Last Fall, I deleted all the content on my social media platforms. I was inspired by this blog post from Corbett Barr, founder, and CEO of Fizzle.co.

In the post, Barr wrote that he was deleting all his social media content, and many of his blog posts, videos, podcasts, and more.

Barr wrote, “I’m going to consolidate my online life and define a new vision for my next decade on the Internet.” In a follow-up post, Barr noted:

“It’s not natural for every thought or scribble you’ve produced to exist publicly for everyone to see for all time. …

It all started with pencils. As a little boy, happiness for me was a sharp pencil and a blank piece of paper. My favorite birthday and Christmas gifts were drawing pencils and blank sketchbooks.

As my drawing skills improved I became less dependent on the pencil eraser. Eventually, I graduated to drawing with a black ballpoint pen. To this day, ballpoint pens are my favorite drawing device.

Later in life, when I moonlighted as an editorial cartoonist for several newspapers, I drew my cartoons with pen and India ink, for greater permanency.

Fast-forward to the present day, and I craft…

In December of last year, I took a long walk with my two dogs, despite a light dusting of snow outside.

The air was crisp and the sky overcast. A few quail, with their silly topknot plumes, chirped and clucked as they ran for low foliage cover. My dogs spied them but were distracted by something in the distance.

The fur on my smaller dog’s shoulders began to stand up, and he let out a low growl. I squinted down the street and spotted movement between a patchwork of shrubs.

Two coyotes stood motionless, eyeing my dogs and me warily…

She was walking to the Middle School one crisp autumn morning when it happened. She stopped to tie her shoelace and a van pulled up beside her. The man behind the steering wheel rolled down his window.

“Hey there,” he said with a kind smile, “It’s pretty cold out this morning. I just dropped my son off at the Middle School. Would you like a ride?”

The girl didn’t think twice. She stood up and bolted in the opposite direction, down toward some local businesses. She ran hard and didn’t look back until she reached the shopping center.

Out of…

If you’re familiar with Ansel Adams then you know he was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist famous for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. What you may not know is that he also shot photographs in color.

Adams shot in color almost as long as he did in black in white (over thirty-five hundred shots), but he preferred black and white.

“I can get — for me — a far greater sense of ‘color’ through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography.” — Ansel Adams

An article in The New Yorker…

Yesterday I was stuck in the service department at my local Chevy dealership, waiting for them to fix my truck’s headlight. A home improvement show blared on the flat-screen TV, but everybody around me seemed hypnotized by their smartphones.

I settled into a corner chair and pulled a book from my backpack. Out of habit, I always take a book with me to appointments.

As I became absorbed in what I was reading, the shrieks of a little girl broke my concentration. Looking up, I saw a frazzled woman leading her energetic daughter to the available chairs across from me.

…

On the morning of May 6th, my iPhone buzzed on the nightstand, awakening me. I fumbled for my reading glasses, sat up, and looked at the glowing screen.

It was a calendar reminder, with the words, “Dad’s birthday.” I leaned back on my pillow, slid off my glasses, and closed my eyes.

Dad passed away in 2004 at the age of 83. I was with him the day he died, holding his hands. He was unconscious, but the hospice nurse said he could still hear me.

“A couple of years before he died, I kissed my father goodbye. He said…

A good friend of mine died many years ago and I was given the honor of delivering his eulogy. The church was packed and I was nervous.

His children, parents, siblings, friends, and professional colleagues were all there. It was important for me to strike the right tone.

Tragically, my friend died by his own hands. He had been through a difficult divorce and then fell into a pernicious depression resistant to therapy or medication.

Delivering a eulogy under such sad conditions is difficult, but my friend’s rich legacy of goodness made the task easier. In the days leading up…