A psychiatrist once told me that when people reach a breaking point with a mental health issue, they tend to deal with it in one of three ways: The religion part was the surprise punchline but after a few beats it made sense. If a […]
All posts filed under: existentialism
What would nature do?
If we were just starting out at the beginning of time and didn’t know much about how to thrive, we would need to look no further than nature for instruction according to Janine Benyus*. Just by looking closely, we would see that nature, among many […]
A Blessing for the Lives We Actually Have
“Blessing” is one of those words I avoided for the longest time. I would never say, “Bless you,” when someone sneezed because, for one, I didn’t really know what it meant, and for another, my family didn’t do that. We didn’t say anything at all […]
Lonely But Not Alone
Leo Bird knows what it’s like to walk into a cafeteria and be faced with what might seem like a mild dilemma: where to sit. Except it’s not mild, not mild at all. Leo, the college student son of one of my longtime/lifetime friends, was […]
Our Story in Layer and Time
There is nothing like the Grand Canyon to make you feel like a speck in time. I hadn’t foreseen the irony of that as my partner and I planned a trip to the Grand Canyon to celebrate the 60 years we have each been on […]
The Fashion Transition
Short read Knowing how to get old is confusing. There seems to be a lot of loss involved. Maybe we can work with that. The whole read For quite a long while getting old seemed mostly like a transition in fashion and hairstyle…the age when […]
The wisdom of trivia
Mom always goes first. She’s spent time — who knows, maybe all week — getting organized for her Saturday Zoom share and needs to get it out there before she loses her train of thought. We are scrupulous in getting right to her once everyone […]
Down to the bone
After raising 5 kids and packing them off to college, my cousin Karen cut her hair, threw a few things in a backpack and trekked around Europe for a while on her own. I was floored. No make-up? No blow dryer? That someone could travel […]
Unleashed
There is something in us that comes out when the environment changes, like that funny thing that always happened in school when the power went off. Under cover of darkness, mild mayhem would erupt. We would all start ooooohing and shouting. Excited tusseling would break out. It was like […]
The next thing
When a friend’s engineer husband decided to go back to school to become a lawyer, for some reason I couldn’t get over his decision to dive into three grueling years. This sounded just awful to me — they had two young kids at home. And […]
The shape we take
Personality has always seemed a solid thing to me, as part of the original package as our genes. After all, who we are certainly couldn’t be developed as haphazardly as a bad habit we pick up. And yet as Lao Tzu maps it out, there […]
Making sandwiches
When my daughter was in high-school she worked at Bagel Central, an iconic establishment in downtown Bangor. Laid back and sunny with floor to ceiling windows and wire baskets of bagels; racks of Danish, rugelach, muffins and cookies; and glass cases of endless desserts, spinach […]
Be cool. 