…lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog’s mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it’s not...

The freedom to choose…means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends...

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.

The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what’s going into the body versus what’s being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome...

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and...

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing.

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it’s...

Something is missing: that’s as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be....

So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form,...

We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies, how to appreciate our own strengths, how to value or respect or understand the packages we came in. Instead, we learned how to look...

Dogs possess a quality that’s rare among humans–the ability to make you feel valued just by being you–and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that...

And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt,...

One thing I’ve noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you’re sober–if you’re alert,...

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.