Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World
This weekend I attended a reform synagogue for Saturday Shabbat services. Reform Judaism is a primarily American movement whose goal is to make Judaism compatible with modern life and culture. This is fascinating because it is emblematic of the classic struggle between tradition and modernity. Are the laws and rituals of Judaism timeless? Is it
Over the past few days, I’ve done 9 of the 10 prayers I was supposed up to do. To make up for the one I missed, I doubled up on an evening prayer. So far the most powerful prayer times are the Fajr and Isha’a, the pre-dawn and post-sunset prayers. The Fajr is a nice
This week has been a bit crazy. I’ve been seriously procrastinating at work, and had a bunch of things to do to hit a few hard deadlines before I headed off to Portland, Oregon for a few weeks (the place where young people go to retire). To get everything done, I had to pull a
I started Taoism month with the intent of contrasting productivity culture with the Taoist principle of wu-wei, or non-action. However, I’m finding the concept has utility even beyond the world of work. Emotional non-action Last week I learned that I will not be attending grad school in the fall. It was disappointing, and my
When I was driving to a client meeting yesterday morning, I relapsed. All of a sudden I just felt depressed and that sense of existential angst returned. There wasn’t anything wrong about yesterday. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, but I just got the sense that everything was pointless and that this project would fail
My second ice bath was, for the most part, uneventful. I extended the immersion period from 15 minutes to 20 minutes, did not take any pictures today (sorry), and did not have to plug the bath with my foot. Again, the anxiety before getting into the ice bath was worse than the ice bath itself.
I mentioned in my previous post that, while the ice baths are not easy per se, I do not fear them like I did before I started my month of Stoicism. Yesterday’s ice bath was about the same as the previous days. My friend, who has been kindly commenting on my posts, asked “I wonder
I finished my first week of ice baths yesterday. The ice bath was the same, but it felt good to stick with something for a week. I could have made an exception based on various rationalizations “oh it’s Sunday, no one takes ice baths on Sunday!” or “I have friends coming over, I don’t want
Yesterday I practiced negative visualization on my drive to work. I thought about the death of loved ones, how I could be living in poverty, how I could have some incurable and painful illness, and how I could be alone and without any friends or companionship. The rest of the work day went pretty well
My goal for my Judaism month was to discover why Judaism fosters such a strong sense of community, despite being the religion of a very small minority of the global population. It was a fascinating month, and it made me wonder how secular, non-Jewish people could purposely find a community to join or cultivate one. So, of