Richard W. shared a stream on May 26, 2022
Let Stillness Direct My Words and Actions

Let Stillness Direct My Words and Actions

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 46 seconds

Jan and JonLife moves so quickly as we become busy with day-to-day tasks; since I was a child,  I often stopped looking and listening.

Jan was always there to slow me down so I could look, listen and speak appropriately.

Without the love of my life, my words can often tumble out and have unfortunate consequences.

I have always liked Eckhart Tolle‘s simple but meaningful quote.

Being still – looking and listening – activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.

On my grief journey, I need to remember that words have meaning and that looking, listening, and stillness are my best and only course of action.

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Jan the Gardener

Jan’s Love Was Transformative

While I still feel the pain of her absence, I can share her love with others and positively impact their lives.

The love Jan and I shared will always be a part of me and will never die.

Richard W. Brown January 13, 2022

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Let Stillness Direct My Words and Actions
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Everything's Fine

Read: June 2023

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Everything’s Fine

by Cecilia Rabess

I started reading Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess today, a stunning debut introducing a talented new author. However, I found it easier to decide to read it after reading in the New York Times that some reviewers on Goodreads criticized the book’s premise without reading it. It’s unfair to criticize something after experiencing it first-hand.

On Jess’s first day at Goldman Sachs, she’s disappointed to learn that she’ll be working with Josh, a white conservative she used to argue with in college. Josh enjoys playing devil’s advocate and can be challenging to deal with.

But when Jess realizes she’s the only Black woman on the team and is being overlooked, Josh offers his support in imperfect but meaningful ways. As they develop an unlikely friendship with undeniable chemistry, it eventually becomes an electrifying romance that shocks them both.

Despite their differences, their attraction brings them together, and Jess starts to question whether happiness is more important than being right. However, as the cultural and political landscape shifts in 2016, Jess, who is just discovering herself, must decide what she’s willing to compromise for love and if everything is excellent. This poignant and sharp novel by Cecilia Rabess asks if they will and if they should.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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My Evil Mother: A Short Story

Read: April 2022

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My Evil Mother: A Short Story

by Margaret Atwood

My Evil Mother: A Short Story by Margaret Atwood was a free book with your Prime Reading membership. I have always enjoyed reading Ms. Atwood’s books. My Evil Mother was an enjoyable read and reminded me why she is a great author and why short stories are unique and special. As the NY Times described, My Evil Mother, is a bittersweet short story about mothers, daughters’ witches’ brew of love—and control. I highly recommend it as it is one of my best books this year. 

Goodreads provides a concise overview.

Life is hard enough for a teenage girl in 1950s suburbia without having a mother who may—or may not—be a witch. A single mother at that. Sure, she fits in with her starched dresses, string of pearls, and floral aprons. Then there are the hushed and mystical consultations with neighborhood women in distress. The unsavory, mysterious plants in the flower beds. The divined warning to steer clear of a boyfriend whose fate is certainly doomed. But as the daughter of this bewitching homemaker comes of age and her mother’s claims become more and more outlandish, she begins to question everything she once took for granted.

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The Covenant of Water

Read: December 2023

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The Covenant of Water

by Abraham Verghese

Today, I began reading The Covenant of Water, the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the significant word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years. The Covenant of Water was a holiday gift from Mike, Elyssa, Nick, and Wes.

From 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast. It follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes throughout her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and human understanding and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Regarding gifts made this month, I will match dollar for dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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The Candy House

Read: December 2022

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The Candy House: A Novel

by Jennifer Egan

The Candy House: A Novel by Jennifer Egan focuses on a new technology that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—it has seduced multitudes. According to the NYTimes, “this is minimalist maximalism. As a widow, I live in a world of memories, but I would not want them shared as they are in The Candy House. “It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century novel onto a flash drive.”

Of course, I am not able to access my unconscious memories. Albeit in an amateur way, I write down some of my memories as they remind me of the power of the love that Jan and I shared. For example, the essay when I met Jan rekindles the memory and attempts to tell the story the way it happened, not how some would like it to be remembered.

The Candy House is one of the NYTimes’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read two of them, The Furrows and Checkout 19. Initially, I was overwhelmed by the multitude of characters and was confused. By the novel’s middle, their interconnectedness helped me understand its real meaning. In the end, Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for authentic connection, love, family, privacy, and redemption. As a widow, authenticity Is what I need to heal.

The Candy House is the seventieth (70) book I have read this year. 

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and “eluders” who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.​ Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy, and redemption.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Being Mortal

Read: August 2019

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Being Mortal

by Atul Gawande

Before departing for Toronto to celebrate our 44th Wedding Anniversary, I went through the e-library. Everything on my list that I wanted to read was not available except for this book. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande is the book I read on our vacation before Jan’s diagnosis of non-Hodgkin Large B-cell Lymphoma.

Selecting Being Mortal might seem an accidental choice to some, and I believe it was a divine intervention. It prepared me to be a caregiver to my wife over the nineteen months of her fight with cancer. It helped me focus on the good life that my wife lived and not the pain and suffering.

Atul Gawande describes his book as “riveting, honest, and humane. Being Mortal shows that the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life – to the very end.”

When I read the book, I wondered what I could have done to help my mother in her final years. The book offers an excellent overview of how nursing homes and assisted living facilities have struggled to meet the needs of their residents.

Dr. Gawande provides an in-depth overview of the benefits of hospice care. Although I knew of this option, reading this book helped me understand that I was ready for hospice when my wife came home for the last time.

He reminds us that “when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.” As he writes in the book, the current system does not work and, in many cases, actually shortens life.

This book has had a lasting impact on my life. It allowed me to be a loving caregiver to my wife when she needed it more than anything else. I read it when it would be most beneficial to me.

I highly recommend this book.

Atul Gawande is the author of several bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto; and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is the Founder and Chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and Lifebox, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making surgery safer globally. He is also the chair of Haven, where he served as CEO from 2018 to 2020. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

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The Amateur

Read: September 2026

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The Amateur: A Novel

by Chris Bohjalian

1978: It is the first Thursday in August, and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood.

Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He’s dead before the ambulance even arrives.

In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent, mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman.

A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?

Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five books, including The Princess of Las Vegas, The Lioness, Hour of the Witch, Midwives, and The Flight Attendant, which was a Max series starring Kaley Cuoco. His other books include The Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; and The Double Bind. His novels Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers were made into movies, and his work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. His novels have been selections of Oprah’s Book Club.

He is also a playwright (The Club, Midwives, and Wingspan). He lives in Vermont with his wife, photographer Victoria Blewer, and can be found at chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Litsy, and Goodreads, @chrisbohjalian.

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