A long time ago, a therapist told me that if one person in a relationship over-efforts all the time, the other person will inevitably under-effort. I no longer stay in relationships where that dynamic is at play. But I haven’t grown out of the tendency to over-effort or overextend myself unsolicitedly. I’ve had a lot on my plate lately. As a result, I’ve had no choice but to ask people—friends, colleagues, family—to be a little more accommodating than usual. This hasn’t been a…

It’s customary for many of us to think about limitations as being impediments, barriers to overcome. This week, I spent a lot of time thinking about how limitations can be freeing. This was initially on my mind because, in my never-ending effort to heal my tortuous relationship with time management, I’m reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I think it’s an insightful book, and I’m its target audience: a person who has trouble letting go of the fantasy that,…

It’s been a pretty chilly January in NYC so far, and I’m writing on a holiday Monday that happens to be especially frigid. Tomorrow will supposedly be the coldest day of winter so far. To be honest, I’m loving the coziness and quiet of this month. It’s similar to my love affair with January last year, though with a little more indoor time. In any case, the thing I wanted to touch upon today was a series of conversations that I had with…

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who felt the jolt of the first full work week of the new year. I was ready to be back in the swing of things, but as soon as Monday morning came, I felt myself battling overwhelm. It was happy timing that I had a copy of Tarthang Tulku’s The Gift of Work queued up in my Kindle. Tulku, a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, writes, “through work we contribute energy to life, investing our body,…

A quick little story about cookie boxes. For the past two years, it’s been my intention to make cookie boxes as holiday gifts for my friends and family. I haven’t gotten around to it, thanks to long work hours and busy months of December. When I told this to a friend a few weeks ago, her reply was, “God, Gena. That’s a lot.” Moments later, she qualified the reaction, noting that half of the effort would be to gather up the requisite materials:…

This weekend reading post is arriving a little late. But does it really matter in this period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve when nobody can say which day of the week it is? There have been years when the fuzziness of this week felt murky and disorienting. This year, it feels delightful. I always say that I want to embrace the twelve days of Christmas in their entirety, from December 25th through January 6th. Yet I usually succumb to a more conventional,…

Last weekend, I reflected gratefully on an overdue visit with friends upstate. Sometimes we don’t realize how much we miss a person until there’s a reunion. This past week, I had another encounter that made me give thanks for adult friendship. I’d been telling a close friend about something difficult that I was going through. She listened supportively, and then she noted that she may have to navigate something similar at some point in the nearish future. I told her that I’d be…