Blog
I launched my blog in 2009 when I was wrestling with a midlife crisis. Since then, the digital world has changed so much. I was new to both Facebook and Twitter when I started blogging, and I was still rocking the BlackBerry for email. Instagram hadn’t launched yet. Podcasting and short videos are what the cool kids do these days, blogging is considered old fashioned. But I still find it the best way to share my thoughts and to profile people who inspire me.
I hope you’ll find something here that inspires you, or at least sparks a conversation. Some of my favorite posts are pinned to the top, scroll down a bit more to find the most recent, or check out the categories in the sidebar.
Oh, Master grant that I may never seek
So much to be consoled as to console
To be understood as to understand
To be loved as to love with all my soul.
John and I recently mailed our last batch of New Year’s cards, which we do instead of Christmas cards. Every pile of hand-addressed envelopes we dropped in the mailbox made my heart feel good, sending good wishes to some of our closest loved ones and some new friends. So when I saw this call from my friend Lauree Ostrofsky to reclaim the elementary…
Lately I’ve been toying with letting my natural color, including the gray, grow in.
I’ve read a number of fashion stories saying there’s a trend in women going gray intentionally. I subscribed to a blog called Revolution Gray that gives pointers on how to do it, including adjusting your makeup and hair products accordingly.
But I struggle more with giving up being a redhead, which has been part of my identity my entire adult life, than I do with going gray.
What seems like a good time to reassess can also bring us to a screeching halt, energy wise.
If you are assessing EVERYthing too much (if you’re not sure, just ask your spouse or best friend who will happily tell you if you are!), you might find you are only ruminating and getting nowhere fast. A better way to get a grip on whether your life is heading in the right direction is to try a few exercises.
There is so much about visiting New Orleans that feels to me like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy lands in Oz and her world transforms from black and white to color. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6D8PAGelN8] One of the things that strikes me most is the colorful paint jobs so many of the houses wear. Yes, houses in some other cities have…
To: Antonio Gomez, new owner of the Waterfront Ale House in Brooklyn From: Colleen Newvine, a patron who lives in the neighborhood Dear Antonio, You recently took ownership of an institution in our neighborhood and many of us are holding our breath to see what you do with it. I haven’t been going to the Waterfront for two decades like some of the devoted…
When your significant other talks to you, how do you respond? How do your heart and head feel when you answer? Do you answer?
It’s a chilly, grey November day, and summer tomatoes are long gone. But thanks to a recent day spent in the kitchen, I’m making spaghetti sauce tonight from local, late summer tomatoes. John and I began hosting monthly spaghetti suppers in September last year, and making homemade sauce is one of my jobs for the night. I’ve experimented with various…
John and I use the shorthand of referring to our “big rocks” — what are the priority items in our lives that we should attend to before anything else? It’s a term we borrowed from this story about putting the big rocks in the jar first or there won’t be room: This post from Zen Habits is a great reminder…
I am far from having all of life’s answers — in fact, as I get older, I think my list of questions keeps growing — but I do think there’s value in acknowledging what life experience has taught me. Shortly after I turned 40, I kicked off a blog series here called “Things I Have Learned.” I started with 40 things I…
I’ve been listening to Deepak Chopra’s “Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” on repeat lately — when I’m at the gym or on the subway, I pick up wherever I left off and get a dose of Deepak. A few ideas stop me every time they loop back. One of them is his notion that there is one thing that you are better…
Preparing for our three weeks of clean living, I weaned down from two cups a day to just one. Then I started mixing decaf into my morning cup to make it half-caf.
Still, I braced for sluggishness and headaches. Instead, much to my surprise, I felt great. I didn’t have that morning fog I’d experienced for years, and had always cut through with coffee immediately upon waking up.
Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight.
John and I recently committed to going to the gym three times a week, which requires making that a priority in our planning. Likewise, meditation required making a decision that my mental health is important enough to make time.
If your workplace doesn’t have a culture of truly letting people leave their cares behind when they take vacation — or if it’s frowned upon to even take vacation — maybe you can tell your boss that you need some task-negative time in order to tap into your best problem-solving insights?
Even before we moved to New York City, John and I had a lot of conversations about how long we’d like to live here. It was not a foregone conclusion that we’d be lifelong New Yorkers. Now that we’re here, it’s both maddeningly expensive and difficult to imagine leaving. We recently visited our home state, Michigan, which renewed intense discussions…