Not All Challenges are Big Ones: Except to Someone
A recent article in the WSJ outlined a two decade pursuit of one of the significant challenges faced daily by parents of children with long hair. Too young or lacking in the regular habit of brushing their own hair the task often falls to a parent who, seeing the child on his or her way […]
Defending Tradition and Fighting for Change–Julia Child Against the World
I like to cook. I learned to cook by watching cooking shows on television. My earliest memories are of cooking shows on PBS–long before there was The Cooking Channel. I remember Graeme Kerr and Pierre Franey and Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck. And now I watch Giana and Bobby. In 2009 I was captivated by […]
Rain Brings Misery and Hope
In Rio de Janeiro, March is the rainiest month. It is a time when it rains so hard that roads become impassable, fields flood, hillsides slide, often destroying or damaging everything in their path. Life becomes difficult, even miserable for people. And for those people whose lives they built around rutted, dirt roads, living on […]
Hey Boomer meets the power of Collabs
A few years ago, the phrase “hey boomer” became a viral putdown from Gen Z and Millennials to their parents and older leaders trying to put life experience and wisdom forward as a solution to an existing challenge. The struggle between established and rising generations is as old as time. And, if you wait long […]
Same Path, Different Routes
There are many places in this world where you can really connect with nature–through hiking. Hiking, outside of a city or country where the road’s end and the sidewalks disappear, requires the walker to pick their own route. One of the easiest to find but not always easy to navigate are dry river, creek or […]
A Slot in an old Wooden Box
Fanny, from her childhood, loved to write poems. Poems were where she escaped from a world she found overwhelming and challenging, even in the best of times. Fanny was very shy. She was nearsighted and her family lacked resources to provide her with glasses. Uncomfortable around others, she would escape to her room and her […]
Get to the Point
Email has become one of the most divisive and sometimes disruptive means to harm a “with” based relationship. According to the Guardian newspaper in the UK, the average worker sends approximately 40 emails and receives over 120 a day. I know people who would kill for a volume that low. I know people whose inbox […]
French Speaking English and English Speaking French
In my ear, there are languages that sound beautiful. There are languages that sound precise. There are languages that sound harsh and languages that are not much more than a whisper, to my ear. French is one of those languages that sound beautiful. When the French speak French, it becomes difficult for me to follow. […]
The Overfull Squirrel
I had developed the habit, over many years, of reading several online news sites (in earlier times it was physical newspapers). I do this early in the morning to get a broad feel for what has happened since I went to bed and what I will experience as I begin a new day. The other […]
Living with Energy
It’s not unusual, whether we’re talking about personal fitness or professional success, to discuss the role habits–regularly repeated activities–have on both important activities. As a general rule, we divide habits into two discrete categories — good and bad. I’d like to look at good and bad habits through a different lens where we define them […]
