I don’t believe that prayers actually change God’s mind – if there is a God – but I liked praying for people in need. It was like moral weightlifting. I tend to be self-obsessed, and it was nice to get out of my brain once in a while.
The Bible talks a lot about thankfulness, and I’m more thankful than I ever was. I try to concentrate on the hundreds of things that go right in a day, instead of the three or four that go wrong.
When I went to Israel, it was a little disorienting, because there are so many people who look crazy and were dressed like me. There, I was just one of the apocalyptic crowd.
This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.
Sometimes miracles occur only when you jump in.
It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?
I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.
Paintings! They’re like TV, but they don’t move.
When I was with the serpent-handlers in Tennessee, it was the most bizarre method of worship I could think of. Yet when you sit with these people, you can kind of see how it makes sense.
I’ve never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.
Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.
Very few people changed the world by sitting on their couch.
I thought religion would eventually wither away and we’d all be worshiping at the altar of science.
If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they’d get along OK, but they’d both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”
More people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving.
A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. This, over the years, can cause real cardiovascular damage.
The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I’m not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.
I was very good at sitting. But I just read so much research about how horrible sitting is for you. It’s like, it’s really bad. It’s like Paula-Deen-glazed-bacon-doughnut bad. So I now move around as much as possible.
I was what they call ‘skinny fat’ – a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat.
My goal? To test out every diet and exercise regimen on planet earth and figure out which work best. I sweated, I cooked, I learned to pole dance. In the end, I lost weight, lowered my cholesterol and doubled my energy level. I feel better than I ever have.
The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.