About a year ago, a friend emailed me inviting me to join a group of his friends at a baseball game. While I generally don’t do well in groups of people I don’t know, I figured it was a good opportunity to stretch myself. (I also really wanted to watch the game!) Little did I … Continue reading Social Intelligence
I know a young man, whom I’ll call Stanley, who is a bit of a hero to me. When Stanley was very young, he decided that he was an athlete. Unfortunately, athletics did not come naturally to him. He was clumsy and awkward and struggled to learn to throw and catch. But Stanley was not … Continue reading Perseverance
Eight years ago, I was facing the seemingly impossible task of rebuilding my life. I really didn’t know where to start, but I decided to throw my curiosity wide open and read about anything and everything that struck my fancy. The idea was just to throw everything against the wall and see what, if anything, … Continue reading Love of Learning
I was once walking in the coastal rainforests of British Columbia with a friend, when he suddenly stopped, looked up, and said “God lives here.” Now my friend didn’t actually think that he had stumbled across the dwelling-place of the Almighty; nor did he mean it in an animistic, ‘tree spirits, gods of the forest’ … Continue reading Spirituality
You can’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. So says the conventional wisdom, and this is a (rare) case where the conventional wisdom is right. This proverb understands the truth that to understand someone’s behaviour we need to understand their experiences: their history, joys, traumas, motivations, hopes and dreams. As it … Continue reading Judgment
Matthew Root 