How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Self-Directed Life Newsletter: Almost too perfect 3:02pm on October 31, 2016When your kids are young, you have the wide-open opportunity to make your best life. As they get older, they’ll be much more resistant to change — they’ll want to cling to the familiar. So now is the time to think about your family culture — how you can make your daily life reflect your values.
Self-Directed Life Newsletter: Almost too perfect 2:57pm on October 31, 2016Children learn from their families what to love and value. Some parents have the impression that they shouldn’t impose their values on their children. But if parents don’t teach their children values, the culture will. Good parents are what Ellen Goodman called counterculture. They counter the culture with deeper, richer values.
Self-Directed Life Newsletter: Almost too perfect 2:53pm on October 31, 2016It’s not a pretty picture: an economy where high levels of stress and anxiety are normal, where people get ill because they’ve lost control of their time, where marriages are damaged and children suffer. And yet, it’s a picture we’re invited to applaud. Our political leaders idolise “strivers” and “hard-working people”, not “chilled-out, caring dads”, for example.
The fetishisation of work is making us miserable. Let’s learn to live again | Anna Coote | Opinion | The Guardian 9:26am on October 31, 2016Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance. Her inarticulate feelings spill into laughter at something innocuous. That’s what happened in the story. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feeling herself so alive was so encouraging of delight. Kurt’s enchantment taught me that such moments are nothing to sneeze at. They’re worth a story.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Teaches You to Read Fiction Like a Writer | Open Culture 2:37pm on October 28, 2016I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Teaches You to Read Fiction Like a Writer | Open Culture 2:34pm on October 28, 2016More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.
Silences — Tillie Olsen 8:55pm on October 23, 2016Between officially scheduled educational activities, parents look for “teachable moments” while interacting with their children. But the foundation for play is free improvisation, and nothing wrecks play like a hidden agenda from one of the participants.
Joan Ganz Cooney Center – We Stink at Playing with Our Kids: Thinking Differently About Playing Together 9:42pm on October 21, 2016Speaking of which . . . this afternoon . . . the interviewers . . . I do not know if I will have the time to prepare. I could try to improvise but I believe an interview needs to be prepared ahead of time to sound spontaneous.
Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 130, Italo Calvino 11:04pm on October 18, 2016The handles of a craftsman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand.
That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcomes guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.
a craftsman’s tools 7:06pm on October 17, 2016What this kind of approach requires, of course, is the willingness to meet the child as an individual. “I had an image of what Charlie ‘should’ be,” one parent says. “I wasn’t keeping my eyes focused on the real boy in front of me.”
Austin Kleon — Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism… 11:25pm on October 12, 2016He’s also not worried about representing something accurately; he’s actually creating something. So, if he’s drawing a tree, in his mind he’s not creating a drawing of a tree, he’s actually creating the tree. John Baldessari said that everything he knew about drawing he learned from watching children draw.
#lamonochats: austin kleon, creativity and inspiration | lamono magazine 4:54pm on October 10, 2016Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part.
Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 12, William Faulkner 10:53pm on October 9, 2016You would suddenly find his eyes on you—very blue, very kind and gentle, and even now not stern so much as inflexible
Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 12, William Faulkner 10:50pm on October 9, 2016Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 12, William Faulkner 10:38pm on October 9, 2016The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 12, William Faulkner 10:32pm on October 9, 2016I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ’If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’
Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) • Instagram photos and videos 9:20pm on October 9, 2016I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.
Paris Review – The Art of Poetry No. 30, Philip Larkin 10:14pm on October 4, 2016Technology does only one thing – it tends toward efficiency. It has no aesthetics. It has no ethics. Its code is binary.
But everything interesting in life – everything that makes life worth living – happens between the binary. Mercy is not binary. Love is not binary. Music and art are not binary. You and I are not binary.
HEWN, No. 181 11:20pm on October 2, 2016Years ago, I was habitually late. “I can’t help it!” I declared to an expert in time management. “Have you ever missed a plane?” she asked. I had not. “Then you can help it. You just care more about yourself than about the needs of others.”
Am I Introverted, or Just Rude? – The New York Times 9:40am on September 29, 2016