Control is a big weakness for me.

I can probably pinpoint most of my flaws to my impulse to control things. Whether that’s the outcome of a negotiation at work, how quickly my wife gets out the door, traffic, restaurant wait times, airline boarding groups, or the speed of the guy walking in front of me on the sidewalk.

As I write this, I realize how absurd it sounds, considering I control approximately none of those things.

The Buddhist tradition says, “resistance is the root of all suffering.” When I try to exert control or force a certain outcome, I’m basically arguing with reality. And I’ve pretty much gone 0-for-infinity in those match-ups.

Inevitably, this white-knuckling attitude leads to exhaustion. It builds up this constant low-grade anxiety; this feeling that if things don’t go according to plan, something has gone wrong.

American priest and author Richard Rohr teaches that suffering is a necessary force. It teaches humility by slowly removing the illusion that we’re in charge. As he puts it, we don’t handle suffering — suffering handles us.

“Suffering” often sounds like a dramatic Biblical term. When you hear it, your mind conjures up images of catastrophe. But it’s more basic than that.

We’re suffering whenever we’re not in control. When you’re stuck at a red light, you’re suffering. When your mom is being annoying, you’re suffering. When the music at the bar is too loud, you’re suffering.

None of these things are painful. They’re just not the way we want them to be.

It takes me a long time just accept — to accept what is; to accept myself, others, the past, my own mistakes, and the imperfections and idiosyncrasies of almost everything. Our lack of acceptance reveals our basic resistance to life. My instinct isn’t to accept things. It’s to resist them. To fix them. To correct them. To argue with them.

Acceptance becomes the strangest and strongest kind of power.

Surrender isn’t giving up, as we often think; it’s a giving to the moment, the event, the person, and the situation.

As the old adage goes: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.

John Steinbeck is widely considered one of the greatest American novelists of our time. I read Of Mice and Men in high school and Travels with Charley in my 20’s, but as a lifelong reader, I felt a calling to reach deeper into Steinbeck’s literary catalog.

Several fellow readers urged me to read East of Eden, Steinbeck’s masterpiece, praised for its epic scope, deep exploration of human nature, and thematic depth on good, evil, and free will. In other words, it’s a completely different beast from his shorter works. He said that every author really only has one "book," and that all of his books leading up to East of Eden were just practice--Eden would be his book.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Also, Netflix is coming out with a series for East of Eden starring Florence Pugh. Excited for that to be released.

I’m only 2/3rds the way through but full review to come soon!

This is a lovely article about the value of something we often look at as a bug, not a feature, of life.

Coupled with Mere Christianity, Tim Keller’s 7-part YouTube series Questioning Christianity is one of the clearest explanations I’ve found for why Christianity offers such a compelling framework for meaning, purpose, and love.

Keller was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and one of the great Christian thinkers of the modern era. What made him unique wasn’t just his theology, but his ability to speak to a skeptical, highly educated, mostly secular audience without ever talking down to them.

In this lecture series, Keller lays out a simple but powerful idea: every human being is searching for five things we cannot live without.

At some point, reason alone runs out of road. We hit what Keller calls the “ceiling” of rational explanation, where the deepest questions of life require us to look beyond pure logic. In other words, everyone has a working theory of how they get those five things. Religion is one answer. Secularism is another. But Keller argues that Christianity provides a uniquely coherent way of holding them all together.

What makes the series so compelling is Keller’s intellectual honesty. He understands the objections to Christianity almost as well as the believers do. Rather than bulldozing skeptics with arguments, he carefully lays out the evidence and lets the listener wrestle with it. One line from the series stuck with me:

It’s hard to watch this series and not feel grateful that thinkers like Keller existed. His rare gift was bridging theology and modern culture — quoting philosophers, poets, and skeptics alongside Scripture — while making the whole conversation feel deeply human.

What a gift this man was.

I’m a big fan of the subreddit/BuyItForLife (BIFL). I’m always on the hunt for the kind of stuff that will last you a decade or more. Bags that somehow look better the more you abuse them. Boots that survive disastrous winters and years of yard work. Below are a few items I’ve bought once and expect to still be using in 20 years when AI has taken over our personal dominion.

These are some everyday items that have lasted me over a decade:

Thanks for reading!