Recovery. Sobriety. Living Wise.
Suffering. What’s the Point? I have been thinking lately about suffering and why we suffer. It’s not a new question. It’s one humans have wrestled with for eons. I’ve had fibromyalgia and painful knee and back injuries for 35 years, stemming from an auto accident. I feel pain every day. But it is minor in comparison to the emotional and physical pain some of my friends endure, such as the loss of … Continue reading Suffering (by Eileen)
My stumbling block in early life was that I didn’t like living with questions. Not at all. In my world answers were the thing. Whether they were right or not was, to me, not the most important thing. What counted was that I had an answer to every question. All that changed one night in 1985 while sharing a bowl of kung pao … Continue reading A Path to Serenity
“Doubt grows with knowledge.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Today we hear many voices speak with the ring of dogmatic certainty, where the ugliest of ugly thoughts are hurled out to every time zone. I find myself asking, how can so many be so sure of so much? Socrates once observed, “I know that I don’t know. But you don’t know what you don’t know and … Continue reading When Doubt is an Ally
Recently I had a fitful night of worry, tossing and turning, my thoughts uncontrollably circulating downward. The impending move to the Pacific Northwest had me anxious. It was two o’clock in the morning and I found myself counting all the things that could go wrong. I thought, it’s one thing to have moved to Chicago at age 22, quite another to return to Seattle at … Continue reading Good Morning
Dear Erin, I had a strange dream the other night and it got me thinking about you and your one-year-old Sam, and the meaning of fatherhood. The dream poked me in the eye and reminded me of a remarkable moment we shared when you were growing up. I often settle myself into sleep by recalling happy thoughts of our time together: shooting hoops in the back … Continue reading A Letter to Erin