We experience many moments in our lifetime; moments that are forever burned in to our mind’s eye. You can remember everything about those moments… the way the air felt, the smells that surrounded you, the fact that you were wearing a purple shirt on a Wednesday.
Think about those moments. I bet you can remember more than a few.
Read MoreFortunately, people are slowly starting to realize that mental health is an important, and necessary, topic of conversation.
There is a growing effort to help people become better informed about various mental health related subjects, and articles about anxiety and depression are easily found in most mainstream news sources.
Here are seven things you should know about mentally “getting better.”
Read MoreDon’t judge a book by its cover? In one regard, my question is: how can you not?? If we are mindful and actively police our thoughts, we are constantly judging one another and everything around us, labeling everything as good or bad.
If you went through life without judging things, how would it go? Judgement, I’d argue, can be vital to survival.
Read MoreFor more than a decade I had taught a unit about Social Labels. The base novel was the novel Monsterby Walter Dean Myers. In the book, the main character Steve is hanging out with the wrong people and gets caught up in this crowd. This group commits a robbery and murders the store owner in the process.
What I like about this story is that it focuses heavily on social and self labels. There are the social labels that Steve fights against such as: criminal, felon, murderer and monster.
In regards to the class, I challenge them to look at people for who they are, not what someone on television or social media might tell them about that person or group.
Read More“The Road Less Traveled” is a poem about choosing a path. On the surface, our author ponders and then chooses a path in the woods on which to walk. One path has been trekked upon by many a wanderer; the grass has been tamped down, the ground evened by traffic. In a word, safe, even comfortable. The other path “was grassy and wanted wear” or untouched; long grass and knotty tree roots so rudely taking up real estate. Potentially dangerous for an incautious, hasty surveyor.
Our subtext here is (just one interpretation anyway) there is a decision to be made; a literal crossroads. What we often face in making any decision is that there are multiple avenues.
Read MoreThe new year brings so many opportunities for fresh starts. But I have a little problem… turning those fresh starts into year long pursuits.
With the help of some thinking, some writing, and some inspiration through reading, I put some ideas together. Nothing mind blowing, nothing revolutionary, just simple ideas. Which I think is why liked them so much; because they were simple and things I could easily do. I thought a lot about two things: the idea of balance in life, and the idea of practice.
Read MoreI’ve heard about stories of people “paying it forward” in terms of buying coffee for others or paying for the meal of the car behind them in a drive-thru, but it had never happened to me; until today.
I told her repeatedly that she “didn’t have to do that,” but she insisted and then there was the moment where we were both standing there and I was trying to decide; do I have a conversation with her? What do we talk about? Am I supposed to buy coffee for someone else? I just didn’t know what the protocol was for these kinds of situations.
Charity. Being nice. Helping out others. These are things which should be engrained in our lives and society, but often they are not.
Read MoreVery recently, my sister was trying to teach my 6 year old niece a life lesson about thinking for one’s self. My niece was copying a behavior of some of her friends that my sister did not think was appropriate for a 6 year old girl. After a wily exchange, my sister finally asked my niece, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do the same?”
To which my niece replied, “Well… is there water under the bridge?”
Read MoreGoing through old boxes, random pieces of a life once lived now stacked away in a dark dry part of my basement. There it was, hidden in time and busy perpetual motion, in a box that came from my childhood home to college, then apartment to apartment to my married home, now divorced.
An unassuming orange hairbrush. The detangling agent of the wily beast that has always been my knotty long dark brown hair. But it was more... my weapon of choice.
I always felt responsible for my father dying. This is not sane or logical or fact-based. Have the coroner's report. Know it wasn't really my fault and yet my heart hangs heavy just thinking of him.
Read MoreThe world of dating is undeniably messy, mine specifically historically has been a dumpster fire with moments of brilliance, intrepid abandon, followed by absolute decimation. Sometimes all on the first date.
This is my cautionary tale, my cliff notes, my laughable, teachable, comical footnotes to a dating life lived and what I learned along the way.
