My parents divorced when I was in my teens. My father decided to remarry when I was in my twenties, which means that I, an only child for the duration of my childhood, now have a much younger, teenage stepbrother. He is a cool kid, although admittedly, I don't see him as often as I [...]
Category: personal growth and spirituality
The One-Two
It never occurred to me that the personal-growth-related phenomena I have spent so much time learning and writing about here on The Used Life may, in fact, have part of their origins in perception (of all things). Indeed, it wasn’t until I began reading Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being, only late last week, [...]
Authenticity is Creative.
It's taken me the greater part of the last year to resolve what I falsely perceived as a dichotomy between creative interpretations of my inner experiences and the actuality of those states. The schism between how I represented myself in word and image and the reality of my consciousness. Indeed, when I first started The [...]
On the Art of Openness
If you were to ask me to name a pursuit, or domain, in which I believe I am most creative, I would say giving form to my inner experiences. Designing my feelings. Fashioning myself. I love to explore the nuances of complex emotional states from the standpoint of an artist, or designer, and embrace the [...]
Pendulum
I arrived at yoga class this morning with the hopes of losing myself in the pause. Of immersing myself in the kind of restorative quiet that is often necessary for the achievement of insight. For the mental clarity required to imbue this post, with which I’d been struggling for the past few days, with meaning, [...]
On Wisdom
It's an ashen sky and lo-fi Sunday. Bone dreary and mellow with intermittent sunlight. The air is pregnant with repose. Heavy. Lingering with moisture, the kind that clings to your hair and drips off the edges of your windowsills. The temperature in a slow and steady climb, typical of spring afternoons in the American South. [...]
In Terms of Life and Death
I'm not sure when exactly I began thinking of creativity, generally, and of the dynamics of creative living, in particular, in terms of life force, or energy. Those activities and attitudes that are life-giving versus those that take it away. Indeed, I was, you might say, "smacked over the head" with an aha moment recently [...]
