On Second Thought Ezra

Tag: life

  • The Cat Who Chose Me

    The Cat Who Chose Me

    by Ezra Nadav Diego was never supposed to be my cat. When I moved to Berwick in October 2021, he belonged to the neighbours across the street. I didn’t know that at first. He didn’t wear a collar, and he certainly didn’t behave as though he belonged anywhere else. He simply started appearing. Then he…

  • Eight Leadership Lessons from Pirkei Avot: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Leaders

    Eight Leadership Lessons from Pirkei Avot: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Leaders

    What can modern leaders learn from the Mishnah? This D’var Torah explores eight timeless teachings from Pirkei Avot that speak directly to responsibility, character, learning, stewardship, and the ethical use of influence. Ancient wisdom. Modern relevance.

  • Looking for Work Has Never Been Easy — and It’s Never Been Harder

    Looking for Work Has Never Been Easy — and It’s Never Been Harder

    by Alex Sturman, PCC Looking for work has always carried a certain emotional weight. Even under the best circumstances, there is something exposing about it. You take years of experience, mistakes, growth, leadership, conflict, resilience, skill — all the complicated parts of being an actual human being — and compress them into a few pages…

  • Why “I’m Sorry” Is Not an Apology

    Why “I’m Sorry” Is Not an Apology

    By Ezra Nadav Somewhere along the way, “I’m sorry” became confused with accountability. It isn’t. “I’m sorry” can mean many things: But none of those things are necessarily an apology. A real apology contains something far more difficult than discomfort: responsibility. An apology requires a person to clearly acknowledge: without immediately shifting blame, defending themselves,…

  • When Conversation Stops Feeling Like Work

    When Conversation Stops Feeling Like Work

    Some conversations feel exhausting long before we admit they do. Not because anything bad happened — but because we spent the entire interaction translating ourselves into more socially manageable forms.

  • The Work That Doesn’t Show — Epilogue 

    The Work That Doesn’t Show — Epilogue 

    The work that keeps a life going is often the least visible. It cannot be easily measured or recognised, yet without it, very little would endure.

  • Choosing a Life That Holds — Part VII

    Choosing a Life That Holds — Part VII

    A life does not need to stand out to be good. In a culture that equates worth with growth and visibility, choosing sufficiency may be less about settling — and more about refusing to postpone living.

  • Maintenance Is Not Stagnation — Part IV

    Maintenance Is Not Stagnation — Part IV

    Maintenance is the quiet labour of keeping things from falling apart. In a culture that celebrates novelty and growth, the work of care, repetition, and repair is easily misread as inertia — when it is often the very continuity that allows relationships, bodies, and institutions to endure.

  • The Violence of “More” – Part III

    The Violence of “More” – Part III

    The pressure for “more” rarely feels like violence — until it becomes impossible to arrive anywhere without wondering what comes next. When growth is the only acceptable state, rest, repetition, and sufficiency begin to look like failure rather than the rhythms that sustain a life.

  • Chronic Illness Is That Coworker Who Never Gets Fired

    Chronic Illness Is That Coworker Who Never Gets Fired

    Some days, chronic illness isn’t tragic — it’s just deeply annoying. A dark-humoured look at what it’s like to negotiate daily life with a body that won’t cooperate, won’t explain itself, and somehow never gets performance-managed.