Happy New Year! No, I haven’t gotten my national holidays confused. And yes, I realize we just finished celebrating the 4th of July. But in some ways, July always feels to me like the start of a new year. It probably has something to do with two “perpetual calendars” I use every day. One is a flip calendar that includes “A Year of Daily Wisdom.” I keep it on an end table in our family room, and enjoy reading each day’s words of wisdom when [...]
My kids were 15 and 13 when I first began writing my column in the Villager. At that time, the name and the theme of my column was “No Place Like Home,” and I thought of it pretty much as a “Mom” column. Hearth and home was my headquarters, and family events and activities – my family’s, and those of families in general – were my main topics. At that time, whenever I wrote about my kids – my husband, too, for that matter – [...]
“Anything can happen if you let it.” There are a few different ways you could interpret that. One is as a cautionary warning, a reminder to set firm limits and boundaries, and to stay disciplined, focused, and attentive. Because if you’re not, if you loosen up a bit or get a little careless, you never know what awful things might occur. I prefer to take it in the other direction, however – the one in which you wander and explore. Having an idea, certainly, of [...]
Imagine that you buy a lottery ticket every week, and that one day you hit the jackpot and win fifty million dollars. But you never cash in, and the windfall doesn’t do you any good. Why? Because you never check the numbers, you just keep on buying tickets. I read a blog post recently that used a slight variation of this as an analogy, and the first thing I did was shake my head, chuckling and rolling my eyes at the thought. Who would do [...]
I was flipping through the pages of last Sunday’s newspaper when something caught my eye. It was a photo of a toddler sitting on a sofa, kissing the forehead of his baby sister, who was seated in his lap. The young boy was two-year-old Prince George of England, and the baby was his newborn sister, Princess Charlotte. The photo was taken by their mother. The reason the photo grabbed my attention was not because it was such an adorable picture – although it certainly was. [...]
I was at an event last week that included an educational seminar and a two-hour riverboat cruise. (Yes, references were made to Gilligan’s Island.) There was only one person at the event whom I knew ahead of time, so virtually everyone I talked to was someone I was meeting for the first time – starting with the person I met in the parking lot who arrived at the same time I did. As we walked toward the dock, we chatted about the weather, the road [...]
Every once in a while I come across a helpful hint, a business tip, or a piece of information or insight so brilliant that I know it’s going to change my life. Often, it’s something that seems so basic and obvious I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that I never thought about it before. It happened again recently when I read about the four stages we have to go through when learning anything new. “Ignorance is bliss” is a good description of the first stage, in which [...]
I spent much of last weekend revisiting the past. Not by taking a road trip to the town where I was born and raised, or to other places I’ve lived since then. Instead, I just kept running into situations that took me back to something or someone I haven’t thought about in a while. On Friday, I was at an all-day workshop with participants from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, as well as states as far away as Texas and California. During one of the breaks, [...]
I just completed a 7-day challenge issued by one of my cousins. She had been tagged on Facebook and challenged to post a Bible verse – and to tag and nominate someone else to do the same – for each of the next seven days. I was one of the people she chose. I took on the challenge, although I decided to skip the part about asking others to do the same. Even though I could easily think of seven other people who would probably [...]
I tripped and fell in the parking lot as I was going home from an event one evening last week. I didn’t break any bones or have any significant injuries, but as I hit the pavement I felt immediate pain in my left hand and wrist, and in both knees. It was mild enough that one of my first thoughts wasn’t about how badly I might be hurt, but about the fact that I probably tore a few holes in my favorite pair of dressy [...]