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Many of the ideas on Pinterest to organize paperwork would not look terribly out of place 100 years ago. Pinterest often seems dedicated to buying stuff and filling space. This makes me anxious: I’ve come to appreciate the calmness of empty space, absence of stuff, ma, the space between. This is how we organize paper:… Continue reading Living Without Paper Documents

The Mdewakanton Dakota, who first lived in the area that is now Minneapolis, called the Mississippi, Hahawakpa, “River of the Falls.” Minneapolis owes its origins to the Mississippi and the St. Anthony Falls. Starting in the 1850’s, logs were floated down the river to be processed in sawmills powered by the falls. Later, flour mills… Continue reading Hennepin Island Hydroelectric Generating Station

“Less is more” is famously the motto of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). The idea is to reduce design to its necessary elements. Less famously, Mies picked up the phrase from his teacher, architect Peter Behrens, in Berlin around 1910. Behrens is considered to be the first industrial designer. In the 1930’s Mies… Continue reading Less is More

The homeless at [Tokyo’s] Ueno Park were up early Monday, with hundreds of the park dwellers quietly disassembling their tents and packing their belongings onto carts soon after dawn. Pushing carts laden with their possessions, they plodded toward a small empty plot hidden by bushes and trees. Around 9:40 a.m., about two hours after completing… Continue reading Blue Tarps in a Park

A few days ago, I walked across the Yorkshire Dales with two friends. In a previous post, I described how we planned the trip and got to the trailhead in Horton-in-Ribblesdale by train. We wanted to avoid the more popular trails: they can be busy, and our boots would only add to the erosion. A… Continue reading A Hike Across the Yorkshire Dales

It has become an annual tradition to walk with two friends for a few days somewhere in the north of England. This year, the hike takes us in a generally eastern direction across the Yorkshire Dales. The inspiration for our trans-Dales walk came from a blog post a friend found. I emailed the blog author… Continue reading Getting to the Start of a Walk across the Yorkshire Dales

I’ve upgraded my hiking gear with a Leki trekking pole which collapses to 15 inches. It easily fits inside my 30-liter backpack. My pack is the same size as some daypacks, but it carries everything I need for an arbitrarily long trip. Even when I took it apart, my previous trekking pole stuck out of… Continue reading Travel Gear: Compact Trekking Pole

The [Japanese] word ‘ikigai’ is usually used to indicate the source of value in one’s life or the things that make one’s life worthwhile … . [It’s] used to refer to mental and spiritual circumstances under which individuals feel that their lives are valuable. There is a difference between ikigai and the sense of well-being.… Continue reading Ikigai: It Gets You out of Bed Every Morning