When I traveled this past summer, I spent just over half the time on my own, the other half with my oldest friend. She is one of the most efficient planners I know. She’d taken care of dinner plans and tickets to museums months in advance. I was so impressed. I’m comically last minute when it comes to travel, which is very different from how I am in my day-to-day life. All this said, it’s impossible to travel without at least a little…

I saw something on social media recently, the source of which I’m now forgetting, that suggested ending the day with a short list of what’s not wrong. I sort of laughed when I first read it—as far as evaluation goes, “not wrong” seemed like setting the bar low. The more I thought about it, though, the more I liked it. Listen, I love the idea of gratitude journaling and gratitude lists. And I’ve tried many times to create a habit of making them…

I’ve been thinking about getting back to things. We read so much about starting something new. And while it’s a brave, character-building experience to step into the unknown, there’s something equally courageous about returning to something that we’ve become separated from. I don’t go to a gym, run, jog, or cycle. Because I live in a walkable neighborhood and city, I do walk a fair bit on my way from one place to another. Yet my walking becomes considerably less when it’s cold…

Years ago, when I was a grad student living in DC, there was a particular walk I’d take in order to get from my apartment to the Georgetown campus. Actually, there were two routes I could have taken. But only one of them would also take my to my yoga studio at the time, which was my first stop of the day. The walk was about twenty-five minutes, which doesn’t sound very long when I write it down. But twenty-five minutes is a…

A while back I read a quotation from Diego Perez, who goes by the pen name of Yung Pueblo. It said, Maturity is knowing that when your mood is down you should not trust the way you see yourself. I happen to be down today. It’s not sadness or melancholy so much as overwhelm and fatigue, which has been an on-and-off-again theme this year. I’ve been sitting here for the past hour feeling awfully frustrated with myself for a whole catalog of reasons….

I’ve been back from traveling for a week now, and I’m easing back into things. I had a lovely holiday. I told myself I’d work a bit on this trip, but as soon as I left New York, I decided not to. Nothing, I realized, was so terribly important that it couldn’t be dealt with in two weeks’ time. In the words of a former boss of mine, “the lives of children do not hang in the balance.” I shared some photos on…

If you tune in regularly, then maybe you’ve noticed that it’s been a challenge for me to keep up with Sunday posts lately. Nothing’s wrong; I’m just very focused on work and on loved ones. There’s not a lot of time to process or reflect these days, so when I think about writing something on Sunday, I often don’t know what to say. A while back, I polled readers about what they might like to see covered in a monthly newsletter for subscribers…