By JIM NICHOLS I suspect my friend does not remember saying it, but I have not forgotten his statement, “Not every task demands perfection.” Like many of you, I have tried to do things correctly for my whole life. It has become obvious that most pieces of life are out of my control; nevertheless, I have worked hard to perform

By JIM NICHOLS Our bodies are not the only things that need exercise. To try to keep my body functioning as well as possible as I age, I do physical activities that might maintain flexibility and strength. It is not comforting to keep reading how much muscle mass a body loses every ten years. My mind and my soul need

By JIM NICHOLS There is so much darkness in the world it seems, perhaps we need to speak more about light—or more specifically, love. I have always liked to learn unfamiliar words. Once I graduated from Dick, Jane, and Spot, even as a child I relished coming upon a word that contained new meaning. In junior high I learned the

By JIM NICHOLS Data from the U.S. Census Bureau recently made a point worth noting. In 2011, 14.3 percent of adults 25 and up had a bachelor’s degree. In 2021, 23.5 percent did. There were parallels of increase in graduate degrees past the bachelor’s degree. As a person with an academic background, I consider this good news. For better or

By JIM NICHOLS If one did not know you were in a hospital, there would be nothing unusual about the setting nor about the people in it. However, this is not an ordinary “let’s go out to lunch together” eating establishment. There are two clearly distinct groups eating here; one group is the various hospital employees and the other, for

By JIM NICHOLS It was one of the “Ah-ha” moments for me; I suspect you have had a few in your life too. One might call them “revelations,” although that sounds a bit pompous. They are times when something dawns on us that, apparently, everyone else seems to know already. We stammer around and smile knowingly while we try to

By JIM NICHOLS The two-lane highway through the Indiana countryside is bounded by trees just beginning to show leaves of autumn color. A few even blow across the road with the modest breeze. As the camera moves down the road, it focuses on single boys behind farmhouses—each boy is shooting a basketball. With the metal hoops and wooden backboards, no

By JIM NICHOLS In the middle 1980s there was a popular television show titled “The A-Team.” Re-done as a movie several years later, it followed a set of four unorthodox ex-soldiers who devised elaborate designs to right some perceived wrongs in the world. Their leader was Hannibal Smith and at the end of every adventure (each of which, of course,