w/Rose, Dr. Richard Ash, Gaby Bernstein & Tevis Trower
Last week I wrote about starting Zen’tinis, a conversational salon. Maybe, like me, you’ve been to enough cocktail parties, networking events, and informal hangouts and you long for the substance of real stimulation. You wish you could have it in an environment where you can learn the thoughts of the folks around you and share one or two of your own.…
I remember hearing it all the time when I was growing up in West Roxbury, a suburb of Boston—“Why don’t you go out and play?” The fact is, I never really wanted to. I wanted to stay in my room and read. Or watch TV. When I was old enough to take the T into Boston to go to the…
A few years ago, something struck me: our culture simply doesn’t offer many situations that are designed to support us in authentic dialogue. Most of the time, adults interact in ways that are either accidental or transactional. Cocktail parties are about transaction according to attractiveness; business-networking events are all about the elevator pitch. We rarely walk into those kinds of…
Last winter I received a letter from an American friend living in Saudi Arabia, who spoke about the monotony of the colors in the desert landscape. I had complained to her about the lack of color in a New York State winter: browns, grays, little green, dull light, and cold. I started thinking about a trip I’d taken years ago…
I dodged a bullet. It was self-inflicted. But I didn’t even know it had been fired at me. I was walking down the street and felt a lump in my calf. It hurt a lot—my whole leg felt warm. I’d better keep an eye on this, I thought. When I woke up the next morning, the lump was gone. No…
