Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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I’m done adulting. I’m olding instead.
Three secret steps to be as old as you want to be. I’ve watched with compassion as millennials and others struggle to learn “adulting” skills, and I dimly recall when I, too, was learning those skills. The struggle has faded in memory, along with the absurd dissipation, unfortunate liaisons, wild travels, and extravagant decisions of the…
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The secret storm in my brain
…that even I didn’t notice. This is not your usual how-I-surmounted-mental-illness story, though I admit I enjoy a good how-I-surmounted-mental-illness story from time to time. Rather, it’s a story about how everything I thought I know about my mental condition might have been wrong. See, I thought my brain had some idiosyncrasies of mood and some…
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Time to clean out your word closet
Photo by Gary Chan on Unsplash At the turn of each calendar year, I love to purge files, sort housewares, clean out closets and send my usable discards to the thrift store (while hoping I don’t buy them back later). As I do so, I’m also thinking it’s a good time to inventory some words and…
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Which obscure sin tops the charts right now?
If you are like many progressive believers or the spiritual-but-not-religious type, you may not spend much time thinking about (cough, cough) sin. Oh, you’ve heard about those classic Seven Deadly Sins, if not in Sunday School then in that 1995 movie Se7en. That film made about $100 million by rendering the sins cartoonishly horrific. (I…
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How to get more out of your health care
Help your doctor be a better doctor We all know that the health care industry in the U.S. is sick as a pup, but no one can agree on the reasons, and no one agrees on the cures. At the national level, it’s a complex crisis. At the personal level, health care providers’ compassion is being…
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In praise of the heart of life
It’s under there, somewhere, the beating heart of the life that we all share. Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash It’s beneath the skin — the infinitely variegated surfaces that each individual shines up or oils down or covers with glitter or costume or camouflage. It’s coequal with the head — the egg-shaped knobs that we each fill with wildly differing…
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Ten books that shaped my raggedy soul
When Jack Preston King tagged me to list my Ten Most Influential Books, I was startled to realize that I had never made such a list before — not here; not on Goodreads; not on Facebook when I was on Facebook. Once in a while, I had the snarky urge to make a list of the “50…
Got any book recommendations?
Rev Dr Sparky on Real/igion 