Health & wellbeing
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Who’s the boss of you?
“I need to take an emotional breath, step back, and remind myself who’s actually in charge of my life.” ~Judith M. Knowlton This month, you’ll find plenty of articles on how to break bad habits and establish new routines. One feature I read defined a bad habit as anything that harms us (and others), negatively impacts our relationships, or steals the time we could be spending more constructively. Habits get tricky when there’s a fine line between what’s good and bad for us. My coffee addiction has several health benefits, according to medical research, but a third or fourth cup pushes my anxiety over the edge and isn’t good for…
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Facing down fear
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt This week, I finally tackled a fear that’s been eroding my peace of mind for way too long. In the fall of 2019, I had an unusual experience involving a medical test that nearly put me in a coma, then left me with a wicked case of post traumatic stress. Most of my doctors advised against…
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What we remember
“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” ~Joan Didion When you repeat an old story at a family gathering, your parent or another relative might say, That’s not exactly how it happened. In my memoir workshops, we spend a fair amount of time discussing how memories are altered over time. Quite often, our recollection of an event is different from someone else’s, especially if the story involves a perpetrator and a victim. This idea applies to humorous stories as well as traumatic ones. Some of us might believe that a particular experience — or how we remember it — defines who we are. But as…
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When things get crazy
“The world is a puzzle. There’s no need to make sense out of it.” ~Socrates Sometimes it feels as if the whole world is falling apart. If old Socrates thought his life was a puzzle, I wonder what he’d think of our lives today? The best we can do, at times, is throw our hands in the air and surrender to the chaos — without adding any more to it. Sometimes we can’t save the world or even clean out the whole garage. As any good philosopher will tell you, there are situations beyond our immediate control. But we can always take care of our own little corner of the…
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The nature of suffering
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality” ~Seneca Influenced by the work of Plato and Socrates, the Stoic philosopher Seneca believed that everyone should live in the present without feeling anxious about the future. Many emotional difficulties are self-imposed, Seneca suggested. His quote today reminded me that I often worry needlessly about the future — not to mention a list of other things beyond my control. I’m not alone. Everyone has worries that loom larger in their minds than is necessary. And we’ve all met some folks who’ve practically made a career out of physical or emotional suffering. But imagine instead what would happen if we didn’t dwell on…
