When I was in my late twenties, I thought I might want to take up tennis.

I didn’t actually pursue it consistently — my life was too chaotic. However, I took a lesson at my mom’s club during a visit with family. My younger sister, who had played tennis in high school, was gracious enough to go down to the high school courts with me and hit some balls around.

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I’d like to tell you about a specific episode of podcast that offered a perfect example of the way a lot of modern experts share information without actually teaching anything.

In fact, I’ve collected many examples of this kind of thing that I want to share and publicly deconstruct.

However, I am still figuring out how to do that without being a sanctimonious jerk.

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The nature of going viral is that, once your piece reaches a certain level of attention, you start to attract an audience for whom it was not originally intended.

Subtleties and nuances are ignored, and you receive comments that are coming from a place of ignorance.

The savvy content creator will use this to their advantage, which is what Jacob Witzling did in response to someone who was upset about the use of a giant chunk of fallen timber to make a bathtub.

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I spent ten years exploring the possibilities of slowness in learning.

As a musician, the surest route to mastery was through mindful, deliberate motion from one note or chord to the next, fully present in the process and letting go of what the finished product would sound like.

I helped my students to do this. We extended the length of a beat from a fraction of a second to several, swimming in the space like we had become microscopic organisms in its ecosystem.

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As many women do, I found myself recently in one of those cocktail party conversations that I didn’t realize until later that I could have ended much sooner.

I was working to maintain a comfortable distance from my conversation partner, who had apparently been drinking heavily. Unconsciously, he closed the distance every time until he had backed me directly into a tree.

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