Dr. Soul’s Inspirational Roundup, June ‘09

– Soul Shelter’s on site Web-prescription representative, Dr. Soul, directs you to four irresistibly inspiring and thought-provoking readings –

1) Author Anthony Doerr on “looking for validation in a wired world.”

What I am loath to articulate, to even contemplate, is that checking e-mail or tinkering around on Facebook or reading snippets about Politician A on Blog B is not about making money at all but about asking the world a very urgent question.

That question is this: Am I still here?

…. What did I do today that will still retain its original meaning two hundred years from now? Might it be better, and more lasting, merely to walk home right now, and open the backyard gate, and lie down in the grass?

A second very fine essay by Doerr can be found in…

2) The Book of Dads: Essays on the Joys, Perils, and Humiliations of Fatherhood.

The Book of Dads is a brand new, thoroughly inspirational volume featuring twenty engrossing personal essays by some of today’s best writers. Looking for a terrific Father’s Day gift?

Writes editor Ben George in his introduction:

I wanted a collection of essays that reaches for what it means to be a father — from beginning to end. In what ways, for instance, was it different to be a father than a mother? What did it mean to be a good dad versus a bad dad? And why did there seem to be so much talk, and so many books, about motherhood, but not that much discussion, at least as far as I could tell, about fatherhood? (Witness, for just one example, the supposedly gender-neutral magazine Parenting, whose subtitle, unsubtly, was until very recently What Matters Most to Moms). It couldn’t be that fathers just weren’t interested in fatherhood — the practice, the difficulties and the gratifications, the way it redirects a man’s life — not according to the conversations I was having…

3) Have our finest universities “forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers?”

William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, provocatively ponders the question in The American Scholar. 

How can I be a schoolteacher — wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

4) Author Catherine Blyth thinks about silence.

Our noisy culture is unbalanced by the view that good communication is all talk. At a gap in conversation, few of us pause to consider silence’s virtues: we’re too busy panicking how to fill it.   The quiet person threatens, because he acts as a verbal laxative on us.

Accept Dr. Soul’s best wishes for a bright, healthy, soul-expanding summer.

You may also enjoy:

“Dr. Soul’s Inspirational Roundup, February ‘09”

“On Slowness”

“In Praise of Physical Spaces”

“Five Soul-Stirring Books”

“What We Really Need to Be Happy“