The gentle art of sanity amidst civilization
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As I was sprinting through the cavernous Hong Kong airport toward my gate Sunday afternoon, a deodorant roll-on in my bag cracked and leaked all over my laptop. The laptop is replaceable, but its contents are not. There may be a way to recover my files, but for the moment it looks like I have [...]
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It’s time to go. By the time you read this I will be flying from Brisbane back to Auckland, where I’ll tie up some loose ends and have one last ice cream cone. Then I go home. It’s been eight and a half months since I exchanged final goodbyes with my family at Winnipeg International. [...]
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When you sit back and reminisce about your life, it’s almost a given that the most enjoyable and memorable moments are the ones in which you were completely present. Do you look back with fondness all the times you spent thinking about work while you drove home, or pondered dinner while you wheeled down the [...]
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Raptitude was born March 15th last year, but it was conceived in the last week of January. I had just visited Problogger for the first time and saw that blogging wasn’t simply speaking your thoughts into a void, it was an interactive community. The words went back and forth, and side to side. There were [...]
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Today is March 15th, Raptitude’s first birthday. A longer post will follow later this week — I was ambushed by an immediate-start job at 10pm last night — but it’s an important date so I just wanted to tell you I am so grateful you decided to spend some of your precious time on earth [...]
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I’ve made a terrible miscalculation. Have you ever been so sure you knew someone inside and out, and then you discover something about them that completely contradicts everything you thought you knew? Denial can make you blind to it, especially if you’ve really been counting on that particular person to fill a certain role in [...]
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Time for another experiment. This one I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. The idea behind it has made the rounds for a few years now and I’m not the first to do it, but I think the concept is fascinating and brimming with potential. One day Will Bowen, a mild-mannered Missouri Reverend, challenged his [...]
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I forged my own blade yesterday, from an unassuming piece of plain steel. With some expert instruction, I pounded it on an anvil, ground the blade down, fitted it with a brass hilt, polished and sharpened it. The handle is made out of native timber that was salvaged from a dismantled insane asylum.
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The first week of January is a natural time to look back. Just as the earth begins another whirl around the Sun, we can’t avoid confronting the reality that yet another sizable chunk of lifetime has been sealed and locked away in the archives. We don’t get many of those chunks, seventy or eighty if [...]
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There was a moment last week when I found myself standing on a beach I never could have imagined. Bookended by two cliffs was a great, smooth expanse of the most otherworldly sand. It was like a Neapolitan ice cream of fine golden sand, exotic black obsidian grains, and clear, saltlike crystals. In the distance, [...]
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