Life
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Everyone Needs Someone to Bark With
Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down. Oprah Winfrey I have made a lot of mistakes over the years, but the biggest may have been to not build and foster long term friendships. Continue reading
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A To-Do List for a Better Life
We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. “Thou shalt not” is soon forgotten, but “Once upon a time” lasts forever. Phillip Pullman A much younger me believed I was in control of my fate. I lived life with the notion that whatever I was and wherever Continue reading
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It’s Life’s Illusions I Recall
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise. Henry David Thoreau Every so often I play the same song over and over again. For the past two days, I have done that with Continue reading
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The Bait and Switch of Student Loans
My values, our values, aren’t about pointing fingers. They are about offering a helping hand. Kathleen Blanco The cost of higher education has changed quite a bit since I was a young man. I went to Arizona State University in the late 1970s and early 1980s when tuition was $500 a semester. Add another $500 Continue reading
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A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory For The Masses
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet. Rumi The original 12-Step program was developed in the 1930s as a way for alcoholics to stay sober. The steps begin by recognizing an Continue reading
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The Stranger
I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. Harriet Tubman July 8th was the 9th anniversary of my father’s death. He died at a memory care facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. I was at a Continue reading
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Mirror, Mirror
Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only. Samuel Butler Doppelgänger: The ghostly counterpart of a living person. From the German words doppel, meaning double, and ganger, meaning goer. I saw him only one time and that was 48 years ago. He was tall with really long, unkept, brown Continue reading
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Walk it Like You Stole It — The 2024 Tofte Trek
The climb might be tough and challenging, but the view is worth it. There is a purpose for that pain; you just can’t always see it right away. Victoria Arlen I did my 27th Tofte Trek this morning. The Tofte Trek is a grueling 10k wilderness run that takes you up a mountain, across a Continue reading
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Death Does Not Become Me
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. Virginia Woolf I remember the day my then 80ish-year-old father said, “Everyone I know is dead or dying.” I am many years shy of that age, but I am starting to experience more death than I care for. In the Continue reading
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Robert Steven Jeffery Prokop
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth – learning and loving. Nothing else – not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake – can possibly have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say ‘I have learned’ and ‘I have loved,’ you will Continue reading
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The Fallacy of Unlimited PTO
When you’re certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool. Edward Teller I admit that the first time I heard about unlimited PTO (Personal Time Off) I was jealous. For my entire work life my vacation and sick days were governed by corporate policies that assigned days off according to the number of Continue reading
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The Home at the End of the Road
And for a reason he still did not understand, he began to cry. Love plain, simple, and so fast it shattered him. Toni Morrison I was low on gas and although I probably could have made it home without refilling, I decided not to chance it and pulled into the first gas station I came Continue reading
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Memorial Day Remembrance
“Older men declare war, but it is youth that must fight and die.” Herbert Hoover Monday is Memorial Day and I can’t help but think about my deceased father and his service to his country. Like most men his age, my father spent his late teens and early twenties in some branch of the armed Continue reading
Can You Hear Me Now 