No single human can work to save the orcas and protect the Amazon and organize anti-fracking protests and write poetry that inspires others to act and pray in a hermit’s dwelling for transformation and get dinner on the table. How easy is it to feel paralyzed by obligations.

The Coast Salish people think trees have personhood too. They teach that the forest is made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to this earth.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

But power isn’t wisdom, and after 100,000 years of discoveries, inventions, and conquests humanity has pushed itself into an existential crisis.

We live a life dominated by stress and are too busy to really take notice of who we are, where we are going and what we want from life. We are now at a moment where technology will disrupt our minds and bodies more than we can begin to imagine.

We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light.

When fear stops us from asking questions, it stops us from solving treatable problems.

Diagnosis is a gatekeeping process, and it slams its heavy bars in the face of anyone who is too poor, too busy, too Black, too feminine, too queer, and too gender nonconforming, among others.

I'm a huge believer that, as long as you’re still alive and your heart beats in your chest, you can change, you can improve, you can influence, you can motivate, you can build, and you can do better.

“The clearest evidence that justice is the most important of all the virtues comes from what happens when you remove it. It’s remarkably stark: The presence of injustice instantly renders any act of virtue—courage, discipline, wisdom—any skill, any achievement, worthless…or worse.”

The great promise of gene editing is that it will transform medicine. The peril is that it will widen the healthcare divide between rich and poor.

There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

We bring up kids to make their own choices. We don’t teach them to place all their trust in external authority - political, religious, or philosophical.

The American Dream’s narrowly defined paths to happiness and success rely on an acceptance of prescribed roles, and a lot of accumulation and exhibition.

As the plant grows, the stem uncoils, revealing new leaves, tender at first, rough at last. The fruit appears at the end of a cycle, growing from a stem that bends toward the ground under its own weight.

Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.

The key to using optimism to enhance resilience is in rejecting black-and-white, either/or thinking. Resilient people use both optimism and pessimism strategically to gain the critical insights and information they need to adjust to change.

Companies are often faced with a predicament about whether to play it safe and maximize their resources (known as exploitation) or look to new products, areas, or partnerships for growth (known as exploration).