We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history.

When we're defined by what people think we lose the courage to be vulnerable.

After doing this work or the past twelve years and watching scarcity ride roughshod over our families, organizations, and communities, I'd say the one thing we have in common is that we're sick of feeling afraid. we want to dare greatly. We're tired of the national conversation centering on "What should we fear" and "Who should we blame?" We all want to be brave.

When we numb [hard feelings], we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous... I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives.

To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.