Hello Reader! I'm thinking of all the teachers out there as we go back to school and how much I appreciate their hard work. I'm so grateful that they chose their profession and think we could all benefit from being more like them. TEACHING IS THE GREATEST ACT OF OPTIMISM "Teaching is the greatest act of optimism." - Colleen Wilcox Back to school season has a particular energy to it that I don't think ever fully leaves us even after our own school days are long behind us. Something about the...
14 days agoย โขย 7 min read
Hello Reader! Halloween decorations in July are training us to skip the present. Here's the science of savoring and why this imperfect summer is worth receiving. HOW TO SAVOR THE REST OF SUMMER The back to school supplies are already being pushed aside for Halloween decorations at my local store. In July. I know I'm not alone in finding this mildly unhinged. And every year I have the same reaction: can we please just be where we are for five minutes before we're asked to be somewhere else?...
about 1 month agoย โขย 7 min read
Hello Reader! Choosing to flourish when the world seems designed to prevent it isn't naive. It might be the most radical thing we can do. Here's why. FLOURISHING PART FIVE: Flourishing as Resistance We started this series with a plant. Lush leaves, juicy fruit, perfect conditions. The plant model of flourishing is clean and intuitive and it breaks immediately when you apply it to human beings, because humans do something plants cannot do. We choose. We make meaning. We decide, in the space...
about 1 month agoย โขย 7 min read
Hello Reader! The most damaging thing we've handed the next generation might not be a broken world. It might be the idea that they have to wait for it to be fixed. FLOURISHING PART FOUR: The Trap What if the most damaging thing we've handed the next generation isn't a broken economy or a destabilized climate or a culture war that never ends? What if it's the idea that they have to wait for all of that to get better before their real life can start? I want to be careful with this one. Because...
about 2 months agoย โขย 6 min read
Hello Reader! Viktor Frankl spent 40 years asking us to apply what he learned to our ordinary lives. Here's what that actually means for your Thursday. FLOURISHING PART THREE: Viktor Frankl, Meaning, and Our Ordinary Thursday Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived four Nazi concentration camps and came out the other side having developed one of the most important psychological frameworks of the twentieth century. Today we're not going to compare our lives to what he survived. We're...
about 2 months agoย โขย 5 min read
Hello Reader! This next part in the Flourishing Series may be hard to hear. And while it might sting to hear that sometimes we need to live through hard things to grow, it also means that just because our lives aren't perfect doesn't mean that we can't start flourishing right now. FLOURISHING PART TWO: Why Difficulty Isn't Your Enemy What if the thing we're most afraid of going through is the exact thing that helps us flourish? Not because suffering is good. Not because hard things are...
2 months agoย โขย 6 min read
Hello Reader! I've started researching flourishing. A literary magazine has an open call for pieces on flourishing and it got me thinking, what does it actually mean to flourish? FLOURISHING: A New Series We know what a flourishing plant looks like. Lush leaves, juicy fruit, perfect conditions. Give it the right soil, the right light, the right amount of water and it does exactly what it's supposed to do. (Something I still can't seem to figure out ๐) But withhold any of those things and it...
2 months agoย โขย 5 min read
Hello Reader! I was playing Mario Kart Monopoly with my kiddos the other day and could not stop rolling sixes. It was getting to the point where I felt awful because I was beating them on every race but I literally could NOT stop doing it. They were telling me to go buy a lottery ticket ๐ I've been reading about creating from expansion vs. creating from necessity. Every other time I play a board game, I WANT those sixes so bad because I'm not playing my kids or looking at their sad losing...
3 months agoย โขย 6 min read
Hello Reader! Sometimes you have to stop preparing and start doing! Procrastination is a big part of my perfectionist protective pattern and stops me from doing so much because it has to be just so. But I got a 77% on a test and for the first time ever, I am ecstatic about it! I passed the Small Unmanned Aircraft System test and that's all that matters. When I told my son that I'd take the test so I could supervise his droning business, I had no idea there would be aeronautical charts to be...
3 months agoย โขย 7 min read