I grew up playing softball and learned to be a pitcher as early as 10 years old. The most important lesson I learned? The strike zone isn’t a bullseye. As a deeply competitive athlete, I was taught to go for strikes and struggled through endless mental battles in warm ups and drills trying to get it right. Here’s the thing: my pursuit of perfection was aimed at a target, but I was also taught the value of diversity. A high inside fastball is just as much a strike as a low outside curveball. A...

It’s common to feel helpless in the face of suffering. We always want to jump to the part where we do something about it to solve the injustice or the problem, but we don’t know what the action is. We easily forget that there’s a step before that. There’s a step that entails acknowledging the entity, a type of acceptance of the scenario. It’s an active recognition that there is something to despair about and the act of naming it gives us something to grasp onto in an otherwise dizzying...

As I settled in to write this week’s musing, I found myself harping on the word settled itself. We find it often in our vernacular to mean settling down or settling in. What about if we settle a dispute or settle the bill? In fact, we have a fair amount of negative association with the word settle. “He settled for someone fine. She settled for that corporate job. Don’t settle for anything less than what you deserve. Settle down already.” The most challenging way to settle sometimes is to...