The following video shares a portion of an audio interview with the late philosopher Alan Watts that is set creatively to a variety of images. In it he invites us to take seriously a very interesting and, I think, important question: “what would you do with your life if money was no object?” When he starts it seems like a nice question to ask. Like, “wouldn’t it be nice if this were the case.” As he moves on, observing that we can easily end up spending lots of our time on things we don’t enjoy, it becomes an important question. And then when he imagines the way we are teaching our children to choose things they despise by...

I have a riddle for you. What is more precious than gold but cannot be bought, earned, or saved? Before answering, let me share with you the story of a nearly perfect day. This past Sunday was absolutely beautiful in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, moving from the high fifties as the sun came up to near eighty degrees and sunny by mid-afternoon. After waking up I took our two dogs for a long walk. Then I went to church and enjoyed a great sermon and worship service. Then we threw a kayak on our car and took the family to Lake Harriet (featured in the picture) and while my two kids kayaked, my wife Karin and I walked around the...

I love brain research. That may seem an odd thing to say, but I find recent advances in brain imaging and what it reveals about our brains fascinating. I also love brain research because I’m a parent, and one of the interesting things that brain imaging and research has revealed is how much longer the brain takes to develop than we’d imagined. In particular, the prefrontal cortex – the place where decision making lies – develops far more slowly than we’d thought in general and develops even more slowly in boys than girls in particular. Which helps to explain a lot about the behavior of our adolescent...

One of the things we lose from an insatiable desire for more is time. Or, more specifically, time for rest. As I mentioned in last week’s post on the same subject, and as crazy as it may now seem, early proponents of capitalism imagined that eventually we would become so efficient that the demand for our work would shrink and our leisure time (understood as time devoted to pursuing culturally enriching tasks) would grow. A recent study from UCLA, and as reported in the Boston Globe, indicates that’s far from the reality most U.S. households experience. In their book Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century, the researchers describe their...