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How do we look?
“Ten years from now it won’t really matter what shoes you wore today, how your hair looked, or what brand of jeans you bought. What will matter is how you thought about yourself, how you lived, what you learned, and where you applied this knowledge.” ~Marc and Angel Chernoff, Marc & Angel Hack Life Everywhere I look, I’m bombarded by ads for products that promise to erase wrinkles, hide age spots, and make me look 10 years younger. Several of my girlfriends have found the courage to let their hair go gray — and they look beautiful — but I haven’t mustered the courage to do the same. It’s human nature…
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List-en to yourself
“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park Did you know that the root of list actually means listen to? When we get quiet and listen to ourselves, we often discover the answers we’ve been seeking. List-making can be a life-changing tool for continuing this inner dialogue. Next Wednesday (Oct.5), I’ll be leading a free community workshop on list-making in the Friends Auditorium at the Royal Oak Public Library. (We’ll have some fun writing a variety of lists in the class.) Meanwhile, I wrote a new article on the benefits of list-making, and you can…
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The empty nest
“It is not what you do for your children; it’s what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.” ~Ann Landers As I post this, a good friend is on the expressway, driving her only daughter to start her first week of college in another state. I’m reminded of an essay I wrote a few weeks later after I settled into my newly emptied nest. The piece was first published in Metro Parent magazine, and later excerpted and reprinted in Guideposts. To read it online, click here. Today our son is a married man with a family of his own — yet the topic of launching our kids to…
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Owning our mistakes
“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.” ~Nikki Giovanni, American poet and activist It’s one of the realities of being a journalist or a published author: The mistakes you make on the job are glaringly public and might remain in print forever. I recall times I made errors that were, luckily, caught by my editors before they made it to print. But sometimes they weren’t caught — and I was humbled when readers pointed them out. (You really need to grow a thick skin in this business.) As sociologist Brene Brown advises, if you’re going to put yourself out there, expect to…
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Domestic arts
“I no longer call such tasks ‘housework.’ I call them the ‘domestic arts,’ paying attention to all the ways they return me to my senses.” ~Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith One of the things I’ve admired about Martha Stewart is the way she elevates homekeeping to an art form. Along these lines, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor finds the sacred in her everyday tasks. In her book, An Altar in the World, she approaches the “domestic arts” with mindfulness — and the belief that cooking our own meals, washing dishes, and taking care of our personal space can be a pleasure and…
