joshua chamberlain

Category: life

  • expansion and contraction

    I had a mentor who used to say there are two kinds of people in the world: expanders and contractors. Expands walk into a room and everything opens up a little bit. Breathing is easier and your molecules relax. Contractors make everything a little bit more tense. The world feels…

  • reading with a pencil

    Austin Kleon states “the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil.“ My dad recently told me he’s been taking this a step further: once he finishes a book, he’ll mark the date he read it on…

  • before making your exit…

    An important question to ask yourself: am I running away from something or towards something?

  • make an exit

    I have a bad habit of sticking around. I’ve never handled change well and as a result, I have a difficult time letting life rearrange itself. I struggled my first semester in college and when fall break came, I went to visit some of my old high school teachers. I…

  • time capsules

    I’ve joked for years that the human body is a time machine. This idea invades both my creative work and my cocktail party anecdotes. But it’s something I believe with sincerity. We steer ourselves through the years as they unfold, like taking a car cross country. And like the family…

  • talk less, listen more

    We live in an age where everyone wants to be interesting. We’re all posting photos and videos and tweets in the hope people will pay attention. But this is a two-way street. The best possible way to be interesting is to be interested in what others are doing. Share what…

  • dare to be great

    No one is rewarded or remembered for meeting expectations, for doing the bare minimum, for just doing their job. Dare to be great. Really…I dare you.

  • streak

    I hate blogging. I’ve never felt I was good at it. I’d writing banal things I didn’t want floating around cyberspace. I’d write a post, then wait months before returning to the website and guilting myself into writing another. I sat down a month ago and told myself I’d start…

  • the deep end of the pool

    For years, I’ve said life is like a swimming pool. Some people are content to splash around in the shallow end, living simple lives and having simple conversations. Others plumb the depths of the deep end, diving into conversation and pushing themselves to expand their thinking. A friend of mine…

  • the case for boredom

    I had a Covid test last week. (It was negative, thanks for asking.) The wait at the doctor’s office was close to two hours and with every person who came in after me, the wait got longer and longer. “It’ll be about four hours,” the receptionist told a woman who’d…