With a Full Heart

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…

June 15 marks the anniversary of my mother’s death, more than 40 years since the last time I saw her wise, deep brown eyes, since I leaned in to kiss her cheek and smelled her favorite “Youth Dew,” and felt the grasp of her warm fingers. I was too young to believe she was really…

We are about to go on vacation, 10 days with dear friends on a European river cruise. Sounds idyllic, and I have no doubt that it will be just that. We will see new things, visit new places and, as we always do when we are together, laugh a lot. The trip is not the…

I have come to realize that, at my center, my decision making process as a leader, and as a person, is a simple one. Although I would never describe myself as as someone who sees things as “black and white,” rather than very many shades of gray, the question I always come back to is…

I’ve often thought about how not to die, thinking about unfinished business and lives cut too short. I’ve thought about losing people I loved long before their time and the terrible holes that their death left in so many lives, holes that will never be filled. In my mind, I think of the course of…