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This Too Shall Pass
My friend hurt his back a couple of days ago. He had breezed through a tough workout at the gym and was doing some simple task at home when he “tweaked” his back. In the course of our conversation, I offered my sympathy and reminded him that the pain was “only temporary”. Everything is after all. Even good stuff. The temporary nature of everything is one of those proverbial good news/bad news things. Good news, it’s only temporary! Bad news…it’s only temporary. As a culture, we place considerable value on permanence. We prize owning over leasing…tenure over annually renewable contracts. We even prefer our best friends to be forever. We approach new or…
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YOLO
In the last few decades, the idea that “you can have it all” has grown in popularity for both women and men. Successful career…check. Amazing family…check. Community involvement…check. Multiple degrees…check. Travel the world. Write a book. Start an organic farming co-op. Foster rescue animals. Knit homemade Christmas gifts…check, check, check! But is accurate to say we can have it all? We all have to make choices. Instead of “you can have it all” perhaps we should be saying “anything’s possible”. Except, even then, there are limits…limits to our personal discipline and time, and then there’s that pesky need for sleep. So perhaps a truer statement would be “you can have it all…just not at the same time”.…
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Listen…Do You Smell Something?
We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say. — Zeno of Citium, ancient Greek philosopher The world is full of voices. They come to us from our families, friends and co-workers. We are bombarded through social media, talk radio, and TV. The struggle is real in the Age of Distraction. If we aren’t intentional about what we are listening to, we can end up with the intellectual equivalent of a junk food diet and a very real headache at the end of the day. Many voices are just noise. Others have merit. Choosing which voice to listen to presents an endless challenge. The most difficult are those…
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Cannot or Can?
The three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. – Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow There are times when you read something, and it’s like stepping on a rake. Knocks you square between the eyes. We can’t change the past. No matter how much we’d like to distance ourselves from our epic fails, they remain ours. Sure, viewing them as a gift or lesson converts yesterday’s liabilities into today’s assets, but nothing can change the circumstances. Another way the past is fixed is that there is no way to go back to it. No matter how special or magical or perfect a time seems in the rearview, the only…
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Data to Wisdom
Lately there has been a great deal of emphasis placed on data. We are inundated with up to the minute statistics. Percentage points gained and lost on political campaigns, standardized test scores, and municipal crime rates fill our news feeds. The media has embraced a philosophy that maintains adding a data point legitimizes any story. The implication being that res ipsa loquitur…the “data” speaks for itself. While data in the form of facts and figures is important, it is only part of a story. Adding context to data give us information…more illuminating that simple data. Add the passage of time, and information becomes knowledge. In this way, we moved from data as singular facts,…
