Posts in March 2018
Behind The Screens: Sophie Chiche

WHAT  IS SHAPE HOUSE?

An urban sweat lodge. A place where people sweat and get delicious “me time.” Shape House is often referred to as an oasis, a calm space to remove you from the brouhaha of a city. People come for different reasons because it serves different needs. Some come because it helps them sleep. Some because it helps them lose weight. Some because it helps their skin.

 

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Experiments in Rebellion: Meditation

The first time I tried to meditate, I was eight years old. My father would chop wood every day in the winter to feed our continuously burning fire. One day, as the darkness crept up on the evening, I remember staring into the fire when no one was around (I am the second of four children and grew up in a loud, chaotic, intense household where solitude was a commodity), and settling into a state of calm.

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Science of Deja Vu

You’re walking down an unfamiliar street, visiting a new city, or hiking a new trail you’ve never hiked, and you’re suddenly overwhelmed with the sense that you’ve been there, in that exact spot, having experienced that exact same situation before – despite knowing that you never have.

Then it’s gone as quickly as it came and you carry on, maybe a little puzzled, but no worse for wear.

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Holy Holey

In the beginning, there was Bruegger’s. Prior to Bruegger’s, I have vague recollections of Lucky Charms, eggs, or, on rare occasions, stacks of pancakes. The recollections are vague because I was very young but also because bagels came in like a blitzkrieg and annihilated all other breakfasts in one fell swoop. Once Bruegger’s opened up in West Concord it was all over. The Tzelnics have been a bagel family ever since.

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Tic, Toc

Our days are structured around clocks—from when we get up to when we eat, to when we finally go to sleep. Except for a few confused days after Daylight Saving Time, we take for granted that our way of slicing up the day into seconds and minutes corresponds to a natural (and sometimes moral) truth. But like many unquestioned truths, it’s not really a truth at all.

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Another Set of Shoes: Life Over 100K

It’s 1:00 AM and Nicole has been working for the past four hours. A whimper comes from the living room: “Mama?” She prays he’ll fall back asleep, but the cries get louder, the sleep draining from the edges of her son’s voice. As she rolls out of bed, another set of footsteps drag from the small kitchen to the tatami mat on the living room floor that serves as her toddler’s bed. Her husband is still awake; she pulls the covers over her head and hopes for sleep.

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