Read MoreOne of my favorite things has always been when the moon and the sun are out at the same time. It’s like they’re getting to spend special time together and during those times, I’ve always felt like the universe is at peace.
This tends to happen in the morning when the moon is still hanging out before the earth fully rotates toward the sun. Then the moon moves away to shine on another part of the earth and lets the sun take over.
It’s incredible how they work together in harmony, to let us live and thrive. Day in and day out, the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun, without fail.
Read MoreEvery single time I get on an airplane to travel for one of my freelance jobs, I repeat the quote, “With no risk, there is no reward,” in my mind. This has driven me to push myself to try new things in a dozen different ways in the past couple of years.
"My people” are not among those who put themselves out there in any sense of the phrase. I was blessed with two hard working parents who never let me quit and encouraged me every step of the way as I was finding my way through my adolescence and into college.
Despite all that, I grew up as . . . well . . . a wuss.
Read MoreA book sits next to my bed. 227 pages read, 129 more to go.
Three drafts reside on my Google Drive: a children's story about a clown dog, a ghost story with only three pages written, and a true story about me and my relationships. All started, none completed.
A to-do list jotted down in a spiral notebook with ugly, yellow pages, sits on my desk at work. Some things are crossed off, some things are not.
A 2015 list of resolutions is folded eight times in a small white, cardboard box; it’s never been taken out since the move.
If I unfold the piece of paper, one corner at a time, to reveal the list I wrote in 2015, would I be disappointed? Probably.
Read MoreThe concept of time is an illusion. Life is an eternal present moment.
All that we have is now. What happened in the past is done. It only exists in our minds. And what happens in the future, we will have only that idea in our minds.
No one knows how much time they have here. We all hope and assume a wonderful life in old age, but what about now. Because truly, and as cliché as it sounds, that is all that we’ve got. What’s happening now, and now, and now, isour life. What we experience today, in every facet, we will never get back.
Read MoreThere are so many reasons why writers are the biggest procrastinators.
They tend to hide behind the excuse that writing is just a hobby. That way, they don’t have to invite criticism in. After all, it is just a hobby. And if it takes weeks, maybe even months, to get back to actually writing, then that’s okay, because hobbies don’t have to be habitual.
But what about if a writer courageously makes writing a habit, therefore earns the identification of being a writer?
Read MoreI clearly remember sitting in the gym at my high school graduation and being confused as I noticed the eyes of the audience members which had turned to look at me.
The people on stage had just announced that they were presenting the American Legion Award for Leadership (which wasn’t surprising, given the nature of the ceremony) and that I had won it (which was, given the nature of my four years at RHS). I had never really considered myself a leader, more of a class clown. For some reason, that moment had a very profound and lasting impact on my life.
Fast forward through five years of college, I emerged (after four changes of my major) as a bright-eyed, first year teacher and coach.
Read MoreAs children we’re encouraged to dream. “Reach for the stars” is what we’re told. We’re encouraged to let our dreams be limitless.
Then, somewhere along the course of this crazy thing called life our dreams become altered. Somewhere along the lines it goes from “reach for the stars” to “reach for what is obtainable.” Somewhere along the lines, our dreams go from what makes us happy, to what is necessary to survive.
As a child, my dream was to be a writer.
Read MoreIf I’ve learned one thing about picking up and leaving everything I love behind for a fresh start, it’s that you don’t need anyone to get you through it but yourself.
Only you can choose a path of positivity or negativity, love or fear.
Read MoreSome of us are better equipped to deal with what feels like failure, and yet others can be so consumed emotionally and physically that starting from scratch just feels like what we do in life. Again and again we pick up, move on and decide what parts of our past experience are valuable enough to hold on to… and which parts we’d rather leave behind.
Most of us would probably agree that in some form or another, we are shaped by our past-- our life experiences, positive or negative, have a conditioning effect as we begin again.
Read MoreSometimes something so big happens that you can’t really understand it all at once.
Yet you must move forward, go through the motions – life is not optional. The sun rises and sets, rises and sets, with or without your head in the game. And that is where you find me here.
My mother died in March – she was the last piece of my original family.
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