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…

As I was reconstituting myself toward the end of this past week, I spent some time thinking about responses to hopelessness. There are so many speeches and verses and sayings about the importance of hope. We’re told that it’s an essential part of our humanness, that it’s vital to the continuation of our species, that we can’t abandon it, no matter how dark things seem. I agree with all of that. But, whether I was responding to global events or to conditions in…

My closest friend from college and his fiancé were in town this weekend, and I had the pleasure of having them over for brunch on Saturday. I whipped up the butternut black bean enchiladas from Power Plates, along with a big salad and a pot of coffee. The three of us had a happy few hours of eating, catching up, chatting about the wedding next fall, and connecting. When they left, I had the same feeling of loneliness that often hits me when…

This week felt like a blur. I was trying to get to the end of a work project that had been weighing me down for weeks. On top of that, I was dealing with the holiday season and end-of-year commotion that consumes so many of us in December. At one point toward the end of the week, after a day of agitation that included subway delays, slow-moving crowds, and being late for everything thanks to my own silly overcommitting, I got to thinking…