What I Just Read

Disappointing, muddled, and at points unreadable. The book, much of it word salad, becomes increasingly painful and masturbatory throughout. The author  wants  to tell the reader that money isn't grubby or bad per se, that it can and should be used as an instrument of self-discovery, and that when used this way money can be a beautiful, effective and practical tool. But the author doesn't seem to want to say this and be done with it. The reader experiences the same frustrations found in Montaigne's essays: you wish the author would consider getting to the point. Of course, when an author writes well and shares plenty of genuine insight along the way, a meandering journey to "the point" can be a pleasure. But this author is not Montaigne. When an author writes to hear the sound of his own voice, the incentives are all wrong. The reader gets salad instead of insight. Thus a healthy practice here--with all writing in fact--is to go over everything, multiple times, ...

To survive modernity you have to reject the traps and lures of modernity, and replace them with things that have endured from the past.  You have to look for what is Lindy .  Modernity brought us things like margarine, social media and W-2 hell. But margarine is not Lindy; butter is. Staring at screens all day is not Lindy; connecting with others is. Working all the time is not Lindy; work with appropriate rest and recovery is. In other words, we already know most of the things that we should do in modernity. These things already exist in our cultures and in our traditions. As author Wayne Muller phrases it: "we only need to remember." Which brings us to the author's conception of the Sabbath, perhaps the most Lindy of all ideas. Muller shapes the Sabbath into an extended metaphor for remembering how to rest, how to pace yourself, how to work into your life moments of mindfulness, meditation and connection--all the things that modernity takes away. Thus this book is a qu...