Create the life you want.

I went to a museum today. Seeing beautiful things is restorative. Last week, I visited the summer camp where I volunteered for 20 years. It was boisterous, noisy, busy – and restorative. For me, sitting on an Atlantic beach, listening to the sounds of waves coming and going is restorative. So is sitting in my back yard, or the woods. Reading a book. Stirring sauce. Taking time. Being quiet. Laughing with people I love. All restorative. To restore is “to bring back or to put b

I'm revisiting a post from two years ago because I've been thinking -- again -- about this zero-sum mentality that pervades our lives. Zero-sum means if I gain, you lose. If you gain, I lose. It means there's only so much. It's a mindset that falsely limits us and pits us against each other. I see it everywhere and it saddens me because it's a snare. For all the times I've written about choice -- and they are many -- I neglected to emphasize the "and" in the process. When we

By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be sitting on a two-mile long, sandy beach in beautiful Cape Ann, Massachusetts, warming in the sun, relaxing with a good book and, every once in a while, looking up at a perfectly blue, sunny summer sky with some white puffy clouds blowing gently by. With that in mind, I offer you a selection of thoughts to contemplate as gently as if they were fair weather clouds floating above your perfect afternoon when you are carefree and have all t

I love summer. I wish it lasted longer. If I had my way, I’d take a month of winter and divide it into an extra week of spring, an extra week of fall and two more weeks of summer. I mean, I like the other seasons – winter the least – and enjoy many of what each has to offer. I just like summer best. Alas, I am not in charge. Nothing lasts; I know. Not the good stuff, but not the bad either. So, if you are the opposite of me, don’t worry. Summer will soon end, cooler weather w

So, I’m still reading this fascinating book called The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The farther into I get, the slower I have to go. Maybe there’s some corollary there with the laws of quantum mechanics (so far as we know them). And let me be very clear – I don’t get a lot of what I’m reading. I barely made it through algebra 2 and the chemistry class for the regular kids, aka not AP. So, with all of my disclaimers, then why am I so enamored of this book? W

I’m reading a book called The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Admittedly, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Non-fiction, for one. I like that but most of the friends in my book club prefer fiction. Science-y, for another. Again, lots of my contemporaries and many others put stuff like this behind them as soon as they finish school. And, honestly, my work and my practices lean strongly toward the social and sociological. But the ideas in science, especially phys

I was doing the crossword puzzle today and was down to a handful of clues that I just could not figure out. So, I took my own advice, took a breath, and shut the computer off. I walked away. My advice to myself was just that – walk away. I’ve learned that sometimes the best solution to a problem is to stop trying to solve it. Now I realize this tactic is not appropriate in all situations. But in this case, it was. And it is in many cases. There are so many times when we just

I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Readers and friends of this letter know I like gardening. For one thing, it’s a great metaphor for living, as I recently wrote. I don’t pretend to be a great gardener, but I have learned a few things. One is that weeding, for me, is a great stress releaser. Five years ago – to the weekend – I was hard at work cutting, weeding and pulling up every superfluous thing in my back yard garden. It was because my husband was gravely ill in a hospital bed and I was having to contempla

Yesterday at 4:24 p.m. was the moment in between. That hour marked the summer solstice in Connecticut where I live. It is the pause between inhaling and exhaling. Or exhaling and inhaling. It’s the playground swing at the peak of its arc before it begins its descent. It’s water turning to ice or to steam. It’s a cusp, a threshold, the beginning of a return. No wonder ancients created all kinds of rituals around the solstices. It feels special. Of course, it's simple astronomy