I’ve been thinking a lot about change this week, how it creeps up unexpectedly and often without any help from us. For a while this past spring it was as if I was suspended in time, which at that moment didn’t feel like much of a good thing. The days were long and stifling, overpopulated by anxious thoughts. It’s different now; I don’t feel as if I’m dragging myself through time. The quality of my day-to-day experience is richer and fuller. There’s more…

This was one of those weeks in which nothing, big or small, went according to plan. From travel delays and disastrous commutes to missed deadlines and forgotten emails, it all felt like a mess. Funnily enough, I was OK with it. It’s funny only because I don’t typically handle curveballs well. Anything that reinforces my lack of control tends to addle me at best, freak me out at worst. This week, though, the rarest of things happened, which is that I greeted all…

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’m sending this weekend reading out into the world from a hectic Sunday, which also happens to be an underslept Sunday. The combination of those two things means that I’m short on words, but last weekend’s post—which wasn’t short on words—did leave me with some follow up thoughts. Two of them aren’t my thoughts. They’re impressions and observations that readers were kind and good enough to share with me. Libby wrote, I don’t know that we are ever finished with anything. We have…

A yoga teacher of mine introduced me this week to Mark Nepo’s wonderful meditation on “the art of facing things.” This is from Nepo’s The Book of Awakening, which I haven’t actually read. I plan to get a copy of the book soon, but in the meantime, I found the passage online. Please forgive any inaccuracies that I might have included in transcribing it. I’m going to share the whole thing, because Nepo’s central metaphor is most powerful in its entirety: Salmon have…

As I mentioned last Sunday, I’ve had some thought-provoking, deep exchanges with new acquaintances lately. One of these was a few weeks ago. I got on the topic of age with a woman whom I’d recently met. According to her, we each live many lives. She told me that she’s living one of her early lives. Her eighteen-year-old daughter, on the other hand, has lived a great many lives before this one. It was a very novel outlook for me. Yet the woman…

Happy weekend! And to those of you who celebrated Rosh Hashanah this week, happy new year. I greeted the holiday with Isa‘s vegan challah from Superfun Times and a gathering with my chosen family on Thursday evening. It was a lovely night, rich in conversation and good food. I got to thinking about how five months ago I sat at the exact same table for Passover, my outlook and spirits so different than they are now. I remember how much it took for me…