Father’s Day Weekend According to Whoop
I wear a Whoop strap to track my daily cardiovascular exertion, my nightly sleep, and my daily “recovery” based on my resting heart rate (RHR) and heart rate variability (HRV). Since I …
From Resolution to Reality: Part II
Last week, I wrote about how “focus is the currency of resolve.” Without focus, we cannot maintain resolve. In a sense, focus and resolve are similar. When we resolve we …
From Resolution to Reality: Part 1
A few months ago, I watched a video from my children’s elementary school: The kid’s principal, Mr. Mac, was announcing the week’s “blue ticket” winners. A student earns a blue …
How Do We Meet?
This is a (lightly edited) copy of an email I sent during the second phase of the pandemic to my family about meeting. The email opened up a few conversations …
James Baldwin: “Rejoice in the fact of death”
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, …
Lockdown Recipes: Food for the Pandemic
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” Brillat-Savarin wrote in his masterwork, The Physiology of Taste, a collection of recipes and parables with topics ranging from …
Immunity in Covid Times
Medical literature often describes the immune system as a wartime defense strategy against invaders. “Without an immune system,” Medical News Today writes, “our bodies would be open to attack…It is our …
Mood: How to Optimize Your Emotional Resilience
How do you feel? We hear this question so often, in so many different contexts, and our answer is invariably the same: “Good.” Or perhaps, “Fine.” Yet, during any given …
Quarantine Notes: To the Class of 2020
The photo above was taken twenty-five-years ago on the Ocean City boardwalk. Karen was seventeen, young and carefree. She wanted to travel around the world. She wanted to go to …
Quarantine Notes: Trying and Failing, and Trying Again
It is 10:10 on Sunday morning in Ambler. The sky framed in the window is white, the pallor of a startled face. Lately, the weather defines my mood. Sunshine feels …