I always enjoy seeing and spending time with John Waite. He’s an incredible musician I’m happy to call a friend. Last night, at Penn’s Peak in Jim Thorpe, PA, he gave an electric performance that mixed hits and deep cuts from his time with The Babys, Bad English, and his solo career. I made new friends before the show and hung out with John and the band afterward. Below are videos, highlights, stories, and photos from this memorable evening.
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Every so often, a film comes along that doesn’t just entertain you—it quietens the noise of the modern world and completely resets your perspective.
Directors Barbara Miller and Philip Delaquis, along with Executive Producers Richard Gere and Oren Moverman, have delivered something truly extraordinary with Wisdom of Happiness: A Heart-to-Heart with the Dalai Lama.
Having watched my fair share of spiritual and philosophical documentaries over the years, I can say without hesitation that this is easily the most profound and impactful documentary I’ve ever seen featuring the Dalai Lama. I was so deeply moved by the experience that I immediately pre-ordered a digital copy the moment the credits rolled.
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We live in a world that practically runs on hyper-criticism. If we aren’t judging someone else’s choices on a screen, we’re usually doing a number on ourselves for not being productive enough, calm enough, or successful enough. Recently, I’ve been reading many books about Buddhism, and they’ve been resonating with me. When I heard about the concept of lovingkindness, I knew I wanted to get a copy of Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness because many consider it the best book on the topic ever written.
The term lovingkindness can sound a bit soft, maybe even passive, in a world that feels like it requires a harder edge just to get through the day. But within the first two chapters, you’ll realize it’s not. Salzberg isn’t teaching passive sentimentality; she’s teaching a psychological martial art.
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If you asked a hundred people to name the ultimate goal of life, you’d get a ton of different answers: making a fortune, finding happiness, leaving a legacy, or just getting some peace and quiet. But if you walk into a Buddhist temple and ask that same question, the answer is singular, definitive, and thousands of years old: Nirvana.
Derived from a Sanskrit word that literally means “blowing out” or “extinguishing”—like snuffing out a candle flame—Nirvana is the ultimate finish line. It’s the moment you finally break samsara, the exhausting, looping cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
But here’s where things get fascinating. While pretty much every Buddhist school agrees that Nirvana is the grand prize, how they define it, how you get there, and what actually happens when you cross the finish line depends entirely on who you ask.
Let’s look at how the three major branches of Buddhism map out ultimate liberation.
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If you’ve dipped your toes into the world of meditation, you’ve probably spent a lot of time trying to follow your breath, notice your thoughts, and stay anchored in the present moment. It’s great practice. It grounds us.
But there’s another side to meditation that often gets sidelined as too “soft” or “woo-woo,” and it’s a shame, because it might just be the most practical mental workout available to us.
It’s called Lovingkindness (or Metta, in the Buddhist tradition).
And despite the gentle name, practicing it is a radical act.
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There’s a unique kind of chaos that comes with urban life. Even when you’re doing work you love, the ambient noise of a city like Philadelphia—the sirens, the constant movement, the digital buzz—can slowly build up a layer of mental static. For a while now, I’ve been looking for a way to cut through that noise and find a more profound sense of stillness.
My curiosity wasn’t accidental. It actually began in an unexpected place: Jet Li’s autobiography. Reading his recent memoir sparked a fascination with mindfulness and his personal exposure to Buddhism, sending me down a rabbit hole of books on the subject. But as any reader knows, there comes a point where you need to move past the theory on the page and actually put the practice into motion.
That search led me to the Philadelphia Zen Meditation Center (part of the Buddhaland on Earth organization).
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I had been looking forward to Jet Li’s new memoir, Beyond Life and Death: The Way of True Freedom, for months, and I can confidently say it did not disappoint. In fact, it completely exceeded my expectations. I consume a substantial amount of literature each year, regularly shifting between graphic novels, thrillers, and other biographies, but this stands out as one of the greatest books I have ever read.
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