Leave Your Mark — essays and old wisdom on living well.
Reflections He won his first world title at twenty and his eleventh at thirty-nine. At fifty-four he's still paddling out on tour as a wildcard, and the goal was never to finish being good at this — it was to keep getting better at it, indefinitely.
Photo by Pedro Szekely (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Reflections Terry Fox lost his right leg at eighteen. Three years later he started running across Canada — about forty-two kilometres a day, every day — for a finish he did not expect to see.
Photo by Paul Fiedler on Unsplash
Reflections A palm reader told her she'd return to study with him one day. She did — with no idea what that actually meant. It turned into one of the defining relationships of her life.
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Reflections A month in northern Thailand will rearrange your relationship with productivity. Mine came back lighter.
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Reflections Bourdain's whole career was built on one unglamorous rule: eat what's offered, ask real questions, and never pretend you already know the answer.
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Reflections In 2017 he climbed 3,000 feet of vertical granite with no rope, no gear, and no margin for error. The scientists who scanned his brain wanted to know why he wasn't afraid. The real answer was less comfortable than 'he just isn't.'
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Reflections A farmer-poet wrote one of the most quoted poems of the last century about lying down where a duck floats on still water. He wasn't being precious about it. He was describing an exit.
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Reflections Mary Oliver spent most of her life walking through marshes and writing about what she saw. She also wrote one question that has never stopped being relevant.
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Reflections A Nobel Prize winner spent a chunk of his career learning to play the bongos, crack safes, and draw nude models, mostly because he refused to do the thing everyone else does, which is wait for permission to be curious.
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Reflections Be water, making its way through cracks. Lee meant it as combat advice. It works just as well as a theory of how to live.
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Reflections John Muir spent years walking into the Sierra Nevada to get away from people. He came back calling it 'going home.' The wording was not an accident.
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Reflections Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica. The ship got stuck in ice before he reached land. He kept all 27 men alive anyway. No one crossed Antarctica.
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