel, L’American, is forthcoming from Random House.

Mindfulness & Shelter

By Emily Gould

The first time I walked into Deborah Wolk’s Iyengar yoga class, I was a complete mess. I’d just started a new job, and I was working all the time, even when there was nothing left to work on. Which might explain why my friend Lori kept trying to drag me to her yoga class. And which might also explain why I’d been putting up a fight. I didn’t want to slow down and check in with myself, to have to think about why I was feeling so terrible at every waking moment. And I didn’t want anyone else to pay attention to me, either, lest they notice any of the enormous number of ways in which I was fake and lame and inadequate. I just wanted to disappear.

Deborah singled me out right away. “Emily has scoliosis,” she announced barely five minutes into the class. “Everyone, come over here and look at Emily’s curve.”

The class crowded around me and ogled my back as I stayed put in a forward bend. Deborah, who from this angle seemed to be entirely composed of sinewy muscles and wild, dark curls, put her hand on my lower back and told me to breathe into her hand. She spoke in a soothing tone that made everything sound woo-woo and ridiculous, but I gave in and let the seldom-used muscles there respond to the heat of her palm. For a moment, I felt a kind of relaxation no pill had ever provided. [From “Deconstructing Deborah,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 5, Summer 2007]

When was the last time you tended to your body?

Is technology taking your away from inner peace?

Emily Gould is an author and journalist whose books include the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever and the novel Friendship.