I thought this was just too charming…and funny to resist. And just the perfect thing for Friday. Apparently, the parishioners of St. Mary’s and St. Andrew’s in the Chelmsford Diocese of the Church of England are having a hard time filling their pastoral vacancy. So the put together a short video describing the charms of their setting. What’s entirely enchanting about the video is their absolute lack of pretense. They are who they are and they own that with good humor. Keep in mind that, among other things, the lucky man or woman who ends up with these creative folks also gets to go by the name of “Vicar.” It doesn’t...

Stories are powerful. The stories we tell each other, the stories we create to help us make sense of our lives, the stories we hear or read from others. Stories are powerful because, I believe, we are narrative beings – we make sense of and share our lives through the concrete plots and characters of stories. Even though the scenes of most stories we tell or hear are not exactly the same as events in our life, the are like elements of our life, and that similarity connects us not only to the story in question but to each other. Stories are powerful. Which is probably why film is such an incredible medium. It allows artists to take a story...

Do you have three minutes? Then watch this video and afterward ask yourself a simple question. The video is about Tommy Carroll. Tommy’s a skateboarder. A good skateboarder. Which means he’s got great balance, and loves a little risk, and falls down from time to time, only to get back up and skate some more. In all these ways, Tommy’s not that unusual from a lot of other kids who love to skateboard. But though Tommy’s been skateboarding since he was ten, he’s been blind since he was two. Yeah. Tommy skateboards by sound. But while that makes him unusual, I’m still not sure that’s what sets him apart. Because I think what makes...

Neil Pasricha didn’t start out to create a killer-blog, he was just going through a really, really hard time and decided he either needed to look for some of the simple joys and pleasures of life or… well, he actually wasn’t sure what else he would do. And so he had a simple idea – notice the small delights of life and share them on a blog. And he executed it really well – these ideas are often quite simple and yet, perhaps for that reason, take you off guard. And it doesn’t hurt that his posts are written with care. 1000 Awesome Things became his project and blog. It received a couple of hits, and then a couple dozen, and then a...

The relationship between money and happiness isn’t a new topic for this blog and its readers. We’ve discussed before the relationship between happiness, money, and memory and, in particular, our inability to predict what will make us happy because of the fragility of memory. We’ve explored the peculiar power of our cultural narrative that having more stuff makes us happy when, in fact, what we need and want so much more than “more stuff” is time enjoy what we have. And we’ve seen how money can, in fact, make you happy when you spend it on others. In this vein, I recently came across a brilliant little video that summarizes a lot...