The V-Word

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”  -Abraham Lincoln

Knowing the history of Abraham Lincoln’s career makes the above comment meaningful: Lincoln failed in business at age 31. Defeated for the legislature at 32. Again failed in business at 34. Sweetheart died at 35. Had a nervous breakdownat 36. Defeated in election at 38. Defeated for...

“We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.”   — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today, the winds shifted and opportunities for new beginnings were everywhere. After many days of trying and failing to get a job posting public, it finally went live and the response was resounding....

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”  -John Lennon

It has been a while since a pain in my neck has captured my full attention as it has today. Something cramped in my upper back over night and all my best attempts to let it go and work it out, mostly served to remind me that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Transition is a close friend of stress, I remember and even with all the optimism and faith...

“He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”  -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There are some 25 million people in transit as I write this; on their way home to someone. It is one of the busiest travel days of the year: millions of people spending millions of dollars to be close to others that they love, that have shaped their lives, that taught them something about...

“This we can all bear witness to, living as we do plagued by unremitting anxiety. It becomes more and more imperative that the life of the spirit be avowed as the only firm basis upon to establish happiness and peace.”   -Dalai Lama

I have been studying the experience of anxiety lately, and thanks to arriving at day 327 of this positivity quest, I am able to be a reliable witness. I am not...

“There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” –Arnold Bennett

I married into a family whose primary operating principle was “If something is wrong, don’t talk about it.” Even as a young woman in my early twenties, I knew instinctively that silence in...

“The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

School politics and reform has always been a vocation of sorts for me. My first child had special needs when she was young so I learned a great deal early on about the magic that can happen in a class room. In one of my daughter’s first immersion classes, Mark, a graduate student in...

“Once again, we see why human beings do not thrive as the “existential cowboys” that so much modern thought celebrates. While it may be literally true that “we are born alone” and that “we die alone,” connection not only helps us to make us who we are in evolutionary terms, it helps determine who we become as individuals. In both cases, human connections, mental health, psychological health, and...

“This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”  -Bertrand Russell

My son fell from a roof last week and just like that all of life was different. This is often how life catches us off guard; with accidents, health emergencies or just bad weather consequences. Suddenly all that we take for granted, that we hold as the fabric of...