Well, I just learned a new term today, a new term from French used in English: mise en place. And it means everything in its place, and it’s used by chefs and cooks in kitchens to speak to the idea of having all your tools and ingredients organized and ready to go, so that when […]

So this past week I’ve had a fairly serious, businesslike kind of attitude, working on just doing work and being happy with doing work, and it’s easy to kind of slip into a too-serious mentality, and really, mindsets, I believe, can be very brittle. If we don’t have enough humour and looseness, then we can

“An open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake.” – Northrop Frye So what does it mean to have an open mind? It’s an idea that’s greatly celebrated, encouraged, and it seems like in the most part it’s

It’s one of those things that we just assume about our everyday world: nowadays we live in a world where we get very high quality professional entertainment available to us at all times. And that’s normal to us now. Certainly now, with Youtube and the internet, the ability to get any entertainment at any time.

So the image is a donkey, the rider holding a carrot on a string dangling in front of the donkey’s nose, so that the donkey is forever trying to catch the carrot. Or sometimes in the earlier iterations it was a turnip, but whatever donkeys like to eat. Just dangling there, and it never actually

Years ago, I remember reading from a baseball book – and I’ve also heard this said in cricket as well – the concept that to be a good fielder, you have to want the ball to come to you. And that always stuck with me. I mean, clearly, just literally speaking, wanting the ball to

Seems like a lot of us are living in a kind of false security, a kind of temporary place of sort-of-comfort, a little hole of mediocrity, it might feel at its worst, or maybe, at its best, something that’s all right, good enough, safe and comfortable. Or maybe it’s not feeling that way anymore. But

Well, you know, sometimes it’s just hard to end the day, because over the course of the day I’m starting to build up work, starting to get things done, and then now it’s getting on to the late evening, and it’s time to go to sleep and start working again tomorrow. Once again, a very

Well, I recently just brushed my teeth and I feel very refreshed and clean. Do you ever hear people talk about how good it feels to brush their teeth? Do they feel it’s important enough to let you know that they’ve recently brushed their teeth? How often does this come up in conversation? How did

So once again, like so much of what this process seems to be about, is the idea of balancing two opposites and calibrating, making adjustments, finding the right mix of two opposite things. And so much about life seems to be based on that. It’s finding that balance point between too hot, too cold, too