Take an Ember Day

How can we regroup, catch our breath, decompress, get some rest and regain our strength?

Canadian postmodern theorist and culture critic Arthur Kroker, professor of Political Theory at Concordia University in Montreal, calls this time we live in "the recline of Western Civilization." Not "decline," but "recline." Some symptoms of "recline"?

You're sitting in your family room, parked in a La-Z-Boy, a proverbial couch potato. The perpetual motion of your remote control is suddenly stopped by an infomercial. It is selling one of dozens of "ab crunchers/toners/tighteners/flexers." Your own tummy flab involuntarily flinches as you sit watching the world's flattest, hardest stomachs do record-shattering numbers of killer sit-ups.

You are mesmerized. You order one. Even though you are so exhausted by the drains and demands of your stress-packed, super-stacked work schedule that you can hardly move, you still want to do more. You may be too tired to get up to go to bed, but you are convinced that what you really need is to schedule some good ab-crunching time into your daily...