Labor Day Long Ago
One day many years ago, I was going through some old files at work and came across one labeled “Women in Labor.” It caught my eye, mainly because I was pregnant with my first child at the time. The file had nothing to do with delivering babies, however. At the time, I was working in the Communications Department of a labor union, and the file was part of a collection of research and background information on stories for articles and [...]
A Front Row Seat
This is the week of the Toastmasters Annual International Convention. It was originally supposed to be in Paris, France, but instead it’s taking place in my home office. And in kitchens, living rooms, lofts, studies, and wherever people around the world have their computers set up. For the first time ever, the Convention and all its activities – including the competition to determine the World Champion of Public Speaking – are taking place online. I’ve been to a number of [...]
Lessons Learned
I visited a club in Barbados last night, after meeting a woman from Barbados a few weeks ago in North Carolina. I was in North Carolina at the invitation of someone I met in Saskatchewan the week before that. He and I were the only ones who showed up at the meeting – apparently the Saskatchewans knew something we didn’t – so we chatted for half an hour and exchanged contact information before calling it a night. These meetings were [...]
A Mess and a Message
“Whenever there’s a mess like this, I try to look for the message in the mess,” my friend told me a few days ago. “And then I try to find the miracle in the message.” As you might guess, my friend is a very faith-filled person. I have seen her step out in faith when most people – myself included – would be paralyzed by fear, indecision, or doubt. The statement she made came as she was telling me about [...]
A Morning Long Ago
I still remember how I felt when my first child was born, and I became a stay-at-home mom. It was a major transition for many reasons, not just the obvious one of taking care of a newborn baby for the first time in my life. One of the things I remember vividly, for some odd reason, is attending a Tupperware party a month or so after my son was born. I’d been to Tupperware parties before, but always in the [...]
An Unusual Way to End the Day
“We’ll be starting the meeting with a brief yoga session.” These are not words I expected to hear prior to a meeting I recently attended via Zoom. Especially since the meeting had nothing to do with exercise, meditation, or health and well-being. Still, I was game, so I put my exercise mat in front of the computer, put on a pair of stretchy, comfortable pants – not yoga pants, officially, but they would do – and got ready for the [...]