Outside the Box

“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstractand profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anythingparticular or external, but it has a unique power to express innerstates or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly;it needs no mediation.”  -Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and Brain Som Sabadell flashmob – Banco Sabadellhttps://youtu.be/GBaHPND2QJg?si=eFBNp_VSZovKs-4m

Are you stuck in the Marshmallow Experiment? Medical education and training can deliver rewards and satisfaction in terms of achievement, increasing competency and patient interaction, but it is also an exercise in significant sacrifice and delayed gratification. Such things as time, money, relationships, leisure activities are put on hold in service of becoming and growing as

It’s likely that all of us have, at some point in our careers, worked in a toxic workplace. Workplaces where the leadership is either willfully ignorant or consciously complicit in implementing policies that create breeding grounds of cutthroat competitiveness, loneliness, exhaustion and misery. We have many rational reasons for staying in a toxic workplace. Professor

“My religion is kindness” Dalai Lama “If you think that you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” Dalai Lama The quality of being friendly, generous and considerate Dictionary definition of kindness Is being kind easy? I suspect that most of us might answer-sometimes. When all is going swimmingly in

The other day I had some trees cut down in my garden. My tree feller is an arborist who brought a sensitivity, wisdom and artistry to the task that I had not previously witnessed. He spoke of trees as living entities that needed to be treated with respect and care. He had to remove a

“Bad news travels fast. Good news takes the scenic route.” Doug Larson (Columnist and Editor) “If it bleeds, it leads” is an old adage in newsrooms. How much of our mental bandwidth do we give up to stories that relentlessly batter us with misery and despair? If these stories truly inform and sometimes inspire a

“The ancient Greeks knew that there had to be a time and place for people who had experienced violence and death to be given permission and empowered to acknowledge their emotions, collectively as a community.” “The word amphitheater in ancient Greek means the ‘the place where we see in both directions.’ In the amphitheater, I

Have you ever found yourself staring at a list of your goals, carefully written out in neat bullet points and feeling utterly stuck and uninspired? Somehow these aspirations, well thought out as they are, just can’t seem to take off from the paper that they are written on. They have feet of clay! Is it

When you are struggling to solve a problem, do you ever find that you get stuck in a rut of stale, circular thinking? To use a quote from Einstein, “The thinking that got us where we are is not the thinking that will get us where we want to be.” In 1975 musician and artist