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No Complaints
“Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.” –Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture Nobody likes a whiner. Consider this…most, if not all, of the situations in your life you have had the privilege of creating. Your environs–home and work, the relationships in your life, and even the nature of those relationships are the direct or indirect results of your choices. You’re the chooser. It’s a powerful thing to look around your life and acknowledge that you chose it. At the very least, we choose our response to our situations…if not the situations themselves. Whining for…
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Messengers
There are times when it seems old friends come out of the woodwork. Your paths cross for some mysterious, karmic reason, and it takes you back in time. Sometimes, it’s not an actual encounter at all–a glimpse of old photograph or a simple turn of phrase, and we become virtual time travelers. Instagram is full of the ubiquitous #TBT. (Does anyone even use hashtags anymore?) Facebook, too, incites rumination with its Year in Review and On This Date functionality. Whatever the trigger, rearview reflections are often useful in considering just how far we’ve come. Or maybe how much farther we’d like to go. At the beginning of 2015, I wrote three goals on my mirror. Run a marathon. Write a book.…
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Balancing
She walks along the edge of where the ocean meets the sand just like she’s walking on a wire in the circus. – Counting Crows, Round Here People often speak about seeking balance in their lives. Sometimes, they refer to wanting things to be in balance or about achieving balance. But balance isn’t static. It is something we only get to glimpse in passing. Like a sensitive set of scales…as soon as there is the tiniest shift everything is set into motion again. So to, when several plates are spinning, if one is left unattended, it begins to wobble. The trick with balancing is accepting the wobble–shifting the focus from a static sense of balance…
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Be Here Now
This time of year, things always seem to get busier, and time goes faster. It’s not true, of course. We just add a bunch of extra stuff on top of an already committed schedule, and viola, every bit of white space on the calendar is consumed. No matter what the import of the date on the wall, it is in fact the day–not the date–that matters most. We each only have this one. This one day. This one moment. To identify and remove the distractions between ourselves and the moment is the launching point for real connection and authenticity. Truly, what greater gift do we have to give than our attention? The ironic…
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The Christians and The Pagans
Tolerance is one of those words that seems to be said more frequently in the inverse than directly. While logic dictates that the ways we could be intolerant should be equal to the ways in which we’re tolerant, intolerance always seems to get top billing. Harsh words, actions, or worse catch our attention. But taking a step back, the division took root in our prior thinking. It begins the moment we shift from acknowledging the differences between us to judging them. We attribute a negative value to them. Consider, one of the first things we do upon making someone’s acquaintance is to compare notes on those things we have in common. We do this with little things like sharing…
