I listened to a fascinating interview with Anna Lembke on the Art of Manliness podcast. She is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She was speaking about her book, Dopamine Nation. I was surprised at what I learned. It’s an oversimplification of her premise, but she explains how and …
f you follow my work at all, you probably already know the influence my dad has had on my life. I quote him constantly. He was a quiet man of few spoken words, but he contained a wealth of wisdom and insight in his short, sturdy frame. So it only made sense to dedicate a …
Read more “Tell Me About That One: I Can Still Hear Him Say.”
I have a section in Use Fewer Words titled Feelings. It opens with this: You feel your way Back to your heart You don’t think your way there. From Use Fewer Words, ©Kevin Shinn, 2021 When a person experiences loss, regardless of what it is, it’s an emotional ordeal. It doesn’t matter if you lose …
Today I am beginning a tab called Tell Me About That One. My desire with this is to invite you further into my thinking behind some of my short poems that I post on my Instagram account. I often entertain a muse or subject that prompts the idea. Many of these are real people and …
At the risk of contradicting myself by describing a very complicated and nuanced subject in a short and simple post, I felt the need today, so bear with me. I’ve sought to live a life of faith for a little over 40 years now. I have lived long enough to encounter some disappointments along the …
The title may seem hyperbolic. Did these songs literally stop me from going off the deep end? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how these songs intersected my story in a timely fashion and deposited a word of truth into my heart that could not have otherwise found its way …
I had an interesting opportunity to observe amusing human behavior yesterday. My last remaining and fully operational CD player, aka The Kia, decided to shut down in the left turn lane of a major intersection here in town. It went dead suddenly, nothing, kaput. Even the emergency flashers didn’t work. As they say where I’m …
When I was 9 years old, my father wanted to take us as a family to visit his sister, who lived in Bermuda at the time. I credit my dad’s willingness to take advantage of moments like this that has shaped me into his mini-me. He lived by this philosophy, “stop and smell the roses …
In a session with The Keyholder, she asked about loneliness and what I do when I feel lonely. I replied back very confidently, ”I don’t allow it.” Her face had that look that indicated I had said something profound, and her slight grin indicated a playfulness guarded by a professional demeanor. Channeling her inner Tyler …
I live alone. Of course there’s Hank, but he doesn’t really count. He swears a lot, especially when I don’t throw the ball often enough or feed him on schedule. His conversation skills are limited in that way. So I end up having conversations with myself. And I’ve learned much from these talks. Specifically, I’ve …