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 […]
All posts filed under: positive psychology
Jasper’s This-Is-Good moment
Jasper is a jail-break kind of dog that slips his leash or digs his way to freedom, however the opportunity may present itself. Pam is a 60-year-old “I’m-on-it” sort of woman who drops her bike on the sidewalk to chase down neighborhood dogs on the […]
Life is still good
Lately the going has been quite rough for everyone, but I happened upon something the other day on my walk that made the world still look pretty delightful. At 6 in the morning In downtown Bangor I found a friendly-looking, middle-aged fellow wrestling a stuffed […]
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. […]
Salvaging stumps
The ideal way to lose something is by choice – and if it’s by choice, then losing it is probably a very joyous thing, as in the case of holiday pounds or bad habits. But even when the loss is unwanted, it doesn’t mean something […]
Some good news
There was one sad winter when even the sound of a siren would bring tears to my eyes just thinking about the tragic mission that emergency vehicle might be on. But that was also the winter I discovered The Office, the legendary sitcom series set […]
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 […]
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 […]
Crazy loops
I’ve walked under the branches of this tree on my walk for the last 12 years, but it wasn’t until just a few days before the new year that I noticed the loop in that low-hanging one. The way it took that sudden bend up […]
Be cool. 