Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You

Brain science shows neurons that fire together wire together. The more you engage in certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, the stronger those patterns become.

if we are to have any chance at improving a broken world, we must learn how to navigate it without becoming broken people.

In his 2022 book, What We Owe the Future, philosopher William MacAskill introduces the phenomenon of “early plasticity, later rigidity.” During and immediately following periods of rapid change, there is a brief window to participate in the creation of a new normal. Over time, however, that window closes, and things calcify and become rigid again.

You can be with, watch, and take interest in the thing instead of immediately reacting to it. You also develop compassion for yourself and for others, realizing how hard it can be to maintain a measure of equanimity amidst the torrent of thoughts, feelings, and urges that occur during just fifteen minutes of formal meditation, let alone a decades-l

Sometimes reorder means sitting in the wake of particularly challenging changes and gradually moving into stability without any immediate gain or discernible value. In time we tend to find meaning and grow from these events. But in the moment, being patient and gentle on ourselves is the best, and perhaps only, course to take.

Nearly everything about social media and cable news teaches us to react instead of respond.

The first core quality of rugged flexibility is opening to the flow of life.

Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Mark Epstein writes that freedom from anxiety requires learning how to navigate inevitable cycles of integration, un-integration, and reintegration—what he calls going to pieces without falling apart.

the most fluid, and I’d argue the most advantageous, way to conceive of one’s “self” is that it can be both independent and interdependent.