I once knew a couple who took stock of their marriage every year to decide if they were going to renew the contract. There is something ghastly about undergoing an annual performance review of your love, but it does speak to the need to ward […]
All posts filed under: mindfulness
Recognizing Lovely
We all want to feel alive and feel the vitality of life coursing through us but lately my hands have made me aware of the very opposite, aware of vitality slipping away. Lately, these hands have become a big problem in my life. I’ve got […]
Tight Pants
I’ve never understood how we (I’m acting like I’m not the only one) don’t always know what we’re thinking. For instance, how is it that I woke up in such a shroud of darkness the other day, wore that mood all day long like a […]
Respectable you
I went to work on Monday, March 16th. About 2 o’clock that afternoon my manager called to say it’s happening; pack up your laptop and go home. In the span of about a minute I became an instant remote employee along with many other people. […]
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 […]
Wisdom from the couch
As my sister says, “You go to therapy so I don’t have to.” As I always say, “Jokes on you because therapy rules!” And that’s especially handy right now when we are all at risk for developing a level of post-traumatic stress by the time […]
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 […]
What can you do when there is no way out?
One of the hard moments in my life as a mother was when my distraught teenage daughter pleaded with me to fix one of life’s bad situations. “Mom, make it go away,” she pleaded. While I can no longer remember what was wrong, two things […]
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 […]
Full-body immersion
I read a memoir once about a high-level executive who lost her job, sending her into a downward spiral. Her recovery involved a lot of therapy and soul searching from which she learned a great deal about herself. As she went through the process of […]
Leaving your mark
There is a lady who walks her dog on State Street in Portland every day. When she gets to Mercy Hospital, she takes a little detour so she can place a painted rock on the hospital’s front entrance steps or the guardrail going down to […]
Scene 6 — the playbook
I’ve been promising the steps of a self-leadership playbook for thousands upon thousands of words now, spanning across 7 long stories. In an act of unprecedented brevity, here they are in 4 numbers and 4 words: Anchor Identify Integrate Act Logically progressive. Beautifully efficient. And […]
Be cool. 