With a Full Heart

If I had to choose one thing to be, one way to define myself in my career, it would be as someone who believes in, supports and wants to create change. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, “when you know better, do better” and there is always more to know and there are always ways to improve.…

I’m not sure why, as a child, I remember being conscious of the fragility of every moment. Perhaps it was, when I was 10, watching my father grieve for his only sister, a loss I felt but didn’t fully understand. He’d devoted a year of his life to helping care for her, as she lost…

Our lives are filled with so many competing priorities. We have to focus on our work and we can’t forget about the priority of our families. We have to practice self care and also care for others. We need to protect our families and ourselves and, simultaneously, care about the safety of the world. I…

I have come to believe that the one of the most important things we can do for ourselves is the simplest one, just move. When we are not physically active, everything changes, everything declines, and physical ability is the least of it. In the work I do with older adults, it is clear that inactivity…

For as long as I can remember, even before I knew the term “mantra,” I had a phrase that I often repeated to myself. There are lots of reasons that I made these words my watchword but, primarily, they are the result of a lifetime of working to self-manage my ADHD. My mother’s favorite admonition,…

A conversation about a family connection who is, invariably, difficult led to the comment that the person “had a tough childhood” and that it was at the root of their negative behavior. My first reaction was to note how many decades this person was removed from childhood and my second, somewhat kinder, was to ask…

This week was my parent’s wedding anniversary.  It is strange for me to realize that they celebrated only 26 anniversaries together before my mother died, stranger still to realize that nearly twice that number of years have passed since. I had a vivid memory of their anniversary the summer after I was first married.  I was…

I hold a regular monthly meeting with a number of my team. I start each session with a question, an icebreaker of sorts, intended to help people who don’t work together daily, and whose paths may not often cross, to get to know each other better. I believe it’s a way to help build team…

Over the past decade or so, we have made a tradition out of traveling with dear friends. They are a couple with whom we clicked from the start. She and I worked together and “the boys” were a match made in heaven from the get go. They have the same irreverent sense of of humor…