I am not like many people who forget or do not care in the first place. I care and I remember. There is a huge array of horror stories which accumulated in my brain years ago, when I was still watching the news, reading newspapers, watching tragedy movies and reading all sorts of novels. Nowadays I only watch comedies and do not follow the news on TV or in newspapers. I also put down a book, if it frightens or saddens me too much. The stories from the past are still haunting me. I cannot believe the details I remember from all the stories of child abuse, mafia, incest, sexual slavery, war camps,...

While some degree of the fear of mistakes is useful and healthy, too much of it can prevent our actions. We might never change things for the better. Or we might never meet new friends for instance. It is true that we can avoid pain by not taking any action and thus omitting mistakes. Yet, the moment we see pain as experience, it might decrease the ‘wrongness’ of a mistake. Of course causing a car accident for instance will always feel wrong. But what about changing a job for example? You earn less at the new job and the change might feel as a mistake. Is it really? Is money everything?...

“We dislike losing the things we have more than we appreciate gaining the things we don’t have.” (Bevelin P.: Seeking Wisdom from Darwin to Munger, Third Edition, Post Scriptum AB: 2013, p. 67) For me the most painful loss was the loss of health at the age of 22. The diagnosis was scary and even hard to spell: schizoaffective disorder. My first reaction was denial. I thought for years that psychiatric pills were the only remedy. Later I started to explore lifestyle changes. Today I do many things to stay healthy, taking medication is only one of them. In the morning, before I start writing, I do...

In this era of haste, we often hear the medical recommendation to take smaller bites. And to chew longer. The point is that the mouth is the first stage of digestion. Chewing means that the food gets processed mechanically, but also biochemically by the digestive juice called saliva. If the food is handled correctly in the mouth, the stomach has it easier doing its job. Our stomach handles a lot of stress that is unavoidable these days. Thus there is no need to put more pressure on it. By taking smaller bites we also get full by less food and thus put even less pressure on our digestive system. It...

Do you ever take the road less travelled? Or do you always do what the majority of people do, because it is easier? It is easier to read many books on meditation and even lecture about it than to actually develop a habit to meditate daily. It is easier to write a book on compassion than to actually be compassionate. Of course it is not difficult to be compassionate to visitors for that one hour they stay at our place. But let’s try to be compassionate to the partner, when we come home from work totally tired and (s)he has forgotten it is our anniversary. It is easier to preach to teenagers about a...