Words for a new year
I maintain a database of ideas, articles, and book passages that I never want to forget. Every day it gives me notes to review. Today, January 1, two passages about perspective and transformation surfaced. And they’re good words to mark the start of a new year. The first passage is the preface of Rich Roll’s…
What a Comatose Patient Taught Me About Healthcare
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” – Susan Sontag
The parable of the K2 inline skates
Through my early teen years, I made money delivering newspapers on rollerblades. I’d gear up with a helmet, pads, and my trusty Walkman (or later, a yellow 128MB Rio mp3 player). I’d dance my way through the streets, with my heavy cloth paper-bag on one shoulder and music in my ears. After a few years,…
“Wouldn’t It Be Great?” A Perspective on Pain
It wasn’t until after the cancer diagnosis that Paul and Lucy decided to have a child, which seems like an odd choice. But there’s a valuable lesson in the details.
The Right Now Paradox
Time is a funny thing. Or maybe it’s the way we think about time and make choices around time that are strange. Tomato, tomahto. For example, sometimes we think there is plenty of time to put off that due-in-a-few-days task. We watch the show, stay up later than we should, and say to ourselves “I’ve…
A Coronavirus Meme-Check
A meme has been making its way around social media recently. Perhaps you’ve seen it. The reaction has been predictable. Many have passed it on in the hopes that it encourages people to wear a mask and avoid gatherings. Others have dismissed it, pointing out inaccuracies in the data. Seeing the lack of dates and…
What To Do When Someone Is Wrong On The Internet
I’m not sure the rest of you have noticed, but there are these people on the internet… And they’re wrong! Crazy, right? Have you seen them around? Run into any of them while you dawdle on the internet? Maybe they’ve commented on your wall, or maybe you have a mutual friend, and you just COULDN’T…
From Chauvet to Today — Are We Happier?
“The last 500 years have witnessed a breathtaking series of revolutions… but are we happier?”
On Harari and happiness.
Maya Angelou on Complaining
I get a weekly newsletter from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, which lives up to its claim of being the “most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web.” (If you’re interested in seeing his latest, you can scroll to the bottom click here A recent quotation from the newsletter was good enough…
We’re All Someone’s Crazy Relative
Thoughts about belief acquisition and permanence from evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics.
Hope in the Desert
In need of a little motivation? My brother, Neal Spackman, recently finished a decade-long endeavor, The Al Baydha Project, in Saudi Arabia. The goal was to turn a desert into an oasis. He describes it like this in the linked youtube video: “The climate is hyper-arid, and the land is non-arable. The ecological degradation is…
Rioting, Explanation, and Justification
Recent online conversations about rioting and racism have made it clear that many writers and many readers are unaware that explaining a behavior is not the same as justifying it. I’ve seen commentators who believe they are engaged in a single conversation, when in fact two separate conversations are taking place. For example, one person…
Achieving Flight: Discerning Between Correlation And Causality in American Healthcare
In the opening chapters of How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen illustrates why hundreds of years of attempts to fly were unsuccessful and what changed that got the Wright Brothers off of the ground. “Early researchers observed strong correlations between being able to fly and having feathers and wings. Stories of men attempting…
Unemployment, An Update
Published Friday, May 1, 2020 as an update to the post Visualizing the Unprecedented Speed and Size of Unemployment. Unemployment numbers from the last two weeks are in. According to the department of labor, as reported by CBS, the week of April 18th saw 4.4 million claims, and the week of April 25th saw 3.8…
“Youth” by Samuel Ullman
I receive a brilliant (and short!) email newsletter from James Clear every Thursday. A poem from this week’s email is too good to not share. It captures how I want to think about aging as I near the completion of my fourth decade. Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of…
Visualizing the Unprecedented Speed and Size of Unemployment
As of the latest report from the New York Times, 22,034,000 Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the last four weeks. That’s a massive number of people–so massize that human minds struggle to comprehend just how large and how fast those claims are being filed. We can compare it to the Great Recession, where it…
Easter Thoughts – “Alleluia, amen.”
Seeing post after post on personal blogs and Facebook has made me want to write something… something to try to communicate what Easter is to me. But as I’ve thought of what to write, the task seems impossible. How can I fully communicate to someone else, some who hasn’t lived through the experiences that taught…
“This dark stormy hour”
I found a new song that alleviated, for me, a little of the existential dread that accompanies the uncertainty of a global pandemic.
Data Is The New Soil
How do you change a mind?
Disconnection and Connection
Life is about choosing between disconnection and connection.
Prayer of St. Francis as a Rulebook for Interacting with the World
The world, especially on the online world, can be so full of rage, misunderstanding, miscommunication, tribalism, racism, and partisanship. I’m not sure what to do about it yet, except to change how I interact with the world, both online and off. When I was a teenager, I heard a choir sing the Prayer of St.…
Stars by Eriks Esenvalds: A Five Minute Dose of Worry-Silencing Beauty
If you need a dose of jaw-dropping beauty, take five minutes and listen to this choral piece by Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds. When I was a kid I used to look up at the stars and wonder about big questions: who I was and where I came from. There was a beauty in the sky…
“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace”
This Sunday, someone will be at church and feel like they don’t belong. Maybe they don’t have as much money everyone else, or maybe they have more money than everyone else. Maybe they’ve struggled for years with infertility, and their prayers seem to fall on unlistening ears. Maybe they don’t feel like God could love…
Communication and Collaboration Lessons from “My Semester with the Snowflakes”
“To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.”
Locus Iste and Sacred Spaces
During high school, I developed a deep appreciation of choral music. Part of it was that I felt it connected me to divinity, to those around me, and to the past. Singing the same songs in the same places hundreds of years later seemed to create a bridge through time, connecting my experience with holiness…
The Completeness Assumption
I recently came across a post by Ben Spackman (who excels at being my older brother, among other things) about seer stones, and noticed something new. “While on my mission in France, I learned about Joseph’s use of the seerstone, along with the Urim and Thummim/ Nephite “interpreters,” and eventually nothing at all, in translating…
Maps, Models, and Mormonism
Note: I wrote this on Facebook and needed to publish it somewhere. Originally written July 18, 2018 I shared this in a combined lesson to the 12-18 year olds at church today. The video is six minutes and it’ll take 5-10 to read through my ramblings. These are rough-draft ideas, so feel free to pick…
Demons, Pain, and Strength
This is one of the best podcasts/interviews I’ve ever heard. It’s Tim Ferriss (of Four Hour Workweek fame) interviewing Amanda Palmer on Creativity, Pain, and Art. Topics range from watching a friend die, to delivering her own stillborn child ALONE, to pain and the power it can bring, to the different types of pain. Favorite…
Spiritual Experiences Are Subjective
Maybe this is obvious. But maybe it’s not. The spirituality of an experience is subjective, not objective. Three examples: Sometimes hear people say, “I really felt the spirit” in a meeting/lesson that I have found particularly lackluster. Other times, I’ll have a deep, intense experience in a sacrament meeting and look around to see that…
A Young Father’s Fear
Having trouble converting ideas from brain to blinking cursor, I shall forego any commentary and simply quote the following, from Jeffrey R. Holland: Thirty years ago last month, a little family set out to cross the United States to attend graduate school—no money, an old car, every earthly possession they owned packed into less than half the…
Context and the Death of Mosiah
My favorite section of the Book of Mormon is from Mosiah 11 to Alma 43. There is so much detail in the storyline, from Abinadi to Alma I to Alma II and Amulek, from Aaron and Ammon and Ammonihah. Apparently, it’s also a treasure trove of place and person names that begin with the letter…
Context and the Population of Zarahemla in 86 B.C.
I recently read through Alma 2, but didn’t get very far when I ran into verse 19: “And it came to pass that the Nephites did pursue the Amlicites all that day, and did slay them with much slaughter, insomuch that there were slain of the Amlicites twelve thousand five hundred thirty and two souls;…
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Hugh Spackman, MBA, MHA 