We can choose to make changes, or we can be subject to other changes – mass migration, disease, armed conflict, a greatly diminished quality of life – but there is no future without change. The luxury of choosing which changes we prefer has an expiration date.
Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.
People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.
It was the feeling of not wanting to live in the world, even if it was the only place to live.
Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.
Like you, I think of myself as many things, as if the thinking made it so. In the meantime, while I think – while you think, while we think – our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.
Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max’s conduit wasn’t bigger than anyone else’s, it was simply unclogged. What.
Should he one day share it and be asked how autobiographical it was, he would say, “It’s not my life, but it’s me.
Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless – it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.
My bat mitzvah portion is about many things, but I think it is primarily about who we are wholly there for, and how that, more than anything else, defines our identity.
She asked: “What can you promise?” He promised: “Things are about to be different.
He was caught somewhere between his mother’s last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be.
I have made efforts to make you appear as a person with less anxiety, as you have commanded me to do on so many occasions. This is difficult to achieve, because in truth you are a person with very much anxiety. Perhaps you should be a drug user.
There are only two reactions to climate change: resignation or resistance. We can submit to death, or we can use the prospect of death to emphasize life.
So She had to satisfy herself with the idea of love-loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.
Once upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about it.
It’s very hard to have a productive dialogue with a thirteen-year-old boy, as every gently broached subject becomes an Ultimate Conversation, requiring defense systems and counterattacks to attacks that were never launched. What begins as an innocent observation about his habit of leaving things in the pockets of dirty clothes ends with Sam blaming his parents for his twenty-eighth-percentile height, which makes him want to commit suicide on YouTube.
So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other?
What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strangers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn’t make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to change my life.
It is dangerous to pretend that we know more than we do. But it is even more dangerous to pretend that we know less.