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Here’s the thing about transition.  Everything takes longer than we think it will.  And even though there is a certain amount of peace in knowing that, after a few weeks or even a couple of months, no matter how busy and fulfilled we keep ourselves along the way, there is this creeping dread that seeps under the door like a fog.  Its number one job will be trying to…

In a conversation between two comedians, one fat and one thin, the larger of the two teases his newly skinny colleague. You shouldn’t have lost all that weight. There’s nothing funny about a physically fit man. It’s lame. Nobody wants to watch a healthy person do standup comedy.  Sadly, this is more than a punchline, it’s an honest illustration of how healthy and happy individuals are not interesting, newsworthy…

People’s only wish is that some simple, incontrovertible solution will magically appear and solve all of their problems.  That would take them off the hook. It would absolve them from having to do the dirty work of confronting themselves.  Unfortunately, human beings are more complicated can that. Nobody is black and white. Each person is alive with longings that cannot be satisfied by simple, prefabricated answers. One size fits…

Packnett, the fashion designer and leader in the police reform campaign, once gave an impassioned presentation on making change in a digital era.  The definition she offered for the word protest was: The act of telling the truth out loud in public.  It’s an inclusive reminder that each of us can take a stand in whatever way suits us. Because if it moves the issue forward, it’s a successful…

Susanka writes in her groundbreaking book that a discordant or unwelcoming entry sequence convinces us that we don’t like the house even before we have set foot in the door.  We simply dive in without any consideration of the path we are taking, she says. And the experience of entering our own inner world may takes some time if it’s done properly, but once we have set up the process, each…

The fact that the universe is not built to care about us, the fact that our deepest dreams are often met by silence, the fact that the door of the world is regularly slammed in our face with heartless indifference, and the fact that many of us feel like biological riff raff spinning senselessly on a tiny rock in a corner of an uncaring universe, none of these realties…

Seneca wrote that greatest peril of misplaced worry is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living.  This insight is particularly appropriate for the experience of making mistakes. Because for many of us, committing simple errors, gaffes and blunders can make us so absorbed in thinking about how completely fucked we are, that it compromises our ability to be present in…

Time, money, love and creativity are the same thing.  They are all forms of energy. They are all currencies that flow to us, flow through us and flow from us, every single day.  But only if we allow them to. Only when our relationship with those energies comes from a place of abundance, generosity, prosperity and gratitude does our cup runneth over.  It reminds me of a colleague of…

Cameron, who spent the past forty years teaching artists around the world how to overcome their creative blocks, found the primary reason writers procrastinate is in order to build up a sense of deadline.  Deadlines create a flow of adrenaline, and adrenaline medicates the censor.  We all have worked with somebody like this. The crisis maker, drama queen or avoidance junkie. Somebody who knowingly puts things off to the last minute…

According to the fire protection association, the three conditions that must be present for wildfire to burn are fuel, air and heat.  Firefighters have aptly named this the fire triangle.  The fuel comes from any flammable material, like grasses, trees, brush or homes.  The heat comes from sources like campfires and hot winds and cigarettes, which brings the fuel to temperatures hot enough to ignite.  And oxygen, which is…