What are Surety Bonds?
Business writer Daniel Akst notes that poet Wallace Stevens spent his career in the insurance industry as a highly successful and respected executive who specialized in surety bonds: Surety bonds are guarantees that one party will fulfill its obligations to another; if it doesn’t, the bond issuer has to pay, but can seek to recover […]
The Collapse of American Parenting
Family doctor and psychologist Leonard Sax explains what we see instead in his book, The Collapse of Parenting: In American culture today, same-age peers matter more than parents. And parents are reluctant to change the rules—to insist, for example, that time with parents and family is more important than time with same-age peers—because parents are […]
Everyone Has a Religion, Even the Athiests
Andrew Sullivan writes in New York (magazine,) Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age. By religion, I mean something quite specific: a way of life that gives meaning, […]
Original Innocence
Pema Chodron writes in Awakening Loving Kindness, When the Buddha taught, he didn’t say that we were bad people or that there was some sin that we had committed—original or otherwise—that made us more ignorant than clear, more harsh that gentle, more closed than open. He taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding […]
Pragmatic Buddhism
Patricia Anderson writes in Real or Pretend, I became enamored of Buddhism when I realized its basic tenet began by saying, essentially, “Life sucks and then you die, so what’s that all about? This was the religion for me. This was a framework I could use to examine my actual experience. Far from the promise […]
The Legacy of the Lascaux Cave Paintings
Bing’s daily picture featured 12-Oct-2018 featured the Lascaux prehistoric gallery of art: In the fall of 1940, a group of boys exploring the outdoors in the Dordogne area of southwest France came upon the entrance to a cave—and unwittingly discovered a treasure trove of prehistoric art. The walls of the cave now known as ‘Lascaux’ […]
Compassion is Our Nature
Jack Kornfield writes in The Wise Heart, Buddhist Psychology for the West: From the perspective of Buddhist psychology, compassion is natural. It derives from out interconnection, which Buddhism calls “interdependence.” This can readily be seen in the physical world. In the womb, every child is interdependent with its mother’s body. If either of them is […]
Meeting Expectations Quarter After Quarter
Warren Buffett asserted at the 2005 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting: Businesses do not meet expectations quarter after quarter and year after year. It just isn’t in the nature of running businesses. And, in our view, people that predict precisely what the future will be are either kidding investors, or they’re kidding themselves, or they’re kidding […]
Doing Less and Being Okay with It
Charlie Munger said at Daily Journal 2019 Annual Shareholders’ Meeting, We tried to do less. We never had the illusion we could just hire a bunch of bright young people and they would know more than anybody about canned soup and aerospace and utilities and so on and so on and so on. We never […]
A Second Handle on Reality
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe wrote in Hopes and Impediments, Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality, enabling us to encounter in the safe manageable dimensions of make-believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real life; and at the […]