Fear. There are plenty of synonyms. Afraid. Scared. Frightened. Upset. Unsettled. Terror. Panic. And so on. Fear might be the first emotion experienced outside of the womb. To be born is to encounter a disruption of state. For a baby to move from a warm, fluid environment into the sudden shock of breathing air and …
I have a gift. Even to print those four words as the opening statement seems a little audacious, maybe even haughty. They have been difficult to own. But it’s apparent I need to press toward this awkwardness and pursue the meaning behind the discovery. To say one has a gift is to imply being in …
It’s coming up on one year without owning an operational car. These are some of my initial reflections on the experiment. As I am settling into my new identity as a single man living alone for the first time in his entire life, there are certain opportunities that I can take that I have never …
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 …