Personal Development
Sometimes, it is our task to find out how much music we can make with what we have left
Yitzhak Perlman, the great violinist, was playing in New York. Yitzhak Perlman was crippled by polio as a young child, so the bottom part of his body doesn’t work well and he wears these very prominent leg braces and comes on in crutches, in a very painful, slow way, hauling himself across the stage. Then he sits down and, very carefully, unbuckles the leg braces and lays them down, puts down his crutches, and then picks up his violin. So, this night the audience had watched him slowly, painfully, walk across the stage; and he began to play. And, suddenly, there was a loud noise in the hall that signaled that one of his four strings on his violin had just snapped.
How many lives have I touched?
“When I was in my mid-forties, my father died. His death stopped me in my tracks and changed my life. Before he died, I was a hot-shot professor at the London Business School – teaching ambitious young men and women, publishing well-received articles, writing best-selling business books, jetting around the world, lecturing at major universities, consulting for big-name companies. I was on the edge of the big time. And, I have to admit, I was pretty pleased with myself. Continue reading
There is a place called, “beyond hope and fear”
What if, at the end of our lives, we die having watched destruction and not been able to create any good effect?
What, really, is available to us if we can’t save the world? What do we fund our work for? Where do we gain energy if we don’t believe that we’re going to be successful? How can we do our work without hope that we will succeed? Continue reading
Physical Healing, Emotional Wellbeing
What are you leaving in your wake?
I had a wonderful day, thanks in no small part to hearing George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” on the radio while I ate breakfast. I walked into town relishing the sunshine, and enjoyed every minute of today. George moved his last block in 2001. Continue reading
Modern medicine has given illness care a miss
The quote below is one of the many brilliant sayings of that great brain, Sir William Osler. “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicines.” Continue reading
What Is Worth Doing
We often avoid the question of whether something is worth doing by going straight to the question “How do we do it?“ In fact, when we believe that something is definitely not worth doing, we are particularly eager to start asking How? We can look at what is worth doing at many different levels: As an individual I can wonder whether I can be myself and do what I want and still make a living. For an organization I can ask for whose sake does this organization exist and does it exist for any larger purpose than to survive and be economically successful? As a society, have we replaced a sense of community and civic engagement for economic well being and the pursuit of our private ambition? Continue reading
What is the transformation in me that is required?
No one is going to change as a result of our desires. In fact, they will resist our efforts to change them simply due to the coercive aspect of the interaction. Continue reading
Pursuing What matters Most
There is something in the persistent question How? that expresses each person’s struggle between having confidence in their capacity to live a life of purpose and yielding to the daily demands of being practical. Continue reading
ONE TUSK 