I read a very interesting article in the newspaper the other day.  At first, it gave me a little hope.  Given a survey, a full 89% of the young people questioned felt that being a good person was more important than having money.  There was one problem, however.  It seems that a third of those same young people had stolen from their parents within the year.  One fifth had stolen from a store.  One fifth admitted stealing from a friend. A full 69% confessed to cheating on a test in school within the month and 90% had admitted lying to a parent about something significant within the last month. ...

I was teaching my kung fu class the other day working with one of the students.  He was having a difficult time with one of the movements I’d shown him a few weeks earlier.  He just wasn’t getting it.  I told him to just move naturally.  “You can tell when you’re moving correctly,” I told him, “It just feels right.  It’s totally natural.  When you feel off balance, when you feel awkward, it’s a sign you’re doing it wrong.”  As children, we move naturally, and then, somehow, we forget how to move, how to breathe. And then I asked him if he practiced every day.  He answered...

I have always been interested in science. Of course I wasn’t interested enough to major in physics or anything. I’m way too lazy to do that. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. That much math would have made my brain implode. Still, I found it interesting enough to read many books and essays on the subject. And you can’t be interested in astronomy without at least a passing knowledge of physics if you want to understand anything. So when my son brought home a science magazine back when he was in high school many years ago and I saw there was an article about current theories in physics,...

I can think back to a time when times were really bad for me. My wife had asked me to leave my home and kids and I found myself living in a tiny trailer in Hawthorne, and not the nice part of Hawthorne either. I was still disabled and living on California Disability Insurance. My employer had fired me because my back was hurt and they didn’t want the potential insurance claims from a re-injury. I was broke all the time. I had bills to pay. I was fat because I was not able to get out and get any exercise, and because I was so damn depressed. I had lost everything. I really only had one friend...

Religious imagery turns a lot of people off, I think. I mean, here we are in the 21st century, having gone to the moon, having seen the earth from outer space, having explored the realm of string theory, and then thinking of the deity as a blue-skinned woman with many, many arms, if you happen to be Hindu. Those two don’t seem to go together so well. It’s hard to think of yourself as a rational citizen of an earth, enlightened by science, and believing in those ancient images of winged angels and such. At least I know that I was, in my youth, put off by the Hare Krishna followers who appeared...

I’ve seen some pretty interesting weight-loss products in my time. They all promise to help you lose a lot of weight in a short time, as much as a pound a day. There are pills and shakes and special belts and shorts. There are special “exercise” machines that all promise to help you shed the pounds with little or no effort (results may vary). However, the strangest product I ever saw advertised for weight loss was something you were supposed to add to your bath water. Just put the product in the bath and then watch the fat go right down the drain! Some people will believe anything. But I...

I Am 56 I Am I have seen fifty-six times the promise of light I have seen the rise of the Titan rocket and the fall of the Challenger I have seen the rise of Camelot and the fall of a president I have seen the rise of Dylan and the fall of Cobain I have heard the voice of a prophet crying in darkness I saw them kill Martin, kill Malcolm, kill Bobby, kill Jack I saw the rise of our consciousness and the fall of our aspirations I saw burning banks, burning draft cards, burning bras, burning desires I saw Watts burning, Detroit burning, Saigon burning, burning, burning I saw burning Vietnamese napalm...

My mother used to drive my family crazy. Often we would go to great trouble to find a gift for her that was just perfect, something we knew that she wanted very much. And we would scramble to find the money to buy the gift, or work our fingers to the bone to make the gift. And she would love it. And she would place the gift in a place of honor in the house and admire it. And then, as soon as someone came over to the house and admired her gift, she would give it away to them. And, well, this hurt quite a few feelings. But my mother could never understand this. Gifts were meant to be given away,...

New Years is one of those funny holidays. You can celebrate it several times during the year if you like. You can celebrate the Jewish New Year in the autumn, and the Chinese New Year in the winter. And of course, you can celebrate the New Year along with Dick Clark. When I was a boy, it was Guy Lombardo. He always said that when he died he would take New Years with him. He didn’t, and in the course of history New Years will come and go whether any of us are here to see them or not. But why are there so many New Years? The reason we have so many New Years Days is because we don’t all use the...

I attended a lecture a couple of weeks ago about teaching children to follow their intuition.  We don’t do that a lot.  Think about the last time you just “had a feeling” about something.  I once drove to Arizona for the holidays and the trip there was a disaster.  The car broke down in Indio.  I was stuck there for hours.  This is not unlike being in purgatory.  You know, the funny thing about that ill-fated trip to Arizona was that I had a funny feeling something was going to go wrong on the way. From time to time in my life I have had those feelings. I’m sure all of you have....