Please join us on Tuesday, December 6, 2016, for a Book Signing Party in Ann Arbor for
Self-Aware: A Guide for Success in Work and Life
We will
Location: Pure Visibility, Inc., 415 N. Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (map).
Please RSVP via Eventbrite.
Last Friday morning, Robert Pasick, Ph.D., and I spoke at Leaders Connect, a networking event at Zingerman’s Roadhouse in Ann Arbor. Our topic was “Ten Steps to Meaningful Goals for 2017,” based on our recent book Self-Aware: A Guide for Success in Work and Life.
If you’re interested, you can watch the entire hour-plus of video on YouTube here.
I thought I’d share a quick video excerpt here, about three minutes of Rob and I chatting about how we collaborated on the book.
“The deeper you go inside, the more general a place you reach.”
Yes.
I read My Struggle Book 1 and now am 3/4 of the way through Book 2. I am loving these books and his writing. His description of the mundane and his internal monologue is riveting, addictive, and moving. Listen to his own reading of his work and see for yourself.
My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgård
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I orient by water. Apparently I have to keep it on the east. If I don’t I have a hard time finding my way around the land. This is one of the many reasons I don’t live in California.
I grew up on the east side of Michigan, in a town pressed up against Lake Saint Clair. Lake Saint Clair is part of the Great Lakes, it’s just not a great lake, more like a pool in between the two straits that connect Lake Huron with Lake Erie.
My family has a cottage up on the east side of the Bruce Peninsula, the Peninsula defines Georgian Bay stretching off to the east.
I spent a lot of time on the east side of south Florida. There again, the seemingly limitless Atlantic stretches off to the East.
And I went to school in New Jersey – once more on the eastern side of the continent.
Basically, all of my most familiar and beloved places have had “big water” to my east, and even when it hasn’t been in sight, I’ve known it was there.
When I go to a place like California that has its ocean to the west, I get my cardinal directions completely backwards, and I find myself stumbling over the fact that away from the water is indeed East, not West, when driving and planning routes. I have imprinted my mental maps on the entirely subjective assumption that the “big water is to the East”.
Learning about my own mental shortcuts helps me see that the categories I create about the world aren’t the world.
I’m pondering the intricacies of nonfiction and fiction writing and interpretation. I heard this on the radio and recognized its truth immediately.
When you’re writing fiction, everybody thinks you’re secretly writing about real people and things. But if you write an autobiography, they think you’re lying as one does.
From Margaret Atwood’s interview with Arun Rath on NPR books, interview full text available from WFAE’s website.
I officiated at the wedding of friends earlier this month. The bride and groom wrote their own vows and the ceremony, and they invited me to share some thoughts about love and marriage in the middle. What follows is a paraphrase of what I said, with more of my story and less about the bride and groom than was in their ceremony on their day.
After choosing a great partner, our next choice is to choose the marriage, over and over again.
The big events are easy: the right choice is obvious. For instance, when Dave had an opportunity to move to England for work, I took a year of detached study from graduate school and went with him. When I worried about not being with my dad ahead of an operation, Dave said, “why don’t you just go?” So I did.
A lifelong marriage contains a few big events and hundreds of thousands of small moments: in person, on the phone, in email, via text…In those moments, we have a choice of how to respond to what happens to us and between us.
The good news is that we don’t have to choose perfectly, enough good choices make a marriage resilient.
My blessing for my friends was that they continue to choose each other, that they have the experience Wendell Berry articulates in this poem:
The Wild Rose
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,and once more I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
“The Wild Rose” is available in Entries as well as in The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982.