This weekend I had the chance to hear a sixteen-year-old harpist play a Mozart concerto on two harps—playing one with his left hand and the other with his right, the type of tour de force you know he learned how to do not because someday a handful of people sitting on some wooden benches would applaud…
Category: Mastery
On using a knife and fork
Jessica’s last day of school is really just a last morning of school, so when I pick her up, the whole day stretches ahead of us. “How about lunch in Lawrence?” I say. “Yes.” She is without hesitation. Jessica is a girl who likes lunch. “Where?” “Let’s go to Encore,” I say. “They have those…
On why I have a grimoire
This is my grimoire: A grimoire is a book of spells, but when I call it a spell book, half the people think I’m talking about a dictionary. A book of spells is like a cookbook, a collection of recipes, but “cookbook” just doesn’t do it for me, and is possibly misleading in case…
What I learned this week
Sometimes, surprise yourself.
On shifting your perspective
For a couple of years, I have been really frustrated with the fact that I wake up several times every night. Usually I go back to sleep pretty quickly, but other times I don’t. So this was a source of some annoyance, a thing I thought I needed to fix. (If you’ve been following along,…
On your one big thing
I originally wrote this post over on Be Your Own Book Doctor, but I wanted to post it here because it has so much to do with what I’ve been posting about a lot here, on doing the work. The key is doing the right work: As I know I’ve said, I get a lot…