I heard the first cicada of summer the other evening as I sat on the porch and watched the sky change hues every few minutes as the day slipped so gently into night. The cicada’s mating call, which our amateur-entomologist daughter informs me is the loudest insect sound on the planet, transports me instantly back to playing “kick the can” at twilight during the summers of my youth. Summer seemed carefree then. That was before mortgages and children—and prior to being thirty years removed from anticipating summer as a heavenly break from the school routine that dominated the other nine months. We couldn’t wait for our school years to be behind us then, but adult life, it turns out, doesn’t in
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In his recent book The Road to Character, David Brooks writes that “...the external drama up the ladder of success is important, but the inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.” Tomorrow marks 241 years since our country’s founders declared independence from an oppressive external force. But how do we find freedom from the internal forces that levy an unreasonable tax on our joy, creativity, authenticity, and capacity for being a loving presence in the world? The seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom was to be “without anxiety about imperfection.” Perfectionistic thinking was the one variable out of nearly two hundred in a large study
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