Tag: learned

What I wish I’d known before I had to learn it.

Sales Experience Necessary

IT HAS LONG BEEN PROPOSED in some circles that, in order to build a better class of citizens, we need some sort of national-service program along the lines of an in-house Peace Corps or revamped Works Progress Administration. “Give people…

We’re all just raindrops on a windshield.”
— Jerry Seinfeld, to Michael Richards in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”

Let’s Get Real

ON THIS DAY EIGHT YEARS ago, I stepped out from under the shadow of a decades-long cannabis addiction. And I haven’t been the same man since. Thank God. What brought me to that point was twofold: I decided that 1)…

Fear of death is worse than death.”
— R. Yehudah de Modena

The Feeling

YOM KIPPUR AFTERNOONS ARE USUALLY the spacetime nexus where radical growth happens — and this year was no exception. Let’s set the stage. After an intense twenty-or-so hours of not eating or otherwise tending to physicality, continuous guided liturgical meditation,…

(Don’t) Be Like Moses

B”H, the following is scheduled to be delivered by me at today’s Yom Kippur service in Sonoma. Take from it what you will, or leave it be. TO PARAPHRASE ANOTHER FAITH’S holiday greeting, “Teshuva [repentance, return] is the reason for…

I am the greatest man in the world; indeed I am so great that I can afford great generosity: I encourage all others to adopt the delusion that they are as great as I. If they truly thought that they were themselves the greatest, they too would be as generous; and then we would all be able to humor each other, in peace, for none would feel threatened by the now-harmless delusions of everyone else.”
— Dr. Philo Drummond (Now go thou and do likewise.)

Never allow what you cannot do to control what you can do.”
— Rabbi Avi Weiss

Blades Runner

THIS IS THE TALE OF a third-degree separation from two of the most prestigious knifemakers in Europe. In addition to regular sharpening and honing, home cooks are supposed to have their knives professionally sharpened once yearly. Thus, one recent Friday,…