Jonas Cain's Blog – November 2023 Archive (14)

I was invited to two Super Bowl Parties that year. Not wanting to disappoint anyone, I accepted the invitation to both. Even though everyone was happy to see me, I didn’t get to enjoy myself—because I wasn’t really present at either gathering.

With the first, I kept thinking about when and…

Eleanor Roosevelt once suggested that “Happiness is not a goal…it’s the byproduct of a life well lived.” Accepting this axiom as a functional truth, the question becomes, how do we live well?

 …

There’s something blatantly arrogant about the song “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” because it can never be universally true. Everyone has their strengths and everyone has their weaknesses.

But of course, sometimes it is true.

Sometimes.

And if…

Most birds nest and sing from the trees, but larks aren’t like most birds—they nest on the ground and sing from the sky—inspiring poet William Wordsworth to muse:…

I don’t really know anything about anything, but what I choose to believe is we are here to Love one another. 

Because we ourselves Are Love; emanations of the eternal source of everlasting Love.

This is not just where we come from, but who we Are.…

Advice of Mischievous Mice

A group of mice is called a mischief.…

Legend has it that when the great magician Howard Thurston would step out onto stage after the curtains rose, the music would suddenly stop, and he would slowly gaze across the theatre, as if he was about to say…

I first met Mr. Scoots in 2019 while I was moving into my new apartment. The timid orange cat was given his name by the other tenants in the building, because of his habit of scooting away every time anyone comes a little too close to him. And true…

The students eagerly handed in their two lists.

They had spent hours working on them, filling the first with…

“That was just what I hoped for!” she exclaimed, firmly shaking my hand. “You gave us time to rethink what we do with a fresh outlook. This was the perfect segue for the rest of our conference!” …

¿Qué hay en tu maleta?

My Spanish isn’t great, but given the context, I surmised the airport employee wanted to open my duffle bag and…

He assumed I lied.

There was no hesitation—the assumption of negative intent was as instinctual as breathing.

But if he even took just a cursory moment to reflect, he would have recognized that for the average person to lie in this situation would go against the very basis of why…

He was seven miles away—but on May 18, even that was too close.

Most everyone had evacuated the area, but photographer Robert Landsburg turned his back to the crowd, on a mission to document the changing landscape of Mount St. Helens.…

In 1937 at the Kansas City Reno Club, a teenage saxophonist sat in on a jam session and during a solo over the tune “I Got Rhythm” he revealed that the title was more of an aspiration than a characteristic.

The solo was just plain bad.

So bad, that the band stopped playing and the drummer threw a cymbal at the…