Mike Vardy

There’s a quiet belief most of us carry without examining it: that a retreat is something you earn. You work hard enough, long enough, and eventually the universe — or your calendar, or your manager — hands you permission to step back. Until then, stepping back feels indulgent, unearned, maybe even irresponsible.

T...

Most people assume they’ll leave a job the way water leaves a glass — slowly, unremarkably, until one day it’s just empty. And sometimes that’s exactly how it happens. But researchers who study why people quit have found something more specific: almost half the time, you can point to a single moment. One event. One conversation. One decision made by someone else that changes,...

There’s a specific kind of realization that doesn’t announce itself as small. It shows up with weight attached — equal parts fascination and dread — and you know almost immediately that it’s asking something different of you than your average “oh, that makes sense” moment does. Most of us don’t have language for the difference. We call both of them an epiphany and move on.

Tom Griffiths titled his new book The Laws of Thought for a reason. For three hundred years, philosophers and scientists have tried to write down the rules our minds are supposed to follow, certain that if they could just get the logic right, human thinking would finally make sense. It ...

We talk about time like it’s a hallway. The past is the part behind us, the present is the door we’re currently standing in, and the future is a hallway stretching out ahead, waiting to be walked. It’s a useful enough metaphor for a calendar. It’s a fairly bad description of what’s actually happening when you’re alive.

In his...