It becomes hard to trust your own thinking when nothing seems to be working. The space between how I thought it would go and how it is going seems to widen in front of my eyes. Maybe most difficult of all is how often the undesirable outcomes around us spill over into our relationships, both at home and at work. An errant comment too easily turns into an argument. I become blind to my impact on people around me, caught up in the unresolved problems surrounding me. During times like these, we often underestimate the power of the choices we make and how it can create a path back towards what’s working or down the slippery slope of self-destruction, which my husband affectionately calls “flirting with the gutter.”

The older I get, the more I appreciate how long it truly takes to be able to understand, articulate and define what we know. Partly this is because what we know is continuously evolving as we grow. The deep wisdom of aging doesn’t come from what we know nearly as much as it does from witnessing all that we haven’t been able to see and that we may well never know. Successful aging, I think, is when...

At first it may not be obvious how sex and chronic illness are related: what context could they possibly share? Yet spend any time at all not feeling well, or worse, and you’ll know intimately how sex and illness both depend completely on the body. And how, paradoxically, when the body is ailing, a desire for pleasure, any desire at all, can feel impossible.

As Wendy has written, “Our body...

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” –Proverbs 4:23

It would have been my friend Janice’s 60^thbirthday this month. She was a multi-talented artist, a compassionate friend, a devoted mother and a godmother to my first daughter. This year marks the second anniversary of her death, which began with breast cancer. As the pink ribbons fly this month, we all have...