I hope you spend your holiday with people who leave you better than they found you. I hope you have food you can eat, food you like, and no one gives you shit about it, regardless what you’re eating. (See above.) I hope you’re kind to retail workers always but especially now through the end … Read more
Still sweating from my run, bent at the hips, fingers touching my shoes, I noticed the artwork on my legs. An old scar from a bike accident. A newer scar from falling while trail running. A pair newer than that from tripping while running up stone steps. And a large bruise from last week. We … Read more
We tend not to see our own strengths because those skills come to us easily, whether developing the skill was easy or not. Sometimes, we don’t see our strengths because they’ve been downplayed by others over time and we’ve taken to believing the naysayers. This leads to us downplaying our skills while overemphasizing/coveting others’ skills … Read more
If I’m giving focus to something, maybe I just want to get it done, and maybe it’s something enjoyable that I want to give my time and energy to. Either way, I want to stay focused. The pinging of the phone is as disruptive to my focus as the alarm clock is to my sleep. … Read more
I got some pushback on Tuesday’s post about we the people needing more empathy. Let me muddy the waters a little. You can have empathy for a person’s situation without letting them do whatever they want. You can—often—help a person who is struggling without enabling bad choices. An example: You give your kid an objectively … Read more
Hello, dear readers! A combination of factors is leading me to take a bit of time off from blogging. I expect to be back by Labor Day if not sooner. If you’d like to still engage with my writing and photography in that time, I am continuing to connect with my email subscribers once per … Read more
Sometimes, we find ourselves in an emotional ditch, and we need to breathe for a minute, drink a glass of water, take a walk around the block, and pull ourselves out of it. Not everything is a “bootstraps” situation, so sometimes when we find ourselves in an emotional ditch, we need to ask for help. … Read more
Validation is a beautiful thing on any day, especially valuable on a rough day or in a rough season. Anyone not having a rough season? We often think about this in the context of an argument or disagreement where we would like our points validated, but it’s applicable to many circumstances. • You belong here. … Read more
Sometimes, we have stuff going on and a friend will make an inquiry. This is a good thing—we want our friends to notice and care when we have stuff going on. We want them to try to understand us, right? But we’ve all been there, where someone asked us about what was going on and … Read more
The persona of the tortured artist is so commonplace that we don’t often think twice about its validity. The first place I remember seeing pushback against it was by Hannah Gadsby, in this little clip from a larger work. More recently for me, it came up in Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, where she points … Read more