Growing up, we were a cat family. This didn’t work out well for my younger brother, John, who was a dog person through and through. He solved the problem by simply pretending Winklemeyer was a dog. He never once let up on the claim. Much […]
All posts filed under: Life
Coming Back to Our Senses
Being able to navigate the overwhelming nature of distress is complicated by the way it focuses our attention right down to a pinpoint, confining us to a very small parcel of real estate in our mind. In this reduced space our entire field of vision […]
The Long Walk Home. Stories From the Road
I was still a few miles from home when out of the blue and for no predictable reason I hit the wall. My energy was instantly gone like someone had siphoned all the gas out of my tank while I was looking the other way. […]
The Theology of Thank You
During a leadership team meeting at an earlier time in my life, we’d been asked to go around the table and offer observations about where each of our colleagues could improve. It felt like a set-up of some sort so consequently I felt myself becoming […]
Everywhere
“Hey, there’s a sunset,” Gail says. No one was expecting this. We’d spent the last few hours of the afternoon with rain dropping pleasantly on the screen house tent, water spattering our arms through the netting. When it came time to cook dinner we’d all […]
Getting Schooled
Putting the house to order before work, I pick up the packaging tape dispenser left on the dining room table and notice the tape has slipped out from the slot it threads through. Oh yeah. That’s why I didn’t put it away. It happens all […]
Riding the Horse
Are you the person you were a year ago? Did you mean to be different? It’s actually strange to think of who we were one year ago and in what ways we may or may not have changed, either by happenstance or by design. I […]
Going With It
Mastering ChangeYou may not have asked for it, but it happens anyway. Being a human being is to be in constant conversation with change. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus kind of said, our lives are like rivers. You never step in the same river twice. […]
Gambling on Humanity
It’s hard to think too far ahead into the future without feeling a certain amount of despair about humanity’s prospects but then someone like 29-year-old Boyan Slat comes along and makes environmental repair feel totally possible. How can it not when this young Dutch inventor […]
The Awe of Transformation
For over a year I watched a house by the golf course go through a head-to-toe upgrade. It was already a cute house on a corner lot in a quiet part of town but by the time the owners artfully staged two pairs of crocks […]
Slippery Perception
A man had a dream he was a butterfly. In the dream he felt with his whole heart that he was a butterfly. Then he woke up and realized he was a man. But then a thought occurred: why couldn’t he just as easily be […]
The Anatomy of a Panic Attack
This is a story about a panic attack that threw a top-level, high-performing, rock-solid leader for a loop. For decades she’d been the person — at work and home alike – everyone turned to for steadiness, for staying power, for perspective, for answers. I will […]
Be cool. 