With a Full Heart

Once again the news is filled with tragedy. A campus shooting, an attack on a Chanukah celebration in Australia, reminding us of the terrible level of violence in our world. It was magnified for me by having been to a major exhibit on Auschwitz, just yesterday. We spent almost 2-1/2 hours steeped in the history…

In a recent presentation that I attended, someone used the phrase “toxic positivity” and I not only wrote it down but have thought about it many times since. It’s such a powerful phrase and I can, as I am sure you can, think of many examples of this, especially in my professional life. I had…

It is the holiday week, Thanksgiving just days away. I have containers filled to overflowing with cookies for the week ahead. I’ve prepped a loaf of fresh bread to bake when some of our kids arrive on Tuesday. I’ve braved the chaos of the supermarket (where I am convinced that just about everyone piloting a…

I often say that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s the time I am most likely to gather as many of our kids as possible around our table. It’s the time that I become obsessed with creating a menu with things that are new each year. Of course, there are items that repeat year after…

Perhaps you, like me, were brought up in a family in which there were lots of political discussions and more than a few dinner-time debating sessions. These did not generally occur when it was just the four of us but when family got together, which was often in my childhood, the back and forth was…

I spend my life, and have for coming up on 20 years, working with older adults. It is an absolute truth that we are all aging, from the moment we draw our first breath to the moment we take our last. But I have come to believe that, while aging is inevitable, old age is…

There is a quote that resonates with me deeply. It’s from Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali philosopher, composer, social reformer and painter who lived from 1861 until 1941. The words “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy” so spoke to…

There is something in the expression “Only you” that puzzles me. I’ve heard it said about my organization in the context of “You are the only ones who would do this,” and I’ve often heard it personally, sometimes accompanied by a rueful shake of the head. My response, in both circumstances, is a variation on…

Maybe, like me, you think that, at a certain point in your life, you know yourself pretty well. I am aware of my strengths and my challenges and, if you asked me, I could definitely give you a list of each. Needless to say, the faults and flaws are a longer list, which I suspect…