“Look it up on the Google.” My husband and I have been having fun saying this to each other ever since we heard it in a movie we watched over the Christmas holiday. The movie was about four guys who have been best friends since they were kids some fifty years ago, and who are having a reunion in Vegas. As you can probably guess, the movie is a comedy, with much of the humor coming from age-related assumptions and misconceptions on both ends of [...]
As always, I spent some time thinking about what my New Year’s Resolution/s would be this year. Part of this process was reviewing my resolutions from the last few years – which is easy for me to do since I devote a column every year to the subject. It’s become a stroll down Memory Lane for me, as well as a good analytical tool. I can see which resolutions became habits and routines that I still follow today, as well as ones that I’m still [...]
I was at a holiday outing last week with a number of people I usually see just once or twice a year, and some that I was just meeting for the first time. So some of the conversations were the getting-acquainted kind, while others were more of the catching-up variety. Yet almost all of them included some discussion of holiday plans. Since few of the people at the event have lived here in Minnesota their entire lives – which is pretty much the norm in [...]
A friend of mine posted the details of a recent experience she had, and the story was so heartwarming and uplifting – not to mention perfect during the holiday season – I knew I had to share it with others. I told her I wanted to write about it, and she graciously gave me her permission. The story ended with someone’s prayer being answered. And it started a few miles away from a home improvement store. That’s where my friend first drove past an elderly, [...]
It happened again. I taught a class one evening this week, and it was a presentation I’ve been preparing for and looking forward to for quite a while. But two nights before the program, I had a dream in which the class was about to begin, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have any of my notes or materials with me. In a moment of panic, I briefly considered driving home and returning with everything I needed, but I didn’t have enough time to [...]
“Choose. It’s all up to you, so choose.” That was the bottom line to a conversation I had with a friend recently. The conversation was a seasonal one, and a typical one. It had to do with the coming of winter – the snow, the cold, the wind, and the darkness that comes earlier and earlier every day. Plus the crowded stores, the rush and crush of the holiday season, and the endless messages, everywhere you turn, to buy, buy, buy. I reminded my friend [...]
If you were asked to list some of the different areas of your life, what categories would you use to describe them? They could be as basic as “personal” and “professional.” Or you might include family, friends, and faith. Leisure activities, hobbies, or travel. Or health and well-being – physically, financially, mentally, or spiritually. There’s really no end to the number or names of categories you can choose to catalog the events and activities of your life. This exercise is something I often do with [...]
It was a conversation that made me want to crawl under a table and hide, and never come out again. It took place at a meeting I attended last weekend, when everyone was still in shock over the attacks that took place in Paris last Friday. Before the meeting started, several of us were discussing the attacks, each of us contributing additional information and details we had read in the paper or heard on the news. From there our discussion broadened into the subject of [...]
I have a friend who was interested in visiting an organization I belong to that meets once a month. I told her I would send her a reminder when it was time to register for the next meeting. When I did, she said she was still interested, but wasn’t able to make that meeting because she was totally booked with clients that day. “I have been wonderfully crazy busy,” she said. The thought that has been with me ever since is, “What a great way [...]
I got a text message from a person I had a meeting with one morning last week, saying she’d be a few minutes late because she was stuck in some road construction traffic. She was frustrated with the situation, but when she arrived she told me that after she tuned in to a traffic report, she found out it wasn’t construction that caused the backup. It was an accident that had briefly blocked traffic in both directions. This gave her a whole different perspective on [...]