A calm sea with clouds overhead

Death is the source of all our fear. We fear our loved ones dying, and we fear the moment and fact of our own death. When we know grief and despair, or when we reflect on mortality, we are transformed. We always know about death, but when it’s a boundary situation, it comes crashing into our live...

No matter how neat and ordered we might want our world to be, there will always be a messy, chaotic, and unpredictable exception. We can hope for the best, and make the plans we want, but we can never take a steering handle on the facts that will affect our existence

It is not possible to c...

Life is a struggle. We work for food, compete for resources, and vie with each other for power, prestige, and status in almost every context there is. As such, there are moments when we are inevitably overcome and defeated, but also when we are victorious and champion. The final outcomes of strug...

The most transformative moments in life are those that we do not see coming. Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" and Karl Jaspers' "boundary situations" both explore the vulnerability and impotence of so much of life. We all want to plan and see order in the world, but death, struggle, guilt, and chanc...

While so much of our lives are spent in planning and preparation, the most transformative and significant moments are those which come at us out of the blue. These are what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called “boundary situations” — the ones we cannot initiate, plan, or avoid. We can only “encou...

“Everything's not going to go perfect. You're going to have some losses that you're going to have to bounce back from and some things that are a little unforeseen that you're going to have to deal with.”

-Tony Dungy

We can have our eyes on some distant shore, some faraway horizon, only to find everything come crashing down by the most unseen of events. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men. Gang aft agley” (often go wrong).

“So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.”

-Sidney Poitier

What Chekhov’s Seagull and Jaspers’ “boundary situations” get right is that we are each much more vulnerable than we might want to allow. A wedding, three years and a fortune to plan, is ruined by a stomach bug. An hour-long journey home for Christmas winds up getting you stuck in the traffic of ...

The longer the seagull flies, the more oblivious they are to how they tire or weaken. They’re so fixated on some distant horizon that they’re at the mercy to life’s sudden changes. They’re blinkered and distracted, and the gods love nothing more than the hopeful hubris of mankind.

The seagu...

Hopefully, there comes a moment for each of us when we finally accept responsibility for things. For many, it comes with adulthood, but for others it comes much later still. It’s the awareness that our actions impact all around us, and our decisions echo into the world. It’s seeing the damage or ...