Pride wants it to be perfect, because you should be producing brilliance, and you should be ashamed not to be producing brilliance. So you don’t work on it, because so far it is neither perfect nor brilliant. Envy is too busy worrying about whether other people have already done it better, and how you can […]
I was setting down my bag and my drink at one corner of a large communal table in a Dark Horse espresso bar. A man of about my father’s age came over and asked me for help logging into the free wi-fi. We compared settings on our iPhones (I know, this story is ridiculous—please bear […]
If you are inspired by metaphors (and I suspect almost everyone is, to some degree), it can be important to have the right one. It’s one thing to motivate yourself with imagery of agriculture and harvest, for instance, quite another to rely on images of bloody warfare. Both might be good sources of metaphors for […]
These are a couple of texts that have helped me, at different times, to fight the impulse to avoid the work that God has placed before me. The first is what I think of as “The Prayer for Finishing Your Dissertation.” I’ll bet you didn’t know there was any such thing in the Canadian Book […]
The confession in the office of Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer speaks of having “left undone those things which we ought to have done.” I have been thinking recently about what some of those things are. For me, this is not just a confession about the large, obvious, or specifically religious failures: […]