*Typing*

On the eve of Siddhartha's enlightenment, he sat and meditated beneath a pipal tree.

He soon found himself at war with the demon god, Mara. In hopes to prevent Siddhartha from enlightenment, Mara used every weapon he had in his arsenal: doubt, anger, greed and lust.

With each attack, Siddhartha would look at Mara and say, "I see you, Mara." He would then make a kettle of tea and offer Mara a cup. By morning, Siddhartha had defeated Mara and had become Buddha.

Perhaps the lesson isn't strictly to meet anger with kindness––to offer one's enemy a cup of tea––but to see and accept things for what they are rather than what we wish them to be.

Lockeland Table in Nashville, Tennessee serves this dish comprised of beef bones split in two like halved firewood.

They will broil them to a crisp and plate them on a heavy piece of ceramic accompanied by five or six slices of grilled sourdough and a pink mound of pickled onions.

You run your spoon down the length of one of those bones and the marrow falls atop the sourdough in a beautiful, fatty, glistening heap. Take one bite and you become intimately aware of what Robin Williams was getting at in Dead Poets Society.

Go to Lockeland, order this dish and then, for the rest of your life––be it in work, art, love, travel, friendship, grief and even in the beautifully ordinary everyday moments like the morning's first cup of coffee––chase the deliciousness of that taste; that depth.

I drove from Nashville to Little Rock this evening and saw not one but two shooting stars. I immediately wished upon both––then wondered where this universally shared impulse originally came from.

Apparently, the ancient Greek philosopher, Ptolemy, hypothesized that shooting stars occurred when the gods parted the heavens to look down upon humankind.

This parting jostled loose a star or two and caused them to fall from where they were first pinned.

The Greeks believed that a wish made after witnessing a shooting star was more likely to come true because the gods were within earshot.

Ptolemy's shooting star is a reminder that each of us are given the privilege to apply positive meaning to whatever it is we choose.

When our ambition is driven by the fear that we are not enough, every failure becomes evidence that we are flawed.

When you are hurt by someone close to you, your knee-jerk reaction is to hurt them in return. This isn’t because you are vindictive but because you are in pain. When you are in pain, you will do anything to make the pain subside.

While hurting someone that hurt you offers momentary relief from your suffering, the hurt will return and you will be left with not one hurt person but two. Instead, you must sit with you hurt.

You must treat your hurt like a fire and lunge your hand into the flame to get at the center of what’s burning. More times than not, the center of this hurt is love. You can only be hurt, truly hurt, by someone you love; and so in a fucked up way, hurt is evidence of the presence of love.

This doesn’t mean you should allow people you love to hurt you. But, it does beg the question as to whether or not you want to be the kind of person that hurts the people you love when they inevitably hurt you––or, forgive